That's the only place. In the real world, fossil fuels are massively more expensive than any other energy source because it would cost us, essentially, an infinite amount of money to clean up after them.
Of course, we don't actually have to clean up this. We can adapt instead at a considerably cheaper cost.
Because from where I'm sitting, these transportation networks exist primarily to enable bad behavior.
Can't rationally argue someone out of a position they didn't rationally argue themselves into. From where you're sitting, maybe use of the term, "hyperflux" has infinite negative cost. Nobody else has to agree.
How many of those would be preventable with a PRT system?
We already have a PRT system with the current system. It's just not recognized by you as such.
This is about greed, this is about convenience at the expense of others, most of whom haven't even been born yet.
This is about your worldview which I just don't care about.
I see a bunch of empty assertions and lightweight facts. What I don't see are reasons such as rational arguments, evidence, or similar things to sway my opinion.
Don't delude yourself into thinking that we're doing anything vaguely close to what is best for our descendants./quote>
It's not a delusion. We don't magically know what is going to be "best" for our descendants. But I find it remarkable how terrible arguments like yours above are for justifying an action on the basis of being best for future generations. Doing nothing looks remarkably good both for us and our descendants compared to many of these schemes.
I see no evidence that he is and you say nothing about what this "very specific location" is. Here's the quote:
However, the warming is so far manifesting itself more in winters which are less cold than in much hotter summers. According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia,within a few years winter snowfall will become "a very rare and exciting event".
"Children just aren't going to know what snow is," he said.
As for Fukushima, the plant was not designed to get hit by a Tsunami and operate under water. It was placed in location that could get hit by a Tsunami. That was the flaw, the siting of the plant in an incompatible location.
And if that sea wall at Fukushima was a couple meters higher, suddenly the location would have become "compatible". Funny how that works.
Saying it will make zero difference is incorrect. Your contribution might be almost unrecordable on a chart but it will contribute.
No, it won't. Because someone else will be able to burn more for longer.
And you're not going to get consensus anyway until global warming is a more serious problem than overpopulation and poverty. IMHO there's a strong negative correlation between the wealth of a society and whether that society chooses to do anything about long term problems like global warming.
The cost of a pack of cigarettes isn't just the cost to grow, process and deliver the tobacco to you, it is also the cost of treating lung cancer - not to mention the social cost of pissing off everyone who doesn't want to die prematurely.
In other words, even attempts to address externalities of cigarettes don't have much to do with the actual costs, including externalities, of smoking, but more with politicians able to throw on excise taxes and the like because smoking isn't popular any more.
The cost of continuing to pump greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere isn't just the cost of extracting the fossil fuels and using them, it's the cost of relocating our cities to higher ground, and other very expensive consequences. We may pass this cost off to future generations and get away (dead) without paying for it, but it is a price that will be paid.
"Very expensive" being a relative term. And if you're going to count externalities, you need to count positive externalities as well as negative ones. The big positive externalities for fossil fuels is that cheap energy and transportation costs allow us to do many other things cheaply and to make our societies wealthier and more adaptable.
Sure, we pass most of these costs off to future generations, but we also pass off a lot of benefits to future generations too.
Not proven with evidence by Wikipedia which attempts to meet a standard of impartiality and supporting evidence for claims made. Since they aren't a court of law, this semantic observation is completely irrelevant.
"Anti-SLAPP (strategic lawsuit against public participation) laws can be applied in an attempt to curb alleged abuses of the legal system by individuals or corporations who utilize the courts as a weapon to retaliate against whistle blowers, victims, or to silence another's speech. RICO could be alleged if it can be shown that lawyers and/or their clients conspired and collaborated to concoct fictitious legal complaints solely in retribution and retaliation for themselves having been brought before the courts."
Asserting it doesn't make it true. SLAPP is a very different beast than RICO.
And alleging RICO in the courtroom when it doesn't apply, doesn't mean anything aside from wasting peoples' time with yet more frivolous lawsuits. We did agree that was a bad thing, right? Or is that a bad thing only when Big Oil allegedly does it?
So the law already accounts for your earlier comment of abuse. The pro-AGW side could indeed end up on the receiving end of RICO charges if they are found to be using the law to scare off the other side's speech.
So what? The other pro-AGW side could also be on the receiving end. If RICO can be successfully invoked for Big Oil's supposed involvement, it can be invoked for IPCC-related business, the sea of corrupt renewable/alternative energy subsidies, or environmental group activities.
But I suppose involving the world's few thousand climate-related scientists in a RICO lawsuit is your idea of progress? Tell me more.
How come it takes TWO people working full-time jobs to get a lower standard of living than my parents had in the 1970s with just my Dad working, despite all this "progress" and "productivity" we supposedly have?
Because we decided everyone should have these things, such as education, housing, and health care and then we implemented policies to make those things accessible. Instead, they made them more expensive. Oops.
And notice that the developing world isn't having this trouble.
Maybe it's time to change the focus of our "progress" away from the machines and towards our social models. No one needs that many cars if we accept that not everyone needs to work anymore.
Show it works first and that people would actually want it. Then show how we're going to get from here to there without a lot of toil.
There's several hundred satellites and unmanned missions beyond the Van Allen belts. And we had seven manned trips from Apollo (1 lunar orbit and 6 lunar landings). I don't really see the point of saying stuff that is so easy to disprove.
Lawmakers can fix broken laws, and even repeal them.
They could, but they don't (at least in the US, probably true in general). There's been an extraordinary growth in laws and regulations over the decades.
If somebody believes organized fraud is going on, it might be cause for a RICO investigation
Belief is never sufficient cause for an investigation of this sort. You should have evidence supporting your belief.
(In your other reply, you're moving the goalposts pretty fast about the IPCC Executive Summary. You say that scientists are claiming to be certain. I point out that, in the most official scientific report, scientists qualify all non-historical claims with confidence levels that never reach certainty. Then you claim that the confidence levels are too high. The confidence levels are certainly open to debate, but the point here is that the climate scientists never claim certainty.)
And I completely disagree with this paragraph. Excessive certainty includes overly high "confidence levels". After all, confidence is not a bit you set.
Can you point to funds spent on pro-AGW propaganda? You may be counting subsidies to newer power technologies, but (a) that's not propaganda, and (b) developing them makes sense even if there is no AGW threat. Getting at least partly off fossil fuels is a good idea because they tend to pollute, their extraction frequently causes a good deal of destruction, and they are going to run low eventually no matter how much we find.
Well, there is the IPCC, for example. It alone receives more in funding (at over ten million dollars a year) than oil companies are supposed to have dished out over the same time period and due to its collaboration with climate scientists (whose jobs depend on climate change being a serious problem). Then there's well-funded government agencies like NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies or the UK's Met Office. On the private side, you have enormous private NGOs like World Wildlife Fund, Greenpeace, and the Sierra Club. There are many hundreds of millions of dollars each year spent on activities which happen to propagandize climate change.
In the other corner of the ring, you have some think tanks, blogs, email lists, and occasionally Fox News.
Taxi laws came about for more than just insurance. The unregulated taxi industry was literately gang warfare. If you called the wrong taxi company and they came into another taxi company's turf to pick you up, they would get shot at. Sure that wasn't happening everywhere, but it was happening in enough areas that city governments had to step in and those laws eventually spread around the country.
Or they could have just enforced the laws on assault and battery.
Uber has already shown us the type of cut throat taxi industry they want to create. Very early in their life they, by policy, were scamming other 'taxi' companies with false calls. Instead of spending their money in changing local laws to make their business format legal, they've been spending their money to twist and turn themselves into every shape possible to avoid the issues. I don't care if they offer a better service or not, the company itself is slime and completely morally corrupt. I can't wait until they're crushed. Anyone who trusts them not to turn extra super evil once the standard taxi industry is killed is a fool. Their own history says they will.
I think this brings up an important point. The taxi regulation system has created an environment where slimy businesses are the only ones that can maneuver and exploit the situation. I think instead of trying to stop Uber when they clearly are filling an enormous unmet need, we change the system.
Now, you might be wondering, is it really fair to characterize you as an idiot like I did in my other reply? Let's look at your own words here on RICO.
They think RICO may be appropriate because they believe there's likely big organized fraud going on, and that's what RICO is for. They aren't trying to bypass the market of ideas, but rather remove some of the goons.
Someone "believes" organized fraud is going on. That's a novel burden of proof there. And in case anyone is wondering if I'm taking that out of context, there are more statements like that such as
Alternatively, climate scientists are getting real tired of being publicly maligned, and want some investigation to see if there's a massive conspiracy behind that.
and
The basis for a RICO investigation would be that some organizations worked together to disseminate information they knew to be false in order to profit from it. The right-wing idiots on this appear to me to be part of astroturfing, which can be illegal, while the left-wing idiots are more independent.
This Pollyanna rationalizing is ridiculous on numerous levels. I've already pointed out the potential for abuse. For example, Michael Mann, one of the authors of the original "Hockey Stick" paper (which purported to show that global mean temperature had been pretty stable over the past millennium until the advent of the Industrial Revolution where it started jumping up) did some shifty stuff with his paper at the 2001 IPCC report (basically a substantial conflict of interest where he got to promote his own paper and its interpretation in the IPCC report as an official reviewer for the IPCC). I *cough* *cough* believe it does so let's use the power of RICO to harass, I mean, bring to justice any scoundrels who were remotely involved.
Then there's the dishonest dissembling about the emphasis on fraud. Having a belief is not a legitimate basis for a RICO lawsuit or prosecution. Emphasizing the "belief" hides that there isn't evidence to go with that. Should Moon hoaxers be able to RICO NASA? Should Flat Earthers be able to RICO the population of physicists? Of course not. There should be evidence first of wrong doing.
Finally, RICO is just the wrong tool for a job that wasn't worth doing in the first place. It was intended for persecuting organized crime, which was a problem at the time the law was introduced. Now, it's being used for parties supposedly lying about global warming in an organized way. What exactly is the need for RICO here?
Lies eventually get caught and the matter sorts itself out without the need for criminal prosecution though you know, if someone has evidence of fraud, they can always prosecute that.
Finally, there is the condescending implication that there wouldn't be all this disagreement, if it weren't for this alleged organized fraud. Somehow Big Oil magically waves a few bills and magically, astroturf springs up.
But the problem here is that the real world propaganda is heavily one-sided in favor of the climate change theory. Journalists snap up any story that hints at problems or scientific research being "climate-related". Politicians spend big money, as in Big Oil would consider it big money, because of the dangers of climate change. The spending is ridiculous in favor of the climate change advocates. I'd say to the tune of one to two orders of magnitude. Even the most of the players alleged to be against climate change mitigation aren't necessarily so. Big Oil is making record profits. I think that is in large part due to the climate change movement.
One side is vastly outspending the other and yet losing the propaganda fight. So it has to be because the other side is cheating. Right.
But once decisions are being made by political consensus, rather than scientific consensus, it's going to be difficult to trust any scientific results that are not externally verifiable.
With respect to global warming, that cat got out of the bag back in the 70s or 80s.
They think RICO may be appropriate because they believe there's likely big organized fraud going on, and that's what RICO is for. They aren't trying to bypass the market of ideas, but rather remove some of the goons.
Well, they better hope they never end up on the receiving side of that sentiment.
I have no frippin' idea why you don't hear of uncertainty. Have you looked at the IPCC report's Executive Summary?
The same summaries that routinely exaggerate impact of global warming with an imposing degree of false confidence? Yes, I have looked at those things.
You also seem not to realize that exactly what to do about AGW is not itself a scientific matter, but a political and economic model.
No, it's not a model, it's a variety of choices.
Learn something about the actual science, then you'll be able to argue intelligently about what should be done about it.
Just because I haven't attained your desired conclusion doesn't mean I haven't learned something about the actual science.
Here's what I see. Someone profoundly ignorant of consequences of judicial/legal adventurism and who can't even be bothered to think about what I actually believe, is lecturing me on learning. But maybe, when your side has to deal with harassing RICO lawsuits, you'll realize what an idiot you are now. There is no tool which can only be misused in your favor.
Alternatively, climate scientists are getting real tired of being publicly maligned, and want some investigation to see if there's a massive conspiracy behind that.
Why in the world would they think RICO is an appropriate way to do that investigation?
You're talking about the marketplace of ideas, but the RICO suggestion is to investigate whether the marketplace of ideas really works, or is a large part of it a setup from some organizations for their own benefit. It isn't an attempt to punish the infidel.
We'll test the market of ideas by deliberately bypassing it and throwing everything into a courtroom? Nonsense.
I have no problem with actual skeptics, but the deniers are so sure they're right that they malign the scientists for coming to a conclusion they dislike. That is an irrational belief comparable to religion. The actual scientists aren't that sure, and I haven't seen any evidence that they're suppressing ideas they disagree with, except as a part of suppressing bad science.
Then why don't we hear of this uncertainty? And why come to conclusions (such as expensive interventions in human society are necessary in order to mitigate future effects of anthropogenic global warming) that should be far more tentative due to that uncertainty?
What's being criminalized is hurting people and lying about it.
I don't buy it. It's worth noting here that no one is actually trying to demonstrate that that the people and organizations which are supposedly subject to RICO are actually harming anyone or lying. It's just a political stunt by people ignorant of or indifferent to the law.
You'd have no problems with criminal proceedings if someone knowingly put toxic waste into your drinking water and covered it up.
CO2 is not toxic in the concentrations we are discussing. You have to show first that it causes harm at the current concentrations.
The most likely scenario is fucking up our food supply. From the plankton to the 'bread basket' regions' water tables (which are depleting anyway) there are a number of vulnerable spots.
A problem which is solved by man and nature by growing a short distance further towards the poles.
The last 10,000 years or so, when the human population expanded to fill as much carrying capacity as possible, have been relatively stable.
And so is the phase of global warming. It's worth remembering here that human societies are very dynamic on the scale of climate changes, even man-made ones.
The problem is, our expansion has been possible thanks to widespread agriculture, and its acceleration in the last century thanks to fossil fuels. We're standing on a precarious, tilting tower of interconnecting technologies and favorable environmental conditions that are all interdependent. Take away any one or two links in that chain, and our whole system of feeding the planet tumbles to the ground.
Is it really possible for climate change to take away a link, especially when we can just move the agriculture and reestablish the link? I'm not convinced.
There's three ways I know of fixing radiation. First, moving and storing it away from places or things where it causes problems. Second, half the problem goes away with each increment of half life in time. Third, some of this material, particular the used fuel rods which are one of the most dangerous radioactive parts, is valuable as nuclear fuel for breeder reactors.
There still is no safe disposal of spent fuel; it sits outside the facility exposed to whatever.
Nuclear power's long term cost is staggering and no one ever talks about "it."
Unless we don't do that and do something safer instead.
However, we can not continue to live in a "democracy" where people permitted to engage in a fraudulent conspiracy to kill billions and cause the extinction of the human race, which is really what global warming denial is all about at this point in the "debate".
Show it's a problem first. Where's the evidence for the existential danger? Where's the evidence for the fraud? Where's the evidence for the conspiracy?
The people who are working to correct a flaw in our society may be wrong in their methods but that doesn't discredit the core reason for their actions.
The obvious error in this argument is the assumption that they are working to correct a flaw rather than merely creating or aggravating a bunch of them.
I hope there is a reasonable solution that doesn't involve the stripping away of freedom and human rights. But to date I haven't seen any plans that accomplish all goals under all constraints.
Sure, there is. Provide a convincing argument for the need to mitigate global warming. If you can't do that, then you have deeper problems than people saying things you don't like.
Once they're murdering a couple of billion people with free speech, it's debatable whether it's worth keeping speech free.
But that's not happening, hence we don't need to discard a fundamental right of our societies. There is no evidence for your position as other repliers have noted and the predicted consequences of global warming fall well short of that.
And note here that you are advocating for the gradual enslavement of your society, yet we don't need to silence your voice in order to protect basic rights - it'd be counterproductive and unnecessary. Instead, we merely ignore you.
The reason so-called climate deniers can't be ignored is because they're doing the homework that advocates of climate change mitigation can't be bothered to explain. For example, asking is the theory for real? Asking whether even if it is for real, is the advocated sacrifice worth the cost? Why do we need to act now? Etc.
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NO. NOT CHEAPLY.
Then where is this price tag?
That's the only place. In the real world, fossil fuels are massively more expensive than any other energy source because it would cost us, essentially, an infinite amount of money to clean up after them.
Of course, we don't actually have to clean up this. We can adapt instead at a considerably cheaper cost.
Because from where I'm sitting, these transportation networks exist primarily to enable bad behavior.
Can't rationally argue someone out of a position they didn't rationally argue themselves into. From where you're sitting, maybe use of the term, "hyperflux" has infinite negative cost. Nobody else has to agree.
How many of those would be preventable with a PRT system?
We already have a PRT system with the current system. It's just not recognized by you as such.
This is about greed, this is about convenience at the expense of others, most of whom haven't even been born yet.
This is about your worldview which I just don't care about.
I see a bunch of empty assertions and lightweight facts. What I don't see are reasons such as rational arguments, evidence, or similar things to sway my opinion.
Don't delude yourself into thinking that we're doing anything vaguely close to what is best for our descendants./quote> It's not a delusion. We don't magically know what is going to be "best" for our descendants. But I find it remarkable how terrible arguments like yours above are for justifying an action on the basis of being best for future generations. Doing nothing looks remarkably good both for us and our descendants compared to many of these schemes.
Viner is talking about a very specific location.
I see no evidence that he is and you say nothing about what this "very specific location" is. Here's the quote:
However, the warming is so far manifesting itself more in winters which are less cold than in much hotter summers. According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia,within a few years winter snowfall will become "a very rare and exciting event".
"Children just aren't going to know what snow is," he said.
As for Fukushima, the plant was not designed to get hit by a Tsunami and operate under water. It was placed in location that could get hit by a Tsunami. That was the flaw, the siting of the plant in an incompatible location.
And if that sea wall at Fukushima was a couple meters higher, suddenly the location would have become "compatible". Funny how that works.
Saying it will make zero difference is incorrect. Your contribution might be almost unrecordable on a chart but it will contribute.
No, it won't. Because someone else will be able to burn more for longer.
And you're not going to get consensus anyway until global warming is a more serious problem than overpopulation and poverty. IMHO there's a strong negative correlation between the wealth of a society and whether that society chooses to do anything about long term problems like global warming.
The cost of a pack of cigarettes isn't just the cost to grow, process and deliver the tobacco to you, it is also the cost of treating lung cancer - not to mention the social cost of pissing off everyone who doesn't want to die prematurely.
In other words, even attempts to address externalities of cigarettes don't have much to do with the actual costs, including externalities, of smoking, but more with politicians able to throw on excise taxes and the like because smoking isn't popular any more.
The cost of continuing to pump greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere isn't just the cost of extracting the fossil fuels and using them, it's the cost of relocating our cities to higher ground, and other very expensive consequences. We may pass this cost off to future generations and get away (dead) without paying for it, but it is a price that will be paid.
"Very expensive" being a relative term. And if you're going to count externalities, you need to count positive externalities as well as negative ones. The big positive externalities for fossil fuels is that cheap energy and transportation costs allow us to do many other things cheaply and to make our societies wealthier and more adaptable.
Sure, we pass most of these costs off to future generations, but we also pass off a lot of benefits to future generations too.
"Alleged", not proven with evidence.
Not proven with evidence by Wikipedia which attempts to meet a standard of impartiality and supporting evidence for claims made. Since they aren't a court of law, this semantic observation is completely irrelevant.
"Anti-SLAPP (strategic lawsuit against public participation) laws can be applied in an attempt to curb alleged abuses of the legal system by individuals or corporations who utilize the courts as a weapon to retaliate against whistle blowers, victims, or to silence another's speech. RICO could be alleged if it can be shown that lawyers and/or their clients conspired and collaborated to concoct fictitious legal complaints solely in retribution and retaliation for themselves having been brought before the courts."
Asserting it doesn't make it true. SLAPP is a very different beast than RICO.
And alleging RICO in the courtroom when it doesn't apply, doesn't mean anything aside from wasting peoples' time with yet more frivolous lawsuits. We did agree that was a bad thing, right? Or is that a bad thing only when Big Oil allegedly does it?
So the law already accounts for your earlier comment of abuse. The pro-AGW side could indeed end up on the receiving end of RICO charges if they are found to be using the law to scare off the other side's speech.
So what? The other pro-AGW side could also be on the receiving end. If RICO can be successfully invoked for Big Oil's supposed involvement, it can be invoked for IPCC-related business, the sea of corrupt renewable/alternative energy subsidies, or environmental group activities.
But I suppose involving the world's few thousand climate-related scientists in a RICO lawsuit is your idea of progress? Tell me more.
How come it takes TWO people working full-time jobs to get a lower standard of living than my parents had in the 1970s with just my Dad working, despite all this "progress" and "productivity" we supposedly have?
Because we decided everyone should have these things, such as education, housing, and health care and then we implemented policies to make those things accessible. Instead, they made them more expensive. Oops.
And notice that the developing world isn't having this trouble.
Maybe it's time to change the focus of our "progress" away from the machines and towards our social models. No one needs that many cars if we accept that not everyone needs to work anymore.
Show it works first and that people would actually want it. Then show how we're going to get from here to there without a lot of toil.
We can't even get past the Van Allen radiation.
There's several hundred satellites and unmanned missions beyond the Van Allen belts. And we had seven manned trips from Apollo (1 lunar orbit and 6 lunar landings). I don't really see the point of saying stuff that is so easy to disprove.
Lawmakers can fix broken laws, and even repeal them.
They could, but they don't (at least in the US, probably true in general). There's been an extraordinary growth in laws and regulations over the decades.
If somebody believes organized fraud is going on, it might be cause for a RICO investigation
Belief is never sufficient cause for an investigation of this sort. You should have evidence supporting your belief.
(In your other reply, you're moving the goalposts pretty fast about the IPCC Executive Summary. You say that scientists are claiming to be certain. I point out that, in the most official scientific report, scientists qualify all non-historical claims with confidence levels that never reach certainty. Then you claim that the confidence levels are too high. The confidence levels are certainly open to debate, but the point here is that the climate scientists never claim certainty.)
And I completely disagree with this paragraph. Excessive certainty includes overly high "confidence levels". After all, confidence is not a bit you set.
Can you point to funds spent on pro-AGW propaganda? You may be counting subsidies to newer power technologies, but (a) that's not propaganda, and (b) developing them makes sense even if there is no AGW threat. Getting at least partly off fossil fuels is a good idea because they tend to pollute, their extraction frequently causes a good deal of destruction, and they are going to run low eventually no matter how much we find.
Well, there is the IPCC, for example. It alone receives more in funding (at over ten million dollars a year) than oil companies are supposed to have dished out over the same time period and due to its collaboration with climate scientists (whose jobs depend on climate change being a serious problem). Then there's well-funded government agencies like NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies or the UK's Met Office. On the private side, you have enormous private NGOs like World Wildlife Fund, Greenpeace, and the Sierra Club. There are many hundreds of millions of dollars each year spent on activities which happen to propagandize climate change.
In the other corner of the ring, you have some think tanks, blogs, email lists, and occasionally Fox News.
Taxi laws came about for more than just insurance. The unregulated taxi industry was literately gang warfare. If you called the wrong taxi company and they came into another taxi company's turf to pick you up, they would get shot at. Sure that wasn't happening everywhere, but it was happening in enough areas that city governments had to step in and those laws eventually spread around the country.
Or they could have just enforced the laws on assault and battery.
Uber has already shown us the type of cut throat taxi industry they want to create. Very early in their life they, by policy, were scamming other 'taxi' companies with false calls. Instead of spending their money in changing local laws to make their business format legal, they've been spending their money to twist and turn themselves into every shape possible to avoid the issues. I don't care if they offer a better service or not, the company itself is slime and completely morally corrupt. I can't wait until they're crushed. Anyone who trusts them not to turn extra super evil once the standard taxi industry is killed is a fool. Their own history says they will.
I think this brings up an important point. The taxi regulation system has created an environment where slimy businesses are the only ones that can maneuver and exploit the situation. I think instead of trying to stop Uber when they clearly are filling an enormous unmet need, we change the system.
This mission will likely have important results, and the cost, at $250M, is peanuts.
At $430 per US ton, that's almost 600,000 US tons of peanuts or a quarter of the US's annual harvest. Cheap is quite relative here.
They think RICO may be appropriate because they believe there's likely big organized fraud going on, and that's what RICO is for. They aren't trying to bypass the market of ideas, but rather remove some of the goons.
Someone "believes" organized fraud is going on. That's a novel burden of proof there. And in case anyone is wondering if I'm taking that out of context, there are more statements like that such as
Alternatively, climate scientists are getting real tired of being publicly maligned, and want some investigation to see if there's a massive conspiracy behind that.
and
The basis for a RICO investigation would be that some organizations worked together to disseminate information they knew to be false in order to profit from it. The right-wing idiots on this appear to me to be part of astroturfing, which can be illegal, while the left-wing idiots are more independent.
This Pollyanna rationalizing is ridiculous on numerous levels. I've already pointed out the potential for abuse. For example, Michael Mann, one of the authors of the original "Hockey Stick" paper (which purported to show that global mean temperature had been pretty stable over the past millennium until the advent of the Industrial Revolution where it started jumping up) did some shifty stuff with his paper at the 2001 IPCC report (basically a substantial conflict of interest where he got to promote his own paper and its interpretation in the IPCC report as an official reviewer for the IPCC). I *cough* *cough* believe it does so let's use the power of RICO to harass, I mean, bring to justice any scoundrels who were remotely involved.
Then there's the dishonest dissembling about the emphasis on fraud. Having a belief is not a legitimate basis for a RICO lawsuit or prosecution. Emphasizing the "belief" hides that there isn't evidence to go with that. Should Moon hoaxers be able to RICO NASA? Should Flat Earthers be able to RICO the population of physicists? Of course not. There should be evidence first of wrong doing.
Finally, RICO is just the wrong tool for a job that wasn't worth doing in the first place. It was intended for persecuting organized crime, which was a problem at the time the law was introduced. Now, it's being used for parties supposedly lying about global warming in an organized way. What exactly is the need for RICO here?
Lies eventually get caught and the matter sorts itself out without the need for criminal prosecution though you know, if someone has evidence of fraud, they can always prosecute that.
Finally, there is the condescending implication that there wouldn't be all this disagreement, if it weren't for this alleged organized fraud. Somehow Big Oil magically waves a few bills and magically, astroturf springs up.
But the problem here is that the real world propaganda is heavily one-sided in favor of the climate change theory. Journalists snap up any story that hints at problems or scientific research being "climate-related". Politicians spend big money, as in Big Oil would consider it big money, because of the dangers of climate change. The spending is ridiculous in favor of the climate change advocates. I'd say to the tune of one to two orders of magnitude. Even the most of the players alleged to be against climate change mitigation aren't necessarily so. Big Oil is making record profits. I think that is in large part due to the climate change movement.
One side is vastly outspending the other and yet losing the propaganda fight. So it has to be because the other side is cheating. Right.
But once decisions are being made by political consensus, rather than scientific consensus, it's going to be difficult to trust any scientific results that are not externally verifiable.
With respect to global warming, that cat got out of the bag back in the 70s or 80s.
They think RICO may be appropriate because they believe there's likely big organized fraud going on, and that's what RICO is for. They aren't trying to bypass the market of ideas, but rather remove some of the goons.
Well, they better hope they never end up on the receiving side of that sentiment.
I have no frippin' idea why you don't hear of uncertainty. Have you looked at the IPCC report's Executive Summary?
The same summaries that routinely exaggerate impact of global warming with an imposing degree of false confidence? Yes, I have looked at those things.
You also seem not to realize that exactly what to do about AGW is not itself a scientific matter, but a political and economic model.
No, it's not a model, it's a variety of choices.
Learn something about the actual science, then you'll be able to argue intelligently about what should be done about it.
Just because I haven't attained your desired conclusion doesn't mean I haven't learned something about the actual science.
Here's what I see. Someone profoundly ignorant of consequences of judicial/legal adventurism and who can't even be bothered to think about what I actually believe, is lecturing me on learning. But maybe, when your side has to deal with harassing RICO lawsuits, you'll realize what an idiot you are now. There is no tool which can only be misused in your favor.
Alternatively, climate scientists are getting real tired of being publicly maligned, and want some investigation to see if there's a massive conspiracy behind that.
Why in the world would they think RICO is an appropriate way to do that investigation?
You're talking about the marketplace of ideas, but the RICO suggestion is to investigate whether the marketplace of ideas really works, or is a large part of it a setup from some organizations for their own benefit. It isn't an attempt to punish the infidel.
We'll test the market of ideas by deliberately bypassing it and throwing everything into a courtroom? Nonsense.
I have no problem with actual skeptics, but the deniers are so sure they're right that they malign the scientists for coming to a conclusion they dislike. That is an irrational belief comparable to religion. The actual scientists aren't that sure, and I haven't seen any evidence that they're suppressing ideas they disagree with, except as a part of suppressing bad science.
Then why don't we hear of this uncertainty? And why come to conclusions (such as expensive interventions in human society are necessary in order to mitigate future effects of anthropogenic global warming) that should be far more tentative due to that uncertainty?
J.J. Rousseau disagrees with you. You might enjoy his books.
Does he do nonfiction too?
What's being criminalized is hurting people and lying about it.
I don't buy it. It's worth noting here that no one is actually trying to demonstrate that that the people and organizations which are supposedly subject to RICO are actually harming anyone or lying. It's just a political stunt by people ignorant of or indifferent to the law.
You'd have no problems with criminal proceedings if someone knowingly put toxic waste into your drinking water and covered it up.
CO2 is not toxic in the concentrations we are discussing. You have to show first that it causes harm at the current concentrations.
The most likely scenario is fucking up our food supply. From the plankton to the 'bread basket' regions' water tables (which are depleting anyway) there are a number of vulnerable spots.
A problem which is solved by man and nature by growing a short distance further towards the poles.
The last 10,000 years or so, when the human population expanded to fill as much carrying capacity as possible, have been relatively stable.
And so is the phase of global warming. It's worth remembering here that human societies are very dynamic on the scale of climate changes, even man-made ones.
The problem is, our expansion has been possible thanks to widespread agriculture, and its acceleration in the last century thanks to fossil fuels. We're standing on a precarious, tilting tower of interconnecting technologies and favorable environmental conditions that are all interdependent. Take away any one or two links in that chain, and our whole system of feeding the planet tumbles to the ground.
Is it really possible for climate change to take away a link, especially when we can just move the agriculture and reestablish the link? I'm not convinced.
You can't fix radiation PERIOD.
There's three ways I know of fixing radiation. First, moving and storing it away from places or things where it causes problems. Second, half the problem goes away with each increment of half life in time. Third, some of this material, particular the used fuel rods which are one of the most dangerous radioactive parts, is valuable as nuclear fuel for breeder reactors.
There still is no safe disposal of spent fuel; it sits outside the facility exposed to whatever. Nuclear power's long term cost is staggering and no one ever talks about "it."
Unless we don't do that and do something safer instead.
Eh, I guess my ears aren't refined enough. Doesn't roll off the tongue, but sounds ok to me.
However, we can not continue to live in a "democracy" where people permitted to engage in a fraudulent conspiracy to kill billions and cause the extinction of the human race, which is really what global warming denial is all about at this point in the "debate".
Show it's a problem first. Where's the evidence for the existential danger? Where's the evidence for the fraud? Where's the evidence for the conspiracy?
The people who are working to correct a flaw in our society may be wrong in their methods but that doesn't discredit the core reason for their actions.
The obvious error in this argument is the assumption that they are working to correct a flaw rather than merely creating or aggravating a bunch of them.
I hope there is a reasonable solution that doesn't involve the stripping away of freedom and human rights. But to date I haven't seen any plans that accomplish all goals under all constraints.
Sure, there is. Provide a convincing argument for the need to mitigate global warming. If you can't do that, then you have deeper problems than people saying things you don't like.
Once they're murdering a couple of billion people with free speech, it's debatable whether it's worth keeping speech free.
But that's not happening, hence we don't need to discard a fundamental right of our societies. There is no evidence for your position as other repliers have noted and the predicted consequences of global warming fall well short of that.
And note here that you are advocating for the gradual enslavement of your society, yet we don't need to silence your voice in order to protect basic rights - it'd be counterproductive and unnecessary. Instead, we merely ignore you.
The reason so-called climate deniers can't be ignored is because they're doing the homework that advocates of climate change mitigation can't be bothered to explain. For example, asking is the theory for real? Asking whether even if it is for real, is the advocated sacrifice worth the cost? Why do we need to act now? Etc.