Evidence of the Climate Hoax

[Enters Laughing]

[Absurd]

[Jimbean]

Spend at least 50 hours researching the science of climate change, study all the claims and counter-claims, the accusations and refutations. Watch a few documentaries both supporting and debunking global warming, then get online and read commentaries on these documentaries. Which side do the facts ultimately seem to support?

Then, consider who stands to win and lose from each side of the debate. Find out who the 7 richest corporations in the world are (6 are oil and gas companies, the 7th is Walmart) and think which side they might be supporting and why.

Then, look at individual climate scientists' opinions on the subject of global warming: do they privately think it is more or less serious than the public is made to believe (answer: they actually downplay the risks for the public in order to not depress them)?

Look at the leaked e-mails. Read analysis from both sides. Look at the e-mails themselves: do the questionable e-mails demonstrate that the climate scientists involved do not believe in global warming, or anthropogenic global warming? or do they demonstrate unethical conduct?

Find out what the Australians' view of global warming is: is it happening or not? What do the Europeans think? What do the leaders of China and India think, whose countries are just getting on the fossil fuel track to success? Surely of all countries in the world China and India would be most interested in debunking the threat of anthropogenic global warming. What do the poorly educated African nations think?

Finally, just thinking logically, could the conversion of billions and billions of tons of extremely energy-dense fossil fuels into kinetic energy and ultimately heat over the course of many decades somehow affect the Earth in any tangible way?

Hmmm....

I acknowledge your post, but I am in the process of finishing up a paper for a college course. I would like to check out the links and ideas in your post, but I am not going to respond until Wednesday.

For the start, no I have not spent 50 hours or more reading about man made climate change; I have spent something like a total of 20 to 30 hours. And I will explain why the IPCC would be dishonest.

[Rick]

What most people don't realize is that there is a whole suite of interrelated problems, of which anthropogenic global warming is just one. These include Peak Oil (we are there right now) and environmental degradation, which can be broken down into ten or so categories, each of which is potentially lethal to modern civilization, if allowed to continue unchecked.

For whatever reason, global warming has piqued media attention in recent years, rather than, say, deforestation, topsoil erosion, salinization of irrigated croplands, or loss of biodiversity. I think that is because it captures people's imagination better and can more easily be cinematized.

Even if anthropogenic global warming turned out to be false, or even if the warming trend (which is currently indisputable) abruptly ended, we'd still have to face all the other problems whose solutions are remarkably similar, sometimes identical, to the solutions for global warming.

Here's a good synopsis of how to adapt to the reality that likely awaits us when our fossil fuels begin to run out (i.e. now):
Definancialisation, deglobalisation, relocalisation | Energy Bulletin

[07490]

there are few things that are conspiracies, man landing on the moon in 1969, alien's communication with the government, the war in Iraq, etc... I agree that a lot of companies have financially benefited from global warming, but it doesn't prove that the ice is melting, but how damaging it is, I am not sure.

[xkj220]

[discojoe]

What most people don't realize is that there is a whole suite of interrelated problems, of which anthropogenic global warming is just one. These include Peak Oil (we are there right now) and environmental degradation, which can be broken down into ten or so categories, each of which is potentially lethal to modern civilization, if allowed to continue unchecked.

For whatever reason, global warming has piqued media attention in recent years, rather than, say, deforestation, topsoil erosion, salinization of irrigated croplands, or loss of biodiversity. I think that is because it captures people's imagination better and can more easily be cinematized.

Even if anthropogenic global warming turned out to be false, or even if the warming trend (which is currently indisputable) abruptly ended, we'd still have to face all the other problems whose solutions are remarkably similar, sometimes identical, to the solutions for global warming.

Here's a good synopsis of how to adapt to the reality that likely awaits us when our fossil fuels begin to run out (i.e. now):
Definancialisation, deglobalisation, relocalisation | Energy Bulletin

Market will take care of it.

[Rick]

Market will take care of it.

There is a whole set of reasons why this may not be true.

Take oil consumption, first of all. Because the use of fossil fuels, specifically oil, lies at the core of our economic system, its elasticity is very low. Modern agricultural production requires enormous inputs of oil and natural gas for fertilizers, harvesting, storage, and transportation. Instead of producing less food, agribusiness will buy the oil at any price and pass on prices to consumers. The same goes with transportation and production of consumer products. Workers will also not go to work less because of higher gasoline prices. Look at the recent price spike of $4/gallon and how much it affected oil consumption -- hardly at all.

Oil-based infrastructure is so pervasive and built-up that it would take many years of concentrated effort to modify it in such a way as to not be dependent upon oil. Furthermore, even the energy necessary for modifying the infrastructure currently can only be obtained from oil. That is why a lot of doomsayers (i.e. energy analysts who aren't paid salaries by the government or oil industry) are saying we only have a decade to make the switch to a non-oil economy. All of suburban America as a residential type is dependent upon cheap oil for its existence. Rather than effortlessly switch to "other forms of housing" as soon as oil reaches X dollars per gallon, people will stick it out in their energy guzzling homes and slowly go bankrupt.

Another difference between oil and most goods that economists examine is that the cost of oil production per barrel is continuously rising -- invisibly to end consumers. As the best oil fields become depleted, more and more energy must be invested in obtaining each successive barrel. I've read that we're now at the ratio of 5:1 (barrels extracted per barrels invested). Agree that a 1:1 or even 1.5:1 ratio would make no sense to producers. That means there is a minimum price of oil that is economical for oil producers to continue their production. I've read that this minimum price now is roughly $70, and rising.

Furthermore, there exists a maximum price of oil at which economic collapse occurs in oil-dependent economies where oil is an inelastic commodity. For the U.S. this price is probably around $150 per barrel -- near where it peaked last year. Consumers continue buying the oil, but their profits from economic activity are eaten up by the high price of energy. Financial collapse ensues.

Conclusion: Oil extraction and consumption can't just be turned on and off at will in response to price fluctuations. Its transfer from producer to end consumer is a complex, many-stage process. We're dependent on it just like we are on food.

Will market forces protect renewable natural resources such as forest, soil, and clean water? Only in special cases. There are plenty of deforested areas, such as Haiti, where private citizens acted in personal interests to cut down all the trees, thanks to personal need and market forces. You don't have to cook with firewood -- you could use solar cookers, etc., but Haitians didn't know that.

99.999% of American buffalo were destroyed in the 1800s. Only thanks to just a few people did the species survive at all. There are countless extinct species -- like the once superabundant Passenger Pigeon -- that were not saved by market forces. It usually happens so quickly that people don't realize what's happened.

Easter Island used to be forested with the largest palm trees in the Pacific. All were cut down within a few centuries of arrival by Polynesian settlers. Meanwhile, soil degraded, they lost their ability to make canoes out of palm logs and thus lost a critical food source -- fishing -- and the society collapsed, and most islanders died. You'd think that as they realized there were fewer and fewer trees left, the price of each would have risen correspondingly to infinity, but that was clearly not the case.

Iowa has lost half its topsoil due to erosion from modern farming methods. You'd think that would affect the value of the remaining topsoil, but it doesn't. Agriculture today is managed by corporations with diffused ownership and responsibility. Shareholders come and go and are only in it for the money. Who of them can be made to care that the agricultural practices employed by the company they own 1/10,000 part of are gradually depleting the soil in a distant land? By analogy, how can a first-world consumer whose lifestyle contributes 1/100,000,000 of all anthropogenic greenhouse gas be expected to change his lifestyle when its effects are being felt in distant lands and may or may not reach him in his lifetime? (and people like Rush Limbaugh are telling him that it's all a hoax designed to allow the government to control his life and get rich at his expense)

Resources tend to be exploited, not carefully managed, in the absence of one of two conditions: 1) perfect central control, 2) perfect private ownership (by individuals, not corporations). Both solutions require perfect information via continual monitoring of the resource. In the case of global warming, we wouldn't even know it were happening if it weren't for scientific monitoring and the ability to deduce climate conditions back millions of years, because our own lifetimes are too short. Only in rare instances is climate change fast enough to observe with certainty within one generation.

More and more economists are realizing is that the full costs of resources have not been figured into their prices. To know the full cost, you have to know the environmental consequences of using the resource, which is only possible if a single person or small group of closely knit people own the resource and observe it on a daily basis, or if there is centralized management with sophisticated environmental monitoring that is immune from populist decision making. If the full cost of extracting, processing, and replacing each resource had been included, perhaps market forces would have done a better job at encouraging sustainability. Right now virtually every aspect of the "American lifestyle" is unsustainable, right down to lawn maintenance. Everything we do is possible only because of cheap energy whose full long-term environmental costs have not been figured into the price because of our own ignorance about the costs. That is why market forces have failed to produce a sustainable economy and are continuing to fail us.

[discojoe]

There is a whole set of reasons why this may not be true.

There is literally not one reason why it might not be true. I'm sorry to sound like a jackass, but all of your arguments consist of fallacies that betray a lack of understanding of how the market functions.

First of all, oil demand is nowhere near as inelastic as you seem to be saying. Look at how the price of gas has plummeted. Nine out of ten of the previous recessions have been followed by a plunge in the price of oil. I understand the difference between demand and quantity demanded, but the bottom line is that prices fell because oil producers had to charge less to make more money.

That is why a lot of doomsayers (i.e. energy analysts who aren't paid salaries by the government or oil industry) are saying we only have a decade to make the switch to a non-oil economy.

If the government wants to look at this as a national security issue, then fine; it can do some R&D and maybe come up with some innovations. Otherwise, there is no way--literally, no way--the government will be able to actually implement any of these changes anywhere near as efficiently as the market.

Rather than effortlessly switch to "other forms of housing" as soon as oil reaches X dollars per gallon, people will stick it out in their energy guzzling homes and slowly go bankrupt.

Rubbish. Some people will do this, certainly, but many people will do things like move in with family and share costs, thus lowering demand and thus prices.

Another difference between oil and most goods that economists examine is that the cost of oil production per barrel is continuously rising -- invisibly to end consumers. As the best oil fields become depleted, more and more energy must be invested in obtaining each successive barrel. I've read that we're now at the ratio of 5:1 (barrels extracted per barrels invested). Agree that a 1:1 or even 1.5:1 ratio would make no sense to producers. That means there is a minimum price of oil that is economical for oil producers to continue their production. I've read that this minimum price now is roughly $70, and rising.

Yes, but as people stop buying the more expensive oil that can now be drilled, oil companies will figure out cheaper ways of drilling it. This has already happened several times.

Furthermore, there exists a maximum price of oil at which economic collapse occurs in oil-dependent economies where oil is an inelastic commodity. For the U.S. this price is probably around $150 per barrel -- near where it peaked last year. Consumers continue buying the oil, but their profits from economic activity are eaten up by the high price of energy. Financial collapse ensues.

Nonsense. When prices rise to unsustainable levels, the market responds by lowering demand. Guess what lowers after that?

Conclusion: Oil extraction and consumption can't just be turned on and off at will in response to price fluctuations. Its transfer from producer to end consumer is a complex, many-stage process. We're dependent on it just like we are on food.

A brief appraisal of the market of the past year immediately refutes this.

Will market forces protect renewable natural resources such as forest, soil, and clean water? Only in special cases. There are plenty of deforested areas, such as Haiti, where private citizens acted in personal interests to cut down all the trees, thanks to personal need and market forces. You don't have to cook with firewood -- you could use solar cookers, etc., but Haitians didn't know that.

Of course there are (rare) instances in which the government much manage externalities, but cutting down trees in Haiti seems trivial. Who cares if they cut down all their trees?

99.999% of American buffalo were destroyed in the 1800s. Only thanks to just a few people did the species survive at all. There are countless extinct species -- like the once superabundant Passenger Pigeon -- that were not saved by market forces. It usually happens so quickly that people don't realize what's happened.

This begs the question.

Easter Island used to be forested with the largest palm trees in the Pacific. All were cut down within a few centuries of arrival by Polynesian settlers. Meanwhile, soil degraded, they lost their ability to make canoes out of palm logs and thus lost a critical food source -- fishing -- and the society collapsed, and most islanders died. You'd think that as they realized there were fewer and fewer trees left, the price of each would have risen correspondingly to infinity, but that was clearly not the case.

I am open to the idea of man-made global warming, but that's not the point. The point is that the science so far being paraded in the mainstream media is utterly bogus, just like your analogy. The socioeconomic/ecological/whatever conditions on Easter Island are not a good microcosm for all of civilization, especially without further information about why the Polynesians destroyed all the trees (i.e., whose decision it was to do it).

Iowa has lost half its topsoil due to erosion from modern farming methods. You'd think that would affect the value of the remaining topsoil, but it doesn't.

Again, you beg the question. Who cares if Iowa loses its topsoil?

By analogy, how can a first-world consumer whose lifestyle contributes 1/100,000,000 of all anthropogenic greenhouse gas be expected to change his lifestyle when its effects are being felt in distant lands and may or may not reach him in his lifetime?

They can't, because it is basically a hoax.

In the case of global warming, we wouldn't even know it were happening if it weren't for scientific monitoring and the ability to deduce climate conditions back millions of years, because our own lifetimes are too short. Only in rare instances is climate change fast enough to observe with certainty within one generation.

I agree, but the problem is that there is no evidence of any problem.

More and more economists are realizing is that the full costs of resources have not been figured into their prices.

It is impossible to do more than theorize on the "true" cost of anything.

Right now virtually every aspect of the "American lifestyle" is unsustainable, right down to lawn maintenance.

You can say this about anything. The Sun is technically unsustainable. Pretty much every system in the Universe, as far as I know, is unsustainable.

That is why market forces have failed to produce a sustainable economy and are continuing to fail us.

The business cycle, and the recessions that come with it, are caused by the Fed, not the market, etc., etc., etc.

[Rick]

I have some disagreements with your understanding of market forces and the causes of business cycles. My understanding is that an unregulated free market is still subject to speculative bubbles and crashes, and to business cycles.

Yes, cheaper forms of extracting oil have been found in the past, but these can only be temporary solutions for extracting a bit more of a finite resource.

You stated that the market implements things much more efficiently than the government. This might be true. However, many things that we think of as being the product of market forces actually owe their existence to government initiatives, public support, or forces that can hardly be called "market." For instance, the current automobile infrastructure is partially subsidized by the government (specifically, highways). Local zoning laws, advertisements of consumer goods, and social pressure encourage urban sprawl and high-carbon lifestyles (automobile dependency, consumerism, large and inefficient homes, etc.). Many great technical breakthroughs requiring large amounts of capital and collaboration are made in the laboratories of universities, research institutes, and military establishments, not in the labs of independent inventors or commercial corporations.

I don't think it's useful to compare the unsustainability of the use of a resource -- oil -- that will run out in a matter of decades with the sun, which will run out in billions of years.

I don't understand why you think people shouldn't care about trees in Haiti or topsoil in Iowa. Either I simply don't get your point, or you are incredibly ignorant of environmental science and man's dependency upon nature. Hopefully the former.

Yes, some people will move in with relatives, but if too many people made that wise decision, housing prices would collapse, pulling many other parts of the economy down with it. So, the government extends yet more funds to people to try to keep them in their homes and avoid the economic and social turmoil that would result from people shifting to a less energy-intensive lifestyle.

>> "It is impossible to do more than theorize on the "true" cost of anything."

I suppose, but that doesn't mean efforts shouldn't be made to raise the prices of things whose low cost is leading to environmental damage and resource depletion. For instance, imagine you've got a town that's getting water "for free" from a well whose water table is gradually dropping. The cost of the utility for the public includes only the cost of physically supplying the water from the well to people's homes and draining it off to a nearby river. The cost is very low, so people take no thought to the amount they use. Obviously, at some point the aquifer will be completely drained, so this practice is unsustainable. A more reasonable cost of the well water is the cost at which human consumption exactly equals the natural replenishment rate of the underground aquifer. This price would probably be 100 to 1000 times higher than what people are currently paying. At this cost, people will find ways to cut down their usage and reuse water. Maybe they'd even find an alternate source for their water that turned out to be less costly.

>> "I am open to the idea of man-made global warming, but that's not the point. The point is that the science so far being paraded in the mainstream media is utterly bogus, just like your analogy."

Mainstream media isn't the best place to learn about the science. I have read a book about the Greenland ice cores and what was discovered in them, and I read a lot of articles and blogs by scientists. There is no reason to believe that the data coming from all over the world is bogus. I have yet to hear of an objection to the consensus position (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scienti...climate_change and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Global_warming/FAQ ) that has not been soundly refuted. The only consistent error of IPCC reports is that their forecasts regarding the impacts of global warming keep turning out to be too conservative and optimistic. What I've seen with my own eyes and heard from people in different countries has also supported the fact that global warming has been occuring (glacier retreat, warmer winters, rising treelines in alpine zones, etc.). It is also apparent that if global warming were to continue along the lines forecasted by scientists, it would be absolutely devastating. So, what exactly do you mean when saying it is a hoax? That it is occuring, that it is anthropogenic, or that it is something to worry about?

[Jimbean]

Spend at least 50 hours researching the science of climate change, study all the claims and counter-claims, the accusations and refutations. Watch a few documentaries both supporting and debunking global warming, then get online and read commentaries on these documentaries. Which side do the facts ultimately seem to support?

Besides the political viewpoint, it does not matter

Then, consider who stands to win and lose from each side of the debate. Find out who the 7 richest corporations in the world are (6 are oil and gas companies, the 7th is Walmart) and think which side they might be supporting and why.

Proponents of a world government stand to benefit. Oil companies, to my knowledge support both sides of the debate, since you see their “go green” advertisements in magazines. Traditionally big companies or corporations support regulation to kill their competition, such as small bio-diesel entrepreneurs.

Then, look at individual climate scientists' opinions on the subject of global warming: do they privately think it is more or less serious than the public is made to believe (answer: they actually downplay the risks for the public in order to not depress them)?

I would answer that statement with the statement of it all depends on the scientist. According to scientists who disagree with the so called consensus, those who claim that global warming is a problem get funding.

Look at the leaked e-mails. Read analysis from both sides. Look at the e-mails themselves: do the questionable e-mails demonstrate that the climate scientists involved do not believe in global warming, or anthropogenic global warming? or do they demonstrate unethical conduct?

I posted those e-mails in this thread; I do not understand how talking about manipulating data through software poses any question.

Find out what the Australians' view of global warming is: is it happening or not? What do the Europeans think? What do the leaders of China and India think, whose countries are just getting on the fossil fuel track to success? Surely of all countries in the world China and India would be most interested in debunking the threat of anthropogenic global warming. What do the poorly educated African nations think?

People have different views of reality, but that does not change facts. Further response to the above piece would derail the subject.

Finally, just thinking logically, could the conversion of billions and billions of tons of extremely energy-dense fossil fuels into kinetic energy and ultimately heat over the course of many decades somehow affect the Earth in any tangible way?

Sure, but how exactly.

Anyone who claims to know more than the IPCC and yet has not done this is just full of hot air (pun intended).

This says it well:
Wallace, Frank R. "If a genius gives in to dishonesty or lack of integrity, he undermines his entire work and diminishes the long-term value of his end results." Neo-Tech Reference Encyclopedia, I & O, 1982, page 54

What most people don't realize is that there is a whole suite of interrelated problems, of which anthropogenic global warming is just one. These include Peak Oil (we are there right now)…

Peak Oil is probably a scam. I say probably because the only trustworthy information that I get is only of second hand source. To my knowledge, oil is a plentiful resource, however, for example, oil here in the United States has higher sulfur content, and therefore is more expensive to refine. I am quite sure through my second hand source, and by looking at the behavior of the establishment, those oil maps show a lot less than what is actually there, thereby helping to create artificial scarcity.

…and environmental degradation, which can be broken down into ten or so categories, each of which is potentially lethal to modern civilization, if allowed to continue unchecked.

Yes! Like the dumping radioactive waste in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, or deforestation, or the dumping of toxic waste and medication in drinking water.

For whatever reason, global warming has piqued media attention in recent years, rather than, say, deforestation, topsoil erosion, salinization of irrigated croplands, or loss of biodiversity. I think that is because it captures people's imagination better and can more easily be cinematized.

This point that you make actually helps my argument. The mainstream media, for the most part, is involved in a conspiracy to create a new world order.

Oil-based infrastructure is so pervasive and built-up that it would take many years of concentrated effort to modify it in such a way as to not be dependent upon oil. Furthermore, even the energy necessary for modifying the infrastructure currently can only be obtained from oil. That is why a lot of doomsayers (i.e. energy analysts who aren't paid salaries by the government or oil industry) are saying we only have a decade to make the switch to a non-oil economy. All of suburban America as a residential type is dependent upon cheap oil for its existence. Rather than effortlessly switch to "other forms of housing" as soon as oil reaches X dollars per gallon, people will stick it out in their energy guzzling homes and slowly go bankrupt.

Not all “doomsayers” share that sentiment.

Another difference between oil and most goods that economists examine is that the cost of oil production per barrel is continuously rising -- invisibly to end consumers. As the best oil fields become depleted, more and more energy must be invested in obtaining each successive barrel. I've read that we're now at the ratio of 5:1 (barrels extracted per barrels invested). Agree that a 1:1 or even 1.5:1 ratio would make no sense to producers.

Artificial scarcity? I don't know, maybe we are at the peak of oil and it is all down hill from here so to speak.

I've read that this minimum price now is roughly $70, and rising.

The real problem here is currency devaluation. Look at prices of other commonities and compare them to oil.

Furthermore, there exists a maximum price of oil at which economic collapse occurs in oil-dependent economies where oil is an inelastic commodity. For the U.S. this price is probably around $150 per barrel -- near where it peaked last year. Consumers continue buying the oil, but their profits from economic activity are eaten up by the high price of energy. Financial collapse ensues.

There are other things that can create an economic collapse. I believe that the economies around the world are collapsing regardless of what the price of oil is.

Will market forces protect renewable natural resources such as forest, soil, and clean water? Only in special cases. There are plenty of deforested areas, such as Haiti, where private citizens acted in personal interests to cut down all the trees, thanks to personal need and market forces. You don't have to cook with firewood -- you could use solar cookers, etc., but Haitians didn't know that.

99.999% of American buffalo were destroyed in the 1800s. Only thanks to just a few people did the species survive at all. There are countless extinct species -- like the once superabundant Passenger Pigeon -- that were not saved by market forces. It usually happens so quickly that people don't realize what's happened.

Easter Island used to be forested with the largest palm trees in the Pacific. All were cut down within a few centuries of arrival by Polynesian settlers. Meanwhile, soil degraded, they lost their ability to make canoes out of palm logs and thus lost a critical food source -- fishing -- and the society collapsed, and most islanders died. You'd think that as they realized there were fewer and fewer trees left, the price of each would have risen correspondingly to infinity, but that was clearly not the case.

Iowa has lost half its topsoil due to erosion from modern farming methods. You'd think that would affect the value of the remaining topsoil, but it doesn't. Agriculture today is managed by corporations with diffused ownership and responsibility. Shareholders come and go and are only in it for the money. Who of them can be made to care that the agricultural practices employed by the company they own 1/10,000 part of are gradually depleting the soil in a distant land? By analogy, how can a first-world consumer whose lifestyle contributes 1/100,000,000 of all anthropogenic greenhouse gas be expected to change his lifestyle when its effects are being felt in distant lands and may or may not reach him in his lifetime? (and people like Rush Limbaugh are telling him that it's all a hoax designed to allow the government to control his life and get rich at his expense)

Limbaugh is only partly correct, actually it is the international banking cartel that plans not to get rich, but to gain power over everyone through carbon taxes if enough people believe what the bankers what them to believe.

The rest of the above paragraphs can be answered by governments adopting a legal framework on top of a foundation of property rights. There are examples here in the United States where class action lawsuits have been filed against industrial companies who poisoned the local water supply, for example. Today, it is not considered smart to run an unclean business here in the United States.

Resources tend to be exploited, not carefully managed, in the absence of one of two conditions: 1) perfect central control, 2) perfect private ownership (by individuals, not corporations). Both solutions require perfect information via continual monitoring of the resource. In the case of global warming, we wouldn't even know it were happening if it weren't for scientific monitoring and the ability to deduce climate conditions back millions of years, because our own lifetimes are too short. Only in rare instances is climate change fast enough to observe with certainty within one generation.

This is not how the free market with a foundation of property rights work.

More and more economists are realizing is that the full costs of resources have not been figured into their prices. To know the full cost, you have to know the environmental consequences of using the resource, which is only possible if a single person or small group of closely knit people own the resource and observe it on a daily basis, or if there is centralized management with sophisticated environmental monitoring that is immune from populist decision making. If the full cost of extracting, processing, and replacing each resource had been included, perhaps market forces would have done a better job at encouraging sustainability. Right now virtually every aspect of the "American lifestyle" is unsustainable, right down to lawn maintenance. Everything we do is possible only because of cheap energy whose full long-term environmental costs have not been figured into the price because of our own ignorance about the costs. That is why market forces have failed to produce a sustainable economy and are continuing to fail us.

Again, this is not true, partly because free market forces have not been allowed to work.

Mainstream media isn't the best place to learn about the science. I have read a book about the Greenland ice cores and what was discovered in them, and I read a lot of articles and blogs by scientists. There is no reason to believe that the data coming from all over the world is bogus.

There is reason to believe that the conclusion that mankind is causing the warming, and that the warming will lead to the destruction of human kind, however is bogus.

I have yet to hear of an objection to the consensus position (see
Scientific_opinion_on_climate_change
and Talk:Global warming/FAQ - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia ) that has not been soundly refuted. The only consistent error of IPCC reports is that their forecasts regarding the impacts of global warming keep turning out to be too conservative and optimistic. What I've seen with my own eyes and heard from people in different countries has also supported the fact that global warming has been occuring (glacier retreat, warmer winters, rising treelines in alpine zones, etc.). It is also apparent that if global warming were to continue along the lines forecasted by scientists, it would be absolutely devastating. So, what exactly do you mean when saying it is a hoax? That it is occuring, that it is anthropogenic, or that it is something to worry about?

The earth is warming and cooling, that has effects on climate all around the world. Wikipedia is not an accurate source in political matters, such as anthropogenic climate change except from deforestation, chemtrails, and urban heat island effect.

First of all, oil demand is nowhere near as inelastic as you seem to be saying. Look at how the price of gas has plummeted. Nine out of ten of the previous recessions have been followed by a plunge in the price of oil. I understand the difference between demand and quantity demanded, but the bottom line is that prices fell because oil producers had to charge less to make more money.

The supply of oil has been manipulated by artificial scarcity in the past, and some evidence points that oil today is still being manipulated.

[discojoe]

The supply of oil has been manipulated by artificial scarcity in the past, and some evidence points that oil today is still being manipulated.

I think OPEC's existence is more of a blatant flashing neon sign that oil is being manipulated.

I will respond to Rick later.

[Rick]

Worldwide oil discoveries are well-known and publicly documented. The exact size of current reserves is not known for sure and is subject to overstatement or understatement by those in control of oil, in order to influence consumer expectations and price. Here is a graph showing the estimated size of newly discovered oil fields by year, and total global oil production.

http://postcarboncities.net/files/im...on.preview.gif

Here's the same type of graph showing oil production within the United States:
http://www.grinningplanet.com/2005/0...iscoveries.jpg

In the U.S., discovery peaked in 1930, and production peaked in 1970, which was roughly the end of the post-war economic boom. At one point, the U.S. was the world's main producer of oil. Now most of our oil is imported.

[Jimbean]

Worldwide oil discoveries are well-known and publicly documented. The exact size of current reserves is not known for sure and is subject to overstatement or understatement by those in control of oil, in order to influence consumer expectations and price. Here is a graph showing the estimated size of newly discovered oil fields by year, and total global oil production.

http://postcarboncities.net/files/im...on.preview.gif

Here's the same type of graph showing oil production within the United States:
http://www.grinningplanet.com/2005/0...iscoveries.jpg

In the U.S., discovery peaked in 1930, and production peaked in 1970, which was roughly the end of the post-war economic boom. At one point, the U.S. was the world's main producer of oil. Now most of our oil is imported.

I think you might teach me something about peak oil. I am familiar with everything you have mentioned so far, but if we are to talk about the quantity of recoverable oil, I honestly cannot say anything for sure except what has come from my second hand source. I do know that there is plenty of oil that officially is unrecoverable or hard to recover.

I have more to say, but I’ll save it for later.

[Jarno]

There are some electronic files that had been stolen from a prominent climate research center and made public last week. The U.N. IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) had said that the evidence was unequivocal, despite the fact that there is no consensus within the scientific community.

actually a professor of climat and wheather in the university in my country, openly sais that there are a lot of questions about the climat that cannot be answered yet. Which makes every conclusion nothing more then somewhat of a guess.

So it's common knowledge that you cannot say anything reasonable about the changing climat.

Though that they are faking numbers in order to conclude thins is a bad thing...

[Jimbean]

I have some disagreements with your understanding of market forces and the causes of business cycles. My understanding is that an unregulated free market is still subject to speculative bubbles and crashes, and to business cycles.

Out of curisosity, how much do you know about monetary theory? If you want to understand modern business cycles, you should better understand money.

[discojoe]

I have some disagreements with your understanding of market forces and the causes of business cycles. My understanding is that an unregulated free market is still subject to speculative bubbles and crashes, and to business cycles.

Boom/bust cycles occur because of the fractional reserve banking system, which existed in the US before the Fed Act of 1913, but is now the exclusive domain of the Fed.

When banks can issue credit on money they do not have, false signals are sent to entrepreneurs about when to borrow and invest money. If interest rates are kept artificially low to "stimulate" the economy, entrepreneurs take this as a signal that people are saving more money (meaning they are investing in future consumption), so they take the opportunity to borrow from banks and invest in whatever. But the truth is that people aren't saving; in fact, they're probably taking advantage of the lowered interest rates to borrow and spend more.

This causes a misallocation of resources that ends either in a bust or in hyperinflation. Banks will eventually run out of cheap money to lend, thus causing the collapse of businesses that sprang up in response to the boom, or the Fed can continue to issue imaginary dollars, which will result in hyperinflation.

Yes, cheaper forms of extracting oil have been found in the past, but these can only be temporary solutions for extracting a bit more of a finite resource.

Sure, if the government wants to spend money on researching things like nuclear fusion technology (they are doing this in CA) then that's great. The point is that the government is incapable of actually implementing this technology throughout society more efficiently than the market.

However, many things that we think of as being the product of market forces actually owe their existence to government initiatives, public support, or forces that can hardly be called "market." For instance, the current automobile infrastructure is partially subsidized by the government (specifically, highways). Local zoning laws, advertisements of consumer goods, and social pressure encourage urban sprawl and high-carbon lifestyles (automobile dependency, consumerism, large and inefficient homes, etc.). Many great technical breakthroughs requiring large amounts of capital and collaboration are made in the laboratories of universities, research institutes, and military establishments, not in the labs of independent inventors or commercial corporations.

Well, first off, the highway infrastructure is a public good that is initially more efficiently created by the government. A private company has little incentive to spend billions on a highway that everyone will be able to use freely.

Zoning laws, advertisements, and social pressure may all have negative effects on the economy, but people don't have to listen to social pressure or advertising, whereas the government can make us do whatever it wants.

As far as technological breakthroughs, like I said, the government can invest in different technologies if it wants, but remember that it would not have the money to do so without the prosperity created by the free market that allows it to tax its citizenry.

I don't think it's useful to compare the unsustainability of the use of a resource -- oil -- that will run out in a matter of decades with the sun, which will run out in billions of years.

It may be a silly analogy, but the point was that the fact that something is unsustainable does not grant the government the logistical means to do anything about it.

I don't understand why you think people shouldn't care about trees in Haiti or topsoil in Iowa. Either I simply don't get your point, or you are incredibly ignorant of environmental science and man's dependency upon nature. Hopefully the former.

Why wouldn't the market work to replenish the soil? Because there's no profit in doing so. Why is there no profit? Because there's no real demand. No real demand means prices of food aren't high enough for people to pay to replenish the soil.

Yes, some people will move in with relatives, but if too many people made that wise decision, housing prices would collapse, pulling many other parts of the economy down with it. So, the government extends yet more funds to people to try to keep them in their homes and avoid the economic and social turmoil that would result from people shifting to a less energy-intensive lifestyle.

The market tries to adjust to reality. If energy became so expensive that people started moving in with relatives, any attempt to "correct" the housing market would be a misallocation of resources, as it would only be impeding the market's efforts to correct itself in light of the new reality of expensive energy.

For instance, imagine you've got a town that's getting water "for free" from a well whose water table is gradually dropping. The cost of the utility for the public includes only the cost of physically supplying the water from the well to people's homes and draining it off to a nearby river. The cost is very low, so people take no thought to the amount they use. Obviously, at some point the aquifer will be completely drained, so this practice is unsustainable. A more reasonable cost of the well water is the cost at which human consumption exactly equals the natural replenishment rate of the underground aquifer. This price would probably be 100 to 1000 times higher than what people are currently paying. At this cost, people will find ways to cut down their usage and reuse water. Maybe they'd even find an alternate source for their water that turned out to be less costly.

If the town is running out of water, the local government should pipe water to it from an outside source. There's no reason to playing nudging games with the town's population.

My concern is that the definition of what does and does not constitute "damage" to the environment will get co-opted by some insane vocal minority that thinks getting pissed off is the same as knowing what you're talking about.

Mainstream media isn't the best place to learn about the science. I have read a book about the Greenland ice cores and what was discovered in them, and I read a lot of articles and blogs by scientists. There is no reason to believe that the data coming from all over the world is bogus. I have yet to hear of an objection to the consensus position (see
Wikipedia (Links)
Scientific_opinion_on_climate_change Scientific_opinion_on_climate_change
and Talk:Global warming/FAQ - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia ) that has not been soundly refuted. The only consistent error of IPCC reports is that their forecasts regarding the impacts of global warming keep turning out to be too conservative and optimistic. What I've seen with my own eyes and heard from people in different countries has also supported the fact that global warming has been occuring (glacier retreat, warmer winters, rising treelines in alpine zones, etc.). It is also apparent that if global warming were to continue along the lines forecasted by scientists, it would be absolutely devastating. So, what exactly do you mean when saying it is a hoax? That it is occuring, that it is anthropogenic, or that it is something to worry about?

Well, I don't think that what you've seen an heard is consistent with global warming. That would be like saying my cough is consistent with early tuberculosis.

I also don't trust anything said by the IPCC nor the United Nations in general. If you want, you can go into the more scientific aspects of global warming. I'll carefully read over anything you say, since you seem to know a lot about it.

[olduser]

actually a professor of climat and wheather in the university in my country, openly sais that there are a lot of questions about the climat that cannot be answered yet. Which makes every conclusion nothing more then somewhat of a guess.

So it's common knowledge that you cannot say anything reasonable about the changing climat.

Though that they are faking numbers in order to conclude thins is a bad thing...

Hypotheses, not guesses, based on the available data. I wouldn't question the available data as it doesn't take much of a scientist to operate modern scientific equipment if it's calibrated correctly.

I can't say i know a lot about the science of climate change. I know there has been a large increase of CO2 gas in the atmosphere and that CO2 absorbs in the UV range which would cause it to gain kinetic energy via UV rays from the sun reflecting off the planet(UV rays are also bombarding us in increasing number due to loss of ozone, which absorbs ultraviolet radation, this causes skin cancer, and genetic mutation, the mutation being good or bad, also slightly negligible because so so many things cause genetic mutation), and the average kinetic energy of a quantity of gas, like the gases of the atmosphere, IS temperature. However, I am taking an upper division lecture next semester on environmental chemistry, which not be focused on 'hot topics' necessarily as it will focus on environmental chemistry, and from this i could probably draw more scientific conclusions about things.

What i will say is there is an obvious push in the country to find alternative energies. My university is VERY dependent on two types of grants; military and energy company grants. we have a school dedicated to energy resources. And even within the chemistry department we have several people researching methods to make a hydrogen economy more feasible.

Anyway, it is most politicians who outright deny athropomorphic effects on the environment. I think it is hard for the common, uneducated person to understand that there are not always definite answers.

[Rick]

Out of curisosity, how much do you know about monetary theory? If you want to understand modern business cycles, you should better understand money.

Not a whole lot. It's not one of my primary topics of interest. But I have read many articles by different authors and a book by George Soros where he calls for more government regulation of financial markets to keep people like himself from getting rich off of people's delusions, which causes destabilization of markets.

Also, the sentiment I sensed in Disco Joe's posts is the idea that a free market can do no wrong, but rather economic problems arise from government interference in free market mechanisms. I used to think similarly, but now I can see a lot of problems with free markets (as with command economies). I don't believe there is a perfect system. Each has its strengths and weaknesses. I don't believe that a perfectly free market can even exist. There will always be political considerations influencing the economy. Also, it is characteristic of Americans to rail against government interference in people's private lives and choices, but yet they are extremely tolerant of transnational corporations exerting the same kind of influence.I have a lot of thoughts about markets and the role of corporations and governments, but I'm not prepared yet to present any hard and fast ideas.

What is clear to me is the environmental basis of our existence and how it is slowly eroding the foundation of our society. Yes, I am an alarmist. I look at the environmental effects of human activity (from firsthand experience and scientific publications), our continuing population growth, and our attitudes about what a good lifestyle is, about economic growth, and about natural resources, and I prepare myself psychologically for what I expect will be a hard and austere life in a post-collapse society. Hopefully I'm wrong, but that would require a magical technological breakthrough providing a new energy source that is even cheaper than fossil fuels.

[Jimbean]

Not a whole lot. It's not one of my primary topics of interest. But I have read many articles by different authors and a book by George Soros where he calls for more government regulation of financial markets to keep people like himself from getting rich off of people's delusions, which causes destabilization of markets.

Well, then I suggest that you get familiar with monetary theory. Read at least a little bit from every major theory, but I would advise you to read up on Ludwig Von Mises and the Austrian School of Economics and forget everything you hear from so called mainstream sources before saying anything about business cycles.

[Hot Scalding Gayser]

I agree, having been caught up in the 'system' and dealing with people in government. There are some good ones and some bad ones. Just like there are some ethical capitalists and others that are fucking disgusting. People just need to learn how to look at the INDIVIDUAL. No matter how the external world is run, people are going to base their decisions based on their thoughts and feelings and that is what we always have to pay attention to.

[Rick]

Thanks for the clarification about business cycles.

If the town is running out of water, the local government should pipe water to it from an outside source. There's no reason to playing nudging games with the town's population.

My concern is that the definition of what does and does not constitute "damage" to the environment will get co-opted by some insane vocal minority that thinks getting pissed off is the same as knowing what you're talking about.

I hadn't thought of that possibility before. Generally, my impression is that most people are unaware of environmental effects and get mad when other people suggest that they don't have a right to use this or that resource the way they have been. We have grown up in a society where each individual directly and indirectly burns many barrels of crude oil each year through his activities, and we believe we have a right to continue doing this. I think of our society as having achieved its current level of development only because of "welfare handouts" from the Earth in the form of nearly free energy. Now we are used to these handouts and even think that we deserve them. But they are going to end unless Santa Claus brings us Cold Fusion just as oil production begins to peter out.

As for what is damage and what isn't, I think there are two reasonable paths a society can take -- that of localized decision making or centralized decision making. In the first case, the community can decide to do whatever the hell it pleases with its own resources, but they cannot count on being able to "pipe in water from somewhere else" or get any outside help. The second path is centralized monitoring and regulation of land and resource use. Here, the people who decide how resources should be used must be scientists.

Jared Diamond discusses these two approaches -- the "bottom-up" and "top-down" approaches -- in the book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Highly recommended.

Well, I don't think that what you've seen an heard is consistent with global warming. That would be like saying my cough is consistent with early tuberculosis.

I also don't trust anything said by the IPCC nor the United Nations in general. If you want, you can go into the more scientific aspects of global warming. I'll carefully read over anything you say, since you seem to know a lot about it.

We know without a doubt that ice is melting around the globe and that ocean levels are rising. I've seen many melting glaciers myself and have seen pictures of their retreat over recent decades. The main reason that's a problem is that a large portion of the Earth's population relies on meltwater from glaciers, especially those of the Himalayas and Andes. This includes something like half the population of China and India or something like that. Once glaciers are gone, water is available in rivers only after it rains or snows, with great deviation in water levels, whereas glaciers ensure a much more constant rate of flow year-round, allowing for predictable use in agriculture, etc. The accelerating retreat of glaciers worldwide is well-documented and is especially marked beginning in the 1980s.

In IPCC reports of just 10 years back, projections for the loss of polar ice were that it would begin to be felt many decades from now. The sentiment among scientists was that these areas were "safe for now." But things have been happening much more rapidly than expected. The problem with the disappearance of arctic sea-ice in the summer months is that it exposes vast areas of open water to the sun, whose rays are absorbed rather than reflected. This is one of the many feedback mechanisms in climate change which make modeling climate change so difficult. It used to be thought that 550 PPM of CO2 in the atmosphere was a "safe" level to try to avoid reaching. Then, consensus lowered that number to 450, and now more and more people are saying 350 is the limit (we've passed that). It is possible that even if humans disappeared now and ceased to have any environmental impact, the Earth's climate would still spin out of control due to the feedback loops of disappearing ice allowing water to absorb far more energy, and of the melting of arctic permafrost allowing vast stores of methane to be released into the atmosphere. This has already begun to happen. Methane is supposedly 30 times more potent than CO2.

Another recent concern that has cropped up is the West Antarctic Ice sheet, which may be starting to disintegrate. It rests on bedrock below sea level, so if melting occurs, water forms between the ice and the bedrock, acting as a lubricant and breaking the ice's bond with the bedrock. Collapse could take place rapidly, sending a lot of floating ice out to sea where it would eventually melt and raise sea levels by several meters.

So, even if one decides "the jury is still out on human-induced global warming," what we now know about climate feedback mechanisms is scary enough to give us great cause for concern. The IPCC's predictions so far have been very conservative and keep having to be revised upwards to accommodate new observations. That is the cause of the increasing hysteria.

Lack of concern about "a few degrees of temperature increase" reflects a general lack of awareness of ecological interrelationships. Of course climate change has occurred in the past and is a normal part of the Earth's functioning. However, if it happens too fast for plants and animals to migrate in sync with the changing climate of the landscape, then they simply go instinct. That is why you hear predictions of "30-50%" of all species lost, or whatever the estimates are. When a few key species disappear, they can take down dozens more with them.

In the Western U.S., one of the effects of global warming has been increased fire incidence and susceptibility to disease (e.g. pine beetle outbreaks in Colorado and many other states, which I've seen with my own eyes). What used to be ideal habitat for a certain tree species no longer is, and the trees become drier, weakened, and susceptible to attack by pests. If climate change happens slowly enough, life has the chance to adapt. The concern is that it's happening too fast for life to adapt.

It's not fair to mix the IPCC and the UN. The people who make up the IPCC are scientists, not politicians. They are not paid for their participation in the panel, which requires a lot of time and effort. All of the IPCC's conclusions can be checked against climate data and papers published by research institutions all over the world. The IPCC publishes no research of their own, but only summarizes research that is already available. That is all it is. If anything, the nature of the IPCC has made it a conservative body that lags several years behind the latest findings. I routinely read things like, "this newly understood feedback mechanism wasn't included in models upon which the IPCC based their forecasts."

[Jimbean]

What do you think we should do about the retreating ice caps on Mars?

[Jimbean]

Jared Diamond discusses these two approaches -- the "bottom-up" and "top-down" approaches -- in the book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Highly recommended.

I read another book of his, he is a smart guy. I do not know anything about the book you listed though.

I thought carbon dioxide was lower now than it was tens of thousands of years ago.

[olduser]

I thought carbon dioxide was lower now than it was tens of thousands of years ago.

This may be the case, however, as Rick stated, it's the ecological shock of a quick increase in CO2 that causes problems. Nature can go through cycles of high CO2 and low CO2 but the cycles are on such a time scale that flora and fauna can adapt(although, of course, some don't and they go extinct, in smaller numbers), however, the current rate is on a human generation time scale(much much much much much faster than an evolutionary time scale), which could cause mass numbers of species to go extinct. Also, Rick didn't make this absolutely clear, but ecological food chains tend to be top down. If you drive out salmon eating bears, salmon kill off all the other species in the rivers and streams in their area. You can view extinction as an exponential function.

Btw, it should be noted that I don't know much about climate change, but i know advanced chemistry, basic biology and ecology. I don't know shit about economics.

[Jimbean]

This may be the case, however, as Rick stated, it's the ecological shock of a quick increase in CO2 that causes problems. Nature can go through cycles of high CO2 and low CO2 but the cycles are on such a time scale that flora and fauna can adapt(although, of course, some don't and they go extinct, in smaller numbers), however, the current rate is on a human generation time scale(much much much much much faster than an evolutionary time scale), which could cause mass numbers of species to go extinct. Also, Rick didn't make this absolutely clear, but ecological food chains tend to be top down. If you drive out salmon eating bears, salmon kill off all the other species in the rivers and streams in their area. You can view extinction as an exponential function.

Btw, it should be noted that I don't know much about climate change, but i know advanced chemistry, basic biology and ecology. I don't know shit about economics.

This is somewhat true, but the question here is what role does carbon dioxide play in relation to global tempreture.

I think another thread can be made for the issue of organisms going extict.

[Rick]

I read another book of his, he is a smart guy. I do not know anything about the book you listed though.

I thought carbon dioxide was lower now than it was tens of thousands of years ago.

The current estimate is that it is higher than it's been in 800,000 to 2 million years (see CO2 Levels Highest in Two Million Years)

the question here is what role does carbon dioxide play in relation to global tempreture.

I can't give you a great explanation, because when I read about this particular issue it goes over my head. Basically, it was discovered way back when that atmospheric gases must play a role in keeping some of the sun's energy that reaches the earth within the earth's atmosphere rather than dissipating it all into space, much like a glass greenhouse allows energy from sunlight to enter, but then keeps that energy inside the greenhouse in the form of heat. Eventually it was speculated that fluctuations in the concentrations of gases might have caused the great shifts in earth's climate that geologists had discovered through their study of glacial landforms. When the ice cores came in from Greenland and Antarctica, they found a close correlation between concentrations of CO2 trapped in the ice and the presence of a certain isotype of Oxygen that was found to be an indicator of global ocean temperature (for a really technical description, see Oxygen isotope ratio cycle - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia).

Sometime in the 70s they discovered other greenhouse gases other than CO2 and water vapor, and I remember reading recently that CO2 is now estimated to account for just 44% of anthropogenic global warming. Other molecules such as methane account for the rest, though CO2 still has the greatest cumulative effect.

That the recent rise in CO2 levels is the result of human activity is simply not under question. The rise corresponds exactly to industrial output, and CO2 is a by-product of burning fossil fuels, which is what modern industry does.

[olduser]

This is somewhat true, but the question here is what role does carbon dioxide play in relation to global tempreture.

Carbon dioxide is a gas which when trapped in the earth's atmosphere in large quantities, can absorb photons of electromagnetic radiation from the sun. When it absorbs these photons, it gains a quanta of energy in an amount equal to the energy of the photon. It emits this quanta of energy as infrared radiation. Infrared radiation is what we percieve as heat. We cannot see it naturally, but infrared cameras exist.

on a side note: The temperature we feel is like a thousands of mols(6.022 x 10^23 molecules) of gas molecules 'hitting' us/emitting IR radiation. This can be explained by considering higher elevations. In general, high elevations have thinner air, less molecules of gas per unit area. A place at 5000 ft and 7000 ft could only be 30 miles away, and be experiencing the same clear sunny day, but it will be 5 or 10 degrees higher in temperature at the location of lower elevation as there are more gas molecules to abosrb the radiation from the sun. This is also why sunburns at elevation are much more severe and living at elevation exposes one to lots of mutating UV radation(this radiation can pass through your skin and can mutate your DNA with a collision with the DNA).

[marooned]

This is somewhat true, but the question here is what role does carbon dioxide play in relation to global tempreture.

I think another thread can be made for the issue of organisms going extict.

I think organisms going extinct is very relevant to this topic... organisms (like cyanobacteria) play a part in regulating Earth's atmosphere... Cyanobacteria is given credit for the Great Oxygen Event (Great Oxygenation Event - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) and it is largely responsible (supposedly) for the free Oxygen in the troposphere Photosynthesis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

As for CO2 it's a greenhouse gas (like water vapor and methane gas)... GHGs trap heat and regulate the climate -- the Earth's surface temp doesn't sky rocket when facing the sun or plumet when turned away, and our atmosphere has a lot to do with this. However, too high of a concentration of GHGs can create a world with a consistent climate that is a burning inferno everywhere on the surface, day or night (Venus provides an example of the "run away greenhouse effect" after it is done "running away"). Atmosphere of Venus - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - the troposphere is 95% CO2.

More on the atmosphere of Venus:

Venus has an extremely dense atmosphere, which consists mainly of carbon dioxide and a small amount of nitrogen. The atmospheric mass is 93 times that of Earth's atmosphere while the pressure at the planet's surface is about 92 times that at Earth's surface—a pressure equivalent to that at a depth of nearly 1 kilometer under Earth's oceans. The density at the surface is 65 kg/m³ (6.5% that of water). The CO2-rich atmosphere, along with thick clouds of sulfur dioxide, generates the strongest greenhouse effect in the Solar System, creating surface temperatures of over 460 °C (860 °F).[32] This makes Venus's surface hotter than Mercury's which has a minimum surface temperature of -220 °C and maximum surface temperature of 420 °C,[33] even though Venus is nearly twice Mercury's distance from the Sun and thus receives only 25% of Mercury's solar irradiance.

[Jimbean]

I am done with school for the semester! However I am not done with this debate. You folks need to learn about the NWO!

[Rick]

I am done with school for the semester! However I am not done with this debate. You folks need to learn about the NWO!

In my opinion, the forces that could cause competing, hostile nations to join together in a sort of world federation are of the same nature as those that in the past have caused tribes to join into chiefdoms, chiefdoms into states, states into empires or alliances, etc. Either 1) there is an external threat sufficiently great to cause smaller societal units to join a larger one for self-preservation, or 2) by conquest.

For nations to join together on a global scale, either one country would have to become powerful enough to subjugate all other nations, or a threat would have to arise that is common to all nations and that can only be addressed by setting aside political differences and submitting to global governance.

I think that global warming / climate change indeed has the potential to lead to the formation of a global federation where individual nations submit to the global government in certain aspects of their lifestyle and activities. The summit in Copenhagen is very telling in this regard. However, because the centripedal forces against global government are so great (i.e. it is not in the self-interest of a single state to do so unless the alternative is anhilation), I do not think that this will actually happen unless human-caused environmental changes and degradation become obvious and imminently severe. In other words, some fudged numbers by biased scientists seeking research grants combined with dramatic films about global disasters are far from enough to make national leaders sacrifice their interests and join a global confederation. If such a thing arises, it will only be because of actual, clearly demonstrated manmade global environmental catastrophe. As soon as the threat is resolved (in the best case scenario), central control will weaken, and the federation will break up or continue to exist only as a formality.

In the U.S. and other countries, hostility towards the idea of a global government is enormous. However, I personally don't see it as a bad thing. It could lay the foundation for perpetual peace as envisioned by Kant (see Perpetual peace - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia).

If global warming and associated changes were to continue as many scientists predict, a successful global federation of mostly free states would actually be the best-case scenario. Other scenarios include widespread famine and bloodshed, the collapse of industrial societies, etc. So, I see little if anything to fear from global governance itself, compared to the possible threat of environmental catastrophe.

If a large meteor were found to be hurtling toward the earth and had a 50% chance of hitting the earth in, say, exactly 10 years, of course it would be a natural and prudent thing to direct all available resources toward jointly finding and implementing a solution to the problem. Some people would probably claim that the whole meteor thing was a conspiracy hatched to justify this or that political agenda, line the pockets of particularly vocal advocates within the laser industry, etc., and raise taxes in order to make the elite even richer at the expense of the masses. Some advocates would dramatize the situation and create all sorts of hype, while opponents would look for and find data suggesting that scientists may have miscalculated the actual trajectory of the meteor. Most incensed would be those industries who stood to lose most from the redirecting of funds toward a solution to the "meteor problem."

I think we are seeing this process begin to unfold now with regards to climate change.

[discojoe]

I am done with school for the semester! However I am not done with this debate. You folks need to learn about the NWO!

I'm still working on mine, which is why I haven't responded to Rick yet (I'm currently taking a 10 minute break from prepping). I will be done in a couple days, then I shall return to the topic.

[Rick]

I don't mean to dominate this thread... but this is the only place that I am discussing these things right now.

I often read stuff like, "Al Gore, the high priest of the global warming cult" and other references to global warming as a kind of religion. While this is offensive to those of us who have a scientific perspective, I do note that in the popular culture an ideology is taking hold that has some resemblance to a religion. Basically, any movement that unifies people emotionally is in one sense a form of religion (but hardly in all senses).

Historically, political conquests have gone hand in hand with religion, which furnished the justification for the conquests and promised rewards to those who lay down their lives for the cause. For instance, in the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, there was a new kind of feeling among Americans -- "we need to pull together and be proud of who we are and fight the enemy together" -- that reflected the need to unite and lay aside personal differences. Words were spoken by politicians that closely resembled religious rhetoric and provided moral justification for going to war and "laying down your life in defense of your country."

Whenever there is some kind of threat or important national process, I think you will notice these phenomena. I was part of this during the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, where most people eventually became deeply disillusioned with the new political leaders within just a few years. I think a similar type of popular movement, now global, is happening with climate change. Time will tell whether it is successful and whether politicians choose to use the energy of the movement for evil or for good.

Even though I think that manmade global warming is occurring and that we are negatively affecting the environment in many ways on a global scale, I am somewhat skeptical about the popular emotional movement and the errors and excesses it may eventually lead to.

[electric sheep]

The lesson for skeptics is to understand that people are generally not intending to be mean, contrary, harsh, or stupid when they are challenged. It's a fight for survival. The only effective way to deal with this type of defensiveness is to de-escalate the fighting rather than inflame it. Becoming sarcastic or demeaning simply gives the other person's defenses a foothold to engage in a tit-for-tat exchange that justifies their feelings of being threatened ("Of course we fight the skeptics-look what uncaring, hostile jerks they are!") rather than a continued focus on the truth.

Skeptics will only win the war for rational beliefs by continuing, even in the face of defensive responses from others, to use behavior that is unfailingly dignified and tactful and that communicates respect and wisdom. For the data to speak loudly, skeptics must always refrain from screaming.

Finally, it should be comforting to all skeptics to remember that the truly amazing part of all of this is not that so few beliefs change or that people can be so irrational, but that anyone's beliefs ever change at all. Skeptics' ability to alter their own beliefs in response to data is a true gift; a unique, powerful, and precious ability. It is genuinely a "higher brain function" in that it goes against some of the most natural and fundamental biological urges. Skeptics must appreciate the power and, truly, the dangerousness that this ability bestows upon them. They have in their possession a skill that can be frightening, life-changing, and capable of inducing pain. In turning this ability on others it should be used carefully and wisely. Challenging beliefs must always be done with care and compassion.

Skeptics must remember to always keep their eye on the goal. They must see the long view. They must attempt to win the war for rational beliefs, not to engage in a fight to the death over any one particular battle with any one particular individual or any one particular belief. Not only must skeptics' methods and data be clean, direct, and unbiased, their demeanor and behavior must be as well.

[discojoe]

I hadn't thought of that possibility before. Generally, my impression is that most people are unaware of environmental effects and get mad when other people suggest that they don't have a right to use this or that resource the way they have been.

I think this happens, but the main thing I think people are scared of is the idea of people "coming in" and levying taxes, setting rules, and generally telling everybody how to live. People want to be left alone, and I think Americans in particular, given our views on centralized authority, are averse to not having a say in things that will dramatically affect our lifestyles.

We have grown up in a society where each individual directly and indirectly burns many barrels of crude oil each year through his activities, and we believe we have a right to continue doing this. I think of our society as having achieved its current level of development only because of "welfare handouts" from the Earth in the form of nearly free energy. Now we are used to these handouts and even think that we deserve them. But they are going to end unless Santa Claus brings us Cold Fusion just as oil production begins to peter out.

I'm not disputing that running out of oil is a huge cause for concern. I just don't think that the government has the logistical capability to spread new technology throughout the society and the economy anywhere near as well as the market can.

As for what is damage and what isn't, I think there are two reasonable paths a society can take -- that of localized decision making or centralized decision making.

There are two different kinds of regulations the government can use in this situation: incentive-based regulation, and command-and-control regulation.

In the former, the government sets a goal and lets companies/society figure out how best to achieve it. In the latter, the government sets the goal and mandates how it will be carried out.

Whether local or centralized, it boils down to using one of the two. Incentive-based is far superior to CAC regulation, because the government can never know the best way for a company or institute to accomplish, well, basically anything.

In the first case, the community can decide to do whatever the hell it pleases with its own resources, but they cannot count on being able to "pipe in water from somewhere else" or get any outside help.

Well, what does and does not define "community" is a complicated issue--especially here in the US where we have cities, towns, townships, counties/parishes, states, and the federal government as a whole comprising different aspects of each state/commonwealth.

For instance, in Milwaukee, our water comes from Lake Michigan, the only Great Lake totally "owned" by the United States. However, because the Great Lakes form one interconnected hydrological system, if Lake Michigan were to be drained, the other Great Lakes would as well. Because of this, every state and Canadian province that borders the Great Lakes has a mutual agreement not to allow any town/state or whatever to take water from the system unless it lies directly on the basin of one of the lakes.

So thirsty areas--say, in Arizona--can't have water pumped from the lakes. This reality gives people less incentive to live there, as fresh water is probably more expensive in hot areas (the water bill when I lived in Florida was much higher than it is here).

So an incentive-based form of regulation made to protect the Great Lakes from overuse has given people an economic incentive to not live in places far from easy sources of fresh water. If the government were to use CAC regulation, it would simply ration the water to everyone.

The second path is centralized monitoring and regulation of land and resource use. Here, the people who decide how resources should be used must be scientists.

What makes you think scientists could do a better job than the government? Even a billion scientists would not be able to regulate land and resource usage.

Imagine if someone gave you a piece of paper that was nine feet long, and printed on it was almost illegibly tiny script that gave daily instructions on how to operate a huge machine. At the top of the instructions was the ambiguous order that the instructions be carried out "as efficiently as possible." Now imagine that "efficiently as possible" meant performing the instructions according to the subjective valuations of twenty million people--people you've got no access to whatsoever. Not only that, but you completely perform this same task (with different instructions each time) every single day.

That's the problem central planners face. The bottom line is that it would be absolute chaos. There must be some other way.

Jared Diamond discusses these two approaches -- the "bottom-up" and "top-down" approaches -- in the book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Highly recommended.

OK, I will check it out.

We know without a doubt that ice is melting around the globe and that ocean levels are rising. I've seen many melting glaciers myself and have seen pictures of their retreat over recent decades.

Okay... but this in itself doesn't constitute an argument. I mean, what if we're just experiencing a new multi-century warm period, like in the Middle Ages?

The main reason that's a problem is that a large portion of the Earth's population relies on meltwater from glaciers, especially those of the Himalayas and Andes. This includes something like half the population of China and India or something like that. Once glaciers are gone, water is available in rivers only after it rains or snows, with great deviation in water levels, whereas glaciers ensure a much more constant rate of flow year-round, allowing for predictable use in agriculture, etc. The accelerating retreat of glaciers worldwide is well-documented and is especially marked beginning in the 1980s.

I was under the impression that global sea ice is actually higher than it was thirty years ago?

In IPCC reports of just 10 years back, projections for the loss of polar ice were that it would begin to be felt many decades from now. The sentiment among scientists was that these areas were "safe for now." But things have been happening much more rapidly than expected.

The problem with the disappearance of arctic sea-ice in the summer months is that it exposes vast areas of open water to the sun, whose rays are absorbed rather than reflected.

Wouldn't the oceans take several centuries to "catch up" to an increase in atmospheric temperature?

This is one of the many feedback mechanisms in climate change which make modeling climate change so difficult. It used to be thought that 550 PPM of CO2 in the atmosphere was a "safe" level to try to avoid reaching. Then, consensus lowered that number to 450, and now more and more people are saying 350 is the limit (we've passed that). It is possible that even if humans disappeared now and ceased to have any environmental impact, the Earth's climate would still spin out of control due to the feedback loops of disappearing ice allowing water to absorb far more energy, and of the melting of arctic permafrost allowing vast stores of methane to be released into the atmosphere. This has already begun to happen. Methane is supposedly 30 times more potent than CO2.

I'll be totally honest: I don't really know much about greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. However, I do hear a lot about scientists signing letters of skepticism toward global warming, saying that the science behind the gases isn't legitimate. Shrug. I should read more about it.

Another recent concern that has cropped up is the West Antarctic Ice sheet, which may be starting to disintegrate. It rests on bedrock below sea level, so if melting occurs, water forms between the ice and the bedrock, acting as a lubricant and breaking the ice's bond with the bedrock. Collapse could take place rapidly, sending a lot of floating ice out to sea where it would eventually melt and raise sea levels by several meters.

Wouldn't it raise sea levels before melting? I don't think melting ice affects water levels if the ice in question is floating.

Anyway, I thought that Antarctica was actually experiencing record snowfall, or ice growth, or... something like that?

So, even if one decides "the jury is still out on human-induced global warming," what we now know about climate feedback mechanisms is scary enough to give us great cause for concern. The IPCC's predictions so far have been very conservative and keep having to be revised upwards to accommodate new observations. That is the cause of the increasing hysteria.

Ehh, the IPCC seems like a puppet for UN politics.

Lack of concern about "a few degrees of temperature increase" reflects a general lack of awareness of ecological interrelationships. Of course climate change has occurred in the past and is a normal part of the Earth's functioning. However, if it happens too fast for plants and animals to migrate in sync with the changing climate of the landscape, then they simply go instinct. That is why you hear predictions of "30-50%" of all species lost, or whatever the estimates are. When a few key species disappear, they can take down dozens more with them.

Has modern society (not some remote, isolated nation) ever experienced a situation where an animal's extinction has triggered an ecological crisis that affected people's lives?

In the Western U.S., one of the effects of global warming has been increased fire incidence and susceptibility to disease (e.g. pine beetle outbreaks in Colorado and many other states, which I've seen with my own eyes). What used to be ideal habitat for a certain tree species no longer is, and the trees become drier, weakened, and susceptible to attack by pests. If climate change happens slowly enough, life has the chance to adapt. The concern is that it's happening too fast for life to adapt.

In Wisconsin, we've been having some of the most severe snowfall ever, as well very mild summers. We got like seven feet of snow two years ago. Usually, the winters are cold but not severe in terms of snow, and the summers are extremely hot. Last summer was mild at best.

It's not fair to mix the IPCC and the UN. The people who make up the IPCC are scientists, not politicians. They are not paid for their participation in the panel, which requires a lot of time and effort.

I think politics extends to science in less obvious ways than simple pay. What is likely is that the scientists on the IPCC are enthusiastic supporters of the global warming cause (i.e., the kind of people being exposed in the recent scandal) or they are protecting grants to their research by advocating global warming.

All of the IPCC's conclusions can be checked against climate data and papers published by research institutions all over the world. The IPCC publishes no research of their own, but only summarizes research that is already available. That is all it is. If anything, the nature of the IPCC has made it a conservative body that lags several years behind the latest findings. I routinely read things like, "this newly understood feedback mechanism wasn't included in models upon which the IPCC based their forecasts."

Maybe you're right, but it seems like it would be easy to pick and choose which research to summarize.

[tcaudilllg]

It'd be great if we all spoke the same language. Really, it would.

I think people need to get together about teaching some language as a second language in every country. This would eliminate the need for language specialists, and generally make cooperation between scientists easier.

Rick, you speak from a position of ignorance. I know how they do that stuff and no, those numbers were not fudged. I recommend that you either get the necessary education, or not comment at all.

Yeah I agree electric sheep, that guy has become the laughing stock of the entire scientific community. Nor will the laughter ever stop, I don't think.

[misutii]

The likelihood that humans are both the primary cause of climate change, and that, if so, humans can actually do anything significant to combat it is so improbably low as to be a waste of time.

Human pollution, on the other hand, in all of its increasing forms is a very real and tangible issue. An issue that affects everyone and everything else. Whether it be air, water, over fishing, or as it is already now - human beings themselves being the very essence of pollution due to poisonous chemicals unleased by their literal shit, flushed away into oceans with mercury and plastic that hermaphrodizes (new word) frogs and likely even humans themselves...

Carbon dioxide itself is by no means a threat to the planet at this point in time. It aids plant life. The residues and other toxic matter emitted by things that currently emit significant amounts of co2, however, is what we ought to be worrying about, amongst other things.

[discojoe]

I thought that plants adapted increases in carbon levels by growing much larger and absorbing more.

[tcaudilllg]

The problem with this carbon dioxide is that it's going into the atmosphere, where the plants can't reach it. (actually I don't know why that is... can anyone explain?)

The main thing that it seems we need to do now, aside from stopping the polution, is to calculate which areas are going to be flooded as the polar icecaps melt, and move people out beforehand.

[marooned]

Plants can't turn into anything outside of what their genome allows though... A spruce tree can't just grow twice its height all of a sudden because it detects more CO2 in the atmosphere... there are limits to how big plants can get and in order to change those limits, plants have to evolve... and evolution takes a very long time, an eternity compared to the 100+ years that industrialized society has been polluting... most non-microscopic life forms just can't keep up with us... evolution is the long, slow way. We take the fast way because we tried to make ourselves "unnatural" and we adapted to the extent that we don't have to be at the mercy of evolution in order to survive. Anyway I don't actually know anything about how plants adapt to pollution (only that there would be limits). I'm sure that during the time of the dinosaurs everything was a lot bigger and there probably was a lot more CO2 in the atmosphere... the point isn't so much how much there is (though it can be, but there has been more of it in the past) but how fast it's increasing. Plants during the time of the dinosaurs had a long time to evolve with the changing conditions on Earth. Plants now have about two seconds to adapt and they can't do it fast enough. Not to mention, we're so hell-bent on killing all of them that it doesn't really even matter. This is largely my opinion but I don't think it's a misinformed one. What I don't know is to what extent humans are impacting the climate... I would just have to do a lot of research to see what I think about that and then I think that I might as well wait as science will discover a whole lot more in the next five years thereby saving me a lot of time... so for the time being I'm trying to concentrate on "reducing my footprint" or whatever they call it because it certainly can't hurt anything, and I think that I need to start working on being less wasteful now because I don't know what's going to happen when we run out of oil... and it could be that things will change in a way that means I can't be quite as much of a domesticated human as I'm used to being (and have been my entire life). Not to mention... I'm not sure things like spruce trees really have that much influence... cyanobacteria probably has a lot more and I don't know what's happening with it or all the highly complex ins and outs of the global ecosystem.

I'm also not sure about CO2 going beyond the reach of plants? When I'm talking about "the atmosphere" I'm primarily referring to is the troposphere. Anyway I'm largely ignorant on whether or not the CO2 in the troposphere somehow ascends to the top beyond the reach of photosynthesis...

Anyway I'm sure everything will be fine as the earth has had major extinction events before and life of course sprung back up, though differently, afterward. It's not necessarily that the Earth or life on Earth is in danger because of us even if we are responsible for most of the problems (e.g. loss of ecological diversity, increased global temperatures, so on) but more that life as we know it, is. There are of course alarmists who think it's already too late and that we can actually send the Earth spiraling into a runaway greenhouse effect that will kill all life and future potential for life on our planet (that this has already begun and it's too late to turn it around)... and I don't know enough to know if they're right (they may not even know enough to know if they're right). I guess I'm falling into the 'better safe than sorry' camp, as aside from my own lifetime I really do care about future generations because I think the human race is awesome (though there are a lot of other species that I think are also awesome that I really don't want to die out because when they're gone, we can never get them back, it's a waste). And that's the other point: we're wasteful, we squander things... and in a way we're still innocent as every species would do the same in our place most likely... but I think that maybe we need to learn how to be something different... or at least I do.