Governments work by force "Do this or else". Corporations work by persuasaion "if you Do this for us, we will do something else for you". There is a major difference in kind there, even if the "something else" is the only realistic choice you have to live. People who think corporations can rule or enslave people without the explicit efforts of government haven't actually been paying attention. American slavery would NOT have existed without the government decreeing that you can have a property right over people.
They don't, in my limited experience, actually last 10 times as long at least for the ones which are 100w equivalents. The smaller bulbs I've gotten are still going strong. Of the 6 100w equivalent bulbs I've used, 2 are at 3 years and still going, 2 lasted less than a year, 1 lasted about 2, and one is still going after 2.
Model C was closest to reality in regards to temperatures up through 2009 (the last time I had looked at it), although still a little high towards the end. Actual temp anomalies have apparently bounced back to Model C levels since then. But Model C assumed that there would be a drastic reduction in CO2 production which didn't happen. The models appear to have been wrong.
GISS has adjusted, which is the proper response, but it takes a long time to see if the models are correct. I can't find when Model E was introduced. I think a 10 year timeframe is a little short for determining accuracy, but 2008 was about the 20 year mark for that first set of predictions.
That's been tried. Michael Mann's predictions for the next couple of decades didn't pan out. Total warming in the 2000s was less than his optimistic scenario which assumed a halt in the increase of CO2 released into the atmosphere. Said halt didn't happen. He adapted his models, but is unwilling to wait another couple of decades to see if he's actually correct. Wasn't there a slashdot link recently about economic models and issues with trying to fit models to data? You might want to consider whether we can accurately predict the effects of adding CO2 any better than we can predict economic effects.
Hey, you choosing to provide medical coverage to me is YOUR fault, not MINE, as is your demand that I pay for yours. The fact that you even used argument 2 is one of the reasons I oppose universal health care, because people like to act stupid and pretend that additional medical costs borne by the system are an existential fact rather than a cost they chose to take on.
Moreover, the total tax take from cigarette taxes exceeds the total additional cost smokers put on the health care system. Some smokers have no health issues, and are net contributers. Some have issues and die early, reducing their total cost to the system. The ones who have problems but nonetheless live long enough to be a net drain on the system are the minority.
Please reconcile the notion of water vapor being a positive feedback as the justification for CO2 producing more heating than it's direct effects with the claim that since the Sun couldn't produce sufficient direct heating it can't be the source. If water vapor acts as a positive feedback on additional heating, then it does so for all sources.
Yes, that IS the reasoning given for why the Sun can't be the driver, at least on message boards.
Are you contending that it is possible to have a sufficiently accurate model of a CEO? Because I'd argue exactly the opposite, that individual decisions are as impossible to predict as individual atoms decaying, and that the statistical effect is NOT as consistent as radioactive decay is in aggregate.
Number 3 is important because if we aren't the cause, then reducing emissions won't actually accomplish anything and we'll have to adapt anyways.
The scope of rising ocean levels is very questionable, and may be compensated for. I suppose I should have written "on net negative" to make it clear that even if the overall effects are beneficial, there will be some negative affects as well. There are also negative effects to drastically reducing our emissions
The person offering the loan should care about whether they are likely to be paid back or not. As it stands now, they don't need to care because the government guarantees they will get paid. This doesn't mean they won't guess wrong on some fields, but students are free to spend their own money to study whatever they like.
Actually, to support the alarmist cause, you need the following:
1. Warming is happening
2. It's effects will be negative
3. Humans are the primary cause
4. Reducing C02 emmisions is better than adapting
Each of those arguments has been on the table, although most skeptics chose to focus on 3, and many of them think 1 is correct. That doesn't make it wrong to take issue with the others.
On a different note, Muller was not actually a skeptic, he was a believer who took issue with the methods used by alarmists. Skeptics have argued that his data doesn't show what he claim, but it will be interesting to see what they come up with. The best thing to come out of this is that his data and procedures are far more open than previous reports. The lack of transparency made it look like alarmists had something to hide, regardless of whether they actually were or not.
The heat island claim is probably going to be the toughest to support. Consider the possibility that the slope of extra temp versus urbanization (not that we have a real measurement for urbanization, but this is meant to convey a concept, not as hard data) is steeper at low levels of urbanization and/or lower temperatures. If that's true, stations will display greater heating at semi rural areas that have seen small amounts of urbanization than at urban areas that were mostly urban at the start. Which appears to be what Muller observed, judging by what I read at Watts up with that.
I personally became a skeptic when I checked the GHCN monthly averages adjusted versus unadjusted, and found a steady upward trend in the adjustments for the last century which was larger than the trend in the raw data. USHCN had a similar issue, but looked fit a quadratic with R^2=.9896, with the low point in the right spot to bring the 1930s below the 1990s instead of being slightly above. I do not know if Muller used his own adjustments or used adjusted data as provided.
Clearly, you don't have a clear enough model of Rubidium then... to paraphrase your earlier post. That's sort of fair, and I did consider radioactive decay, but you were focusing on chemical effects so it seemed somewhat irrelevant.
Your partisan blinders are showing. Paul Krugman hasn't been as accurate as you seem to think. It's not becaue they are paid to get it wrong that economists get things wrong. There are fundamental limits to what can be predicted. Your straw man dismissial of actual arguments for tax cuts make it pretty clear where you stand, and it's skewing your perceptions.
Just as a note on tax revenue in particular: Assume that permanent tax cuts which leave some non-zero level of taxation have a permanent positive effect on annual economic growth. There exists some year N such that from that year forward government revenue is higher than it would have been without the tax cut.
I'm well aware that this doesn't prove much, but it does reveal how people can legitimately expect tax cuts to increase net revenue. Since by the end of Reagan's term revenue was higher and tax rates lower after correcting for inflation and population growth, it's not necessarily wrong. OTOH, the system is sufficiently chaotic that some niche business might avoid going out of business, spark the next bubble, leading to a crash, which causes some suicidal person to set of a bomb and start a war between super powers, leading to mass extinction...
Actually, be definition, they do know what is in their self interest at the time. You are adding the word "best" in there as if there was some sort of objective best. I, on the other hand, don't presume to tell other people what their desires SHOULD be.
Each atom of any given isotope of rubidium acts the same as any other regardless of circumstances. There are no 2 people out there who act exactly the same under all circumstances.
Lack of healthcare doesn't cause death. The untreated illness or injury do. That may seem just semantics, but it's an important distinction that an awful lot of people fail to make. If the results of my choices are indistinguishable from me not existing, I can't be said to have caused those effects, and therefore I am not at fault for them. I am not responsible for things I didn't cause. Failure to help does not justify coercive force.
This is somewhat offtopic from whether education and healthcare qualify as needs, but your note on healthcare touched on something I see as a basic issue with most pro-government arguments I've seen. Lots of people seem to think that lack of healthcare causes death, therefore by not providing it we are killing people, therefore those people are justified in engaging in theft/robbery/etc in order to get them. It doesn't follow, because they have misused the word 'cause'.
If they were living in well fed, educated, well developed areas, there wouldn't be nearly as many of them. Arguably, if the entire planet was modernized, the environment would benefit from the population reduction more than it would lose to the addtional material wealth person.
"If not for NASA then we wouldn't be spending people into space right now private or not" [citation needed].
In all honesty, why do you think no one would have spent any time and effort trying to reach space without government intervention? Other government intervention, in the form of arms control, is the only plausible reason I can imagine. Aeronautics did not start in government labs.
On another note, basic scientific research hasn't always been the purview of government either and still got done with private funding. It's quite plausible that government funding crowds out private research in a way that is detrimental to progress. It's not exactly measurable, but you seem to have a blind faith that private funding doesn't happen, and you should really double check that sort of premise before you draw too many conclusions from it. Judging slowly on the rate of increase of our understanding, I'm open to the argument that either public or private is better. However, please consider the possibility that private systems may lead to faster overall development even with the distasteful side effects such systems bring.
Capitalism addresses poor achievement just fine by allowing failure and the consequences thereof. Attempting to get everyone, regardless of lack of ability, to the same level of education is the most damaging thing in the educational world today. No matter how badly something isn't working, the public school solution is almost always "we just need more money" which is why in DC it costs almost twice what private school costs.
Those flawed implementations of capitalism are the inevitable result of any attempt to implement communism. You can't spread the wealth around without taking it from someone. That person is either free to choose not to produce an excess to be taken, or their labor is forced. "From each acccording to his ability" is slavery. "From each according to his choice to produce, to each what they produce and what they can persuade others to provide" is at least compatible with freedom.
Another way to look at it: only a megalomaniac would think they have the ability to decide what everyone else has the ability to produce.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, no. That is in no way their justification for regulation.
Governments work by force "Do this or else". Corporations work by persuasaion "if you Do this for us, we will do something else for you". There is a major difference in kind there, even if the "something else" is the only realistic choice you have to live. People who think corporations can rule or enslave people without the explicit efforts of government haven't actually been paying attention. American slavery would NOT have existed without the government decreeing that you can have a property right over people.
And that is exactly what NN does, in one way or another.
They don't, in my limited experience, actually last 10 times as long at least for the ones which are 100w equivalents. The smaller bulbs I've gotten are still going strong. Of the 6 100w equivalent bulbs I've used, 2 are at 3 years and still going, 2 lasted less than a year, 1 lasted about 2, and one is still going after 2.
I do not trust articles which cite only anonymous aides on such things.
Politician's syllogism: We must do something. This is something. We must do this!
That's all your last sentence amounted to.
Model C was closest to reality in regards to temperatures up through 2009 (the last time I had looked at it), although still a little high towards the end. Actual temp anomalies have apparently bounced back to Model C levels since then. But Model C assumed that there would be a drastic reduction in CO2 production which didn't happen. The models appear to have been wrong.
GISS has adjusted, which is the proper response, but it takes a long time to see if the models are correct. I can't find when Model E was introduced. I think a 10 year timeframe is a little short for determining accuracy, but 2008 was about the 20 year mark for that first set of predictions.
Sorry, I used the wrong name. I was thinking of Hansen, and his model C from 1988.
That's been tried. Michael Mann's predictions for the next couple of decades didn't pan out. Total warming in the 2000s was less than his optimistic scenario which assumed a halt in the increase of CO2 released into the atmosphere. Said halt didn't happen. He adapted his models, but is unwilling to wait another couple of decades to see if he's actually correct. Wasn't there a slashdot link recently about economic models and issues with trying to fit models to data? You might want to consider whether we can accurately predict the effects of adding CO2 any better than we can predict economic effects.
Hey, you choosing to provide medical coverage to me is YOUR fault, not MINE, as is your demand that I pay for yours. The fact that you even used argument 2 is one of the reasons I oppose universal health care, because people like to act stupid and pretend that additional medical costs borne by the system are an existential fact rather than a cost they chose to take on.
Moreover, the total tax take from cigarette taxes exceeds the total additional cost smokers put on the health care system. Some smokers have no health issues, and are net contributers. Some have issues and die early, reducing their total cost to the system. The ones who have problems but nonetheless live long enough to be a net drain on the system are the minority.
Please reconcile the notion of water vapor being a positive feedback as the justification for CO2 producing more heating than it's direct effects with the claim that since the Sun couldn't produce sufficient direct heating it can't be the source. If water vapor acts as a positive feedback on additional heating, then it does so for all sources.
Yes, that IS the reasoning given for why the Sun can't be the driver, at least on message boards.
Are you contending that it is possible to have a sufficiently accurate model of a CEO? Because I'd argue exactly the opposite, that individual decisions are as impossible to predict as individual atoms decaying, and that the statistical effect is NOT as consistent as radioactive decay is in aggregate.
Number 3 is important because if we aren't the cause, then reducing emissions won't actually accomplish anything and we'll have to adapt anyways.
The scope of rising ocean levels is very questionable, and may be compensated for. I suppose I should have written "on net negative" to make it clear that even if the overall effects are beneficial, there will be some negative affects as well. There are also negative effects to drastically reducing our emissions
The person offering the loan should care about whether they are likely to be paid back or not. As it stands now, they don't need to care because the government guarantees they will get paid. This doesn't mean they won't guess wrong on some fields, but students are free to spend their own money to study whatever they like.
Actually, to support the alarmist cause, you need the following:
1. Warming is happening
2. It's effects will be negative
3. Humans are the primary cause
4. Reducing C02 emmisions is better than adapting
Each of those arguments has been on the table, although most skeptics chose to focus on 3, and many of them think 1 is correct. That doesn't make it wrong to take issue with the others.
On a different note, Muller was not actually a skeptic, he was a believer who took issue with the methods used by alarmists. Skeptics have argued that his data doesn't show what he claim, but it will be interesting to see what they come up with. The best thing to come out of this is that his data and procedures are far more open than previous reports. The lack of transparency made it look like alarmists had something to hide, regardless of whether they actually were or not.
The heat island claim is probably going to be the toughest to support. Consider the possibility that the slope of extra temp versus urbanization (not that we have a real measurement for urbanization, but this is meant to convey a concept, not as hard data) is steeper at low levels of urbanization and/or lower temperatures. If that's true, stations will display greater heating at semi rural areas that have seen small amounts of urbanization than at urban areas that were mostly urban at the start. Which appears to be what Muller observed, judging by what I read at Watts up with that.
I personally became a skeptic when I checked the GHCN monthly averages adjusted versus unadjusted, and found a steady upward trend in the adjustments for the last century which was larger than the trend in the raw data. USHCN had a similar issue, but looked fit a quadratic with R^2=.9896, with the low point in the right spot to bring the 1930s below the 1990s instead of being slightly above. I do not know if Muller used his own adjustments or used adjusted data as provided.
Clearly, you don't have a clear enough model of Rubidium then... to paraphrase your earlier post. That's sort of fair, and I did consider radioactive decay, but you were focusing on chemical effects so it seemed somewhat irrelevant.
Your partisan blinders are showing. Paul Krugman hasn't been as accurate as you seem to think. It's not becaue they are paid to get it wrong that economists get things wrong. There are fundamental limits to what can be predicted. Your straw man dismissial of actual arguments for tax cuts make it pretty clear where you stand, and it's skewing your perceptions.
Just as a note on tax revenue in particular: Assume that permanent tax cuts which leave some non-zero level of taxation have a permanent positive effect on annual economic growth. There exists some year N such that from that year forward government revenue is higher than it would have been without the tax cut.
I'm well aware that this doesn't prove much, but it does reveal how people can legitimately expect tax cuts to increase net revenue. Since by the end of Reagan's term revenue was higher and tax rates lower after correcting for inflation and population growth, it's not necessarily wrong. OTOH, the system is sufficiently chaotic that some niche business might avoid going out of business, spark the next bubble, leading to a crash, which causes some suicidal person to set of a bomb and start a war between super powers, leading to mass extinction...
Actually, be definition, they do know what is in their self interest at the time. You are adding the word "best" in there as if there was some sort of objective best. I, on the other hand, don't presume to tell other people what their desires SHOULD be.
when you average the interactions of millions of people, the result is NOT predictable. People are NOT as similar as molecules.
Each atom of any given isotope of rubidium acts the same as any other regardless of circumstances. There are no 2 people out there who act exactly the same under all circumstances.
Lack of healthcare doesn't cause death. The untreated illness or injury do. That may seem just semantics, but it's an important distinction that an awful lot of people fail to make. If the results of my choices are indistinguishable from me not existing, I can't be said to have caused those effects, and therefore I am not at fault for them. I am not responsible for things I didn't cause. Failure to help does not justify coercive force.
This is somewhat offtopic from whether education and healthcare qualify as needs, but your note on healthcare touched on something I see as a basic issue with most pro-government arguments I've seen. Lots of people seem to think that lack of healthcare causes death, therefore by not providing it we are killing people, therefore those people are justified in engaging in theft/robbery/etc in order to get them. It doesn't follow, because they have misused the word 'cause'.
If they were living in well fed, educated, well developed areas, there wouldn't be nearly as many of them. Arguably, if the entire planet was modernized, the environment would benefit from the population reduction more than it would lose to the addtional material wealth person.
"If not for NASA then we wouldn't be spending people into space right now private or not" [citation needed].
In all honesty, why do you think no one would have spent any time and effort trying to reach space without government intervention? Other government intervention, in the form of arms control, is the only plausible reason I can imagine. Aeronautics did not start in government labs.
On another note, basic scientific research hasn't always been the purview of government either and still got done with private funding. It's quite plausible that government funding crowds out private research in a way that is detrimental to progress. It's not exactly measurable, but you seem to have a blind faith that private funding doesn't happen, and you should really double check that sort of premise before you draw too many conclusions from it. Judging slowly on the rate of increase of our understanding, I'm open to the argument that either public or private is better. However, please consider the possibility that private systems may lead to faster overall development even with the distasteful side effects such systems bring.
Capitalism addresses poor achievement just fine by allowing failure and the consequences thereof. Attempting to get everyone, regardless of lack of ability, to the same level of education is the most damaging thing in the educational world today. No matter how badly something isn't working, the public school solution is almost always "we just need more money" which is why in DC it costs almost twice what private school costs.
Those flawed implementations of capitalism are the inevitable result of any attempt to implement communism. You can't spread the wealth around without taking it from someone. That person is either free to choose not to produce an excess to be taken, or their labor is forced. "From each acccording to his ability" is slavery. "From each according to his choice to produce, to each what they produce and what they can persuade others to provide" is at least compatible with freedom.
Another way to look at it: only a megalomaniac would think they have the ability to decide what everyone else has the ability to produce.