I believe that this is only true if we assume that the problems you've stated are completely independent from the economic benefits of a large-scale restructuring of our energy system.

I think it's hard to say that those issues compete with renewable energy for funding. If we consider two initiatives Project "A" and Project "B".

"A" being funded does not imply that in "A"'s absence, "B" would receive that funding.

This may be the case for several reasons:
1) "B" may be more difficult to solve, creating a problem of diminishing returns (You can't necessarily just throw money at a problem).

2) Fundraising for "B" may be more difficult.

3) Finally, "B" may also have costs which are related to "A". (Since Energy volatility/cost percolates through to the price of everything)

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Tactics yes, Tact no...

This is a particularly pertinent point in the climate change debate because the alternatives mentioned are always helping the poor, funding adaptation, education and the like. It makes me think the arguments are aimed rather carefully at liberals and moderates, because the people usually making them are the kind of conservatives who wouldn't support such spending for a minute.

I recall the argument made by Bjorn Lomborg about $50 billion spent annually on fending off climate change leading to a worse outcome than $50 billion spent annually improving the economic conditions of the world's poor in places like Africa and South Asia, where the harm from climate change is most likely to be keenly felt. The additional economic growth and the additional personal protection and empowerment that ordinary people would get from being better off and heading toward middle class status would far outstrip, by his calculation, the harm they would suffer from serious but gradual climate change of the kind he believes we are in for.

It is a powerful and interesting argument and one well worth serious consideration. What's missing, though, is any effort by anybody on the "let's not address GW" side to _actually_ spend $50 billion improving anybody's economic conditions. All they seem to want to do is spend a bit of time on the thought experiment about which is better. Actually spending it? No. If someone put forward a proposal that "look ... back off on the carbon tax thing ... we'll put serious billions into alleviating poverty worldwide," I'd pause. I'd be awfully tempted. The offer just hasn't quite come in yet.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtevF4B4RtQ

If this documentary is totally fake, or the awful truth is totally fake, I cant tell the difference. Thats why i say i dont really know what is going on- and i think most of us dont know. If we find 2 scientist claiming otherwise, as a commoner, the onyl decision we can make is on faith.
As a skeptical I look at what is certain, and there are participants that have vested interests. I believe that the highest climate study lab, if it found themselves undisputable evidence that global warming is not man-made, might be tempted to hide it.
Even more, because of that scenario , i wouldnt be surprised if they didnt look at anything at all that could disproof the model, becuase its detrimental to its institution. I dont know if this is happening, but I dont see why it couldnt happen.

Climate is not one of those thigns you can say the scientific community gets just right. We sent people to the moon decades ago, but still cant tell if its going to rain tomorrow or how much is going to rain next year.

Im not saying there is no climate change, or global warming. Im saying i dont know and from that position, the "pushing" of indiscriminate priority into this subject doesnt feel appropiate, specially on light of other subjects.

You seem to claim that it is impossible to know, but anyone can read the papers or even process the data for themselves.

Papers are simply terrible at even summarise an accurate account of scientific data. They are simply very unreliable sources of scientific information.

Processing the data is possible, but in most cases unlikely (I haven't looked for the source data for much climate change research, but generally you get the published papers, not the data behind it).

Without actually being involved to some degree in the research itself, it is actually quite hard to be reliably informed.

For me, climate change is irrelevant. Is it disastrous if it exists (which it probably does)? Sure. But it's little more than a symptom. A symptom of (industrial) civilization, namely. Civilization does a bunch of other nasty things like the concrete, see-with-your-own-eyes style destruction of the environment and making people elsewhere suffer in more ways than we can count. It just so happens that the cures to these problems would help against global warming.


So, problems?

First big one is agriculture. Sedentary agriculture itself is fundamentally a destructive activity - wonder why most civilizations have left behind them little but desert? Fossil fuels, tractors, pesticides just make the problem worse. They compact the soil, further erosion, cause CCD and other fun stuff.

Without oil, civilization has always been founded on slavery, because the cities need their food, and without oil, the densely-packed sedentary agriculture needed to feed them is a bad bet for the individual: It's a lot of work and high densities of people and animals lead to epidemic disease. Plus, it is legible to the state. This means taxes. Furthermore, agriculture has a tendency to destroy ecosystems and turn them into desert and lots of hungry people. Cue expansion.

The written history is written by the state. Naturally, it speaks of one-direction advancement of people turning into agriculturalists and fostering a better and better state. The people outside the state - the barbarians - are naturally stigmatized. It serves the state to keep people in fear and to believe there is only misery outside. Yet, throughout history, turning "back" into swiddening and foraging and the like - walking away from the state - has been a constant phenomenon. I mean, less work, better diet, less risk of disease, no taxes, the freedom to govern yourself, or at least be governed only by a chief you know and can just go and speak your mind to. Why the hell wouldn't you?

Meanwhile, the civilized have fostered a narrative of their own superiority and entitlement to take stuff and convert others to civilization - naturally, it's the best way to live, so it must be correct. The need for expansion, the entitlement and belief in their own superiority, the concentrated military power, the faiths they adopt that are not born from a place but rather disconnected from it, transportable. All conspire to create something akin to a cancer of the mind. A way of living that is consuming and lacks checks to stall it's growth.

In eras of lower technology, the difficulties of terrain and distance limits to taxation (transporting grain past 500km or so on oxcarts ceases to be profitable), there used to be certain limits. Industrialization has removed much of these, is eliminating the space for noncivilized people to live (it's easy to talk of progress and the unacceptability of things when it is always someone else than the decisionmaker paying the costs), and essentially turned the cancer of civilization into something metastatic.


So, barring a technological miracle, there will eventually be much less people on this planet. I consider that to be a fact of life, however unpleasant it is. The question is, will that fall in population numbers be a graceful one of less people being born, or something ugly? It will be ugly.
Ask yourself, will the powerful politician or businessman willingly give up his power? No, he doesn't. And even if he does, the power is in the position, and he will simply be replaced. If they feel their control slipping away, they will turn to totalitarianism and the police state to steady their failing grip. This is already happening in the US and in the EU. They matter. You don't. They don't care, they won't care.
Will the TV-dumbed worker give up his TV and his SUV? No. Chances are, he will not.
What about the sick fuck shooting animals with weapons so they explode in showers of blood just for the hell of it? I don't think so.
What about the poor? They have no land. The same system that immiserates them is also where they get their food. They are chronically dependent on civilization in the short term.

Besides, it's none of their fault. The whole system is based on inculcating people from responsibility. The ordinary folks are just doing their jobs. The businessmen are just doing what the shareholders demand. The shareholders? They don't make any decisions. No responsibility to pin anywhere. No accountability. The system has ceased to serve us, we serve it. And it has a death wish.

It is amazing how so many ppl actually think not using fossel fuel will help man kind.
having average temperature of 1 degree higher will not cause any catastrophy.
IMO it will only benefit man kind by raising temperature.

_________________
"The more we think we know about
The greater the unknown"
Words by neil peart, music by geddy lee and alex lifeson

Whether or not it helps is quite irrelevant. What is relevant is that basically everything in our society runs on oil or is made from it. And the production is stalling. In a culture predicated on endless growth like ours, that is nothing short of disaster. The oil will run out eventually or it's extraction will become unfeasible. At that point, we have to live without it. It just so happens civilization is in the process of destroying our means of doing so. Little else to it.

Fossil fuels will run out eventually. What do you think will happen if the fossil fuels run out and we haven't come up with an alternative? Switching to a clean and renewable power source as soon as we can is quite obviously the proper thing to do.



Yes, it will. See how easy it is to make baseless claims?



Again, do you have any basis for this belief? Science predicts the opposite.

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Poka King of the south east.

A couple of comments about man made global warming. First, on the you tube page there was a link to a brief video by Sir David Attenborough ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9ob9WdbXx0 ), which argues for man made global warming since the latter half of the 20th century. That video illustrates my previous point about statistics. Statistics proves nothing. There is, no doubt, evidence for man made global warming, but evidence is not proof. (Besides, only a few decades does not provide much evidence.)

The video above, entitled The great global warming swindle, is, as its title indicates, obviously biased. However, I believe that the experts quoted in it are sincere. But they are nearly all careful to say that they do not believe in man made global warming. To a rhetorician that is a dead giveaway, implying that they do believe in global warming, or do not disbelieve in it, and that is the reason that they qualify their remarks. Otherwise, they would not hedge.

Moi, I think that whether global warming is man made or not matters little. Should New York City, for instance, in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, beef up its defenses against storm surges and its protection against flooding of its subway system? Surely the answer to that question does not depend upon whether or not Sandy was caused in part by human activity.

_________________
The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

Hahaha, yeah this is really wrong. Sorry. Check this out:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer

Snow was falling in June, tons of crops got destroyed. How much did the temperature deviate from average?

"climate abnormalities caused average global temperatures to decrease by 0.4–0.7 °C (0.7–1.3 °F)"

1° WORLDWIDE average can really screw stuff up.

I'm saving this quote.

I'm not sure if I believe it, I think there are opportunities to shift people and I'm still optimistic. But points for style.

EDIT: Although this is the reason why "Smaller government" comments really irk me. Admittedly, the size of the government must be kept under control, so that it never becomes fascistic, but the government is the only entity in the whole damn mess which takes responsibility/metes out responsibility.

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Tactics yes, Tact no...

Modern government laughs at any meaningful definition of responsibility. Someone gets laid off, so sad, he got a nice job at a big corp. And they sure aren't accountable to the people. The police's core function is to serve and protect the rich. They do a whole bunch of nice and hideous stuff on the side, but that's the core function of law and order since time immemorial.

Small state, if by that one means a more libertarian-minded one, could actually be really helpful in some ways. A key thing in that would be the end to eminent domain - small landowners could no longer be driven from their land in favour of huge gas pipelines, permaculturists and other small farmers would have more freedom of action. People could perhaps be unplugged from the Matrix of civilization by showing the industrial cogs-in-a-machine what real life is once more. The real danger of the "wild" people has, throughout history, been that their way of life is addictive.
It might also help to transfer the fight to a local scale. Local battles, real or figurative, can be won. On a local level, you're dealing with people instead of machines constructed of people.

But as a final solution? It is still a state. It is still civilization. In other words, it is still the core problem.


EDIT: Funny tidbit about the fascim. We're already in one, whether European or American. Hitler's eugenics were kind of beside the point. If you listen to Mussolini:


-= Admin =- Gentlemen, if we could please get back on track and stay away from politics, it would be much appreciated as politics is not allowed in this forum.

I got about half-way through this before giving up because it annoyed me too much. It is unfortunately just a propaganda piece as well. I think if you cut out about half of the material you would get a summary of a credible skeptical position, but it makes several statements that are obviously untrue, and easily verified - for example the temperature graph they show looks about right from 1910, but there's a vastly exaggerated rise of temperature from 1850 that's not in any data set I'm aware of. The sad thing is that I think the rise from 1910 to 1940 is a valid question for climate science which I've never seen answered, so why exaggerate it.

So unfortunately this demonstrates that you can't just believe people, on either side, you have to go check for yourself as much as possible.

I am INCREDIBLY skeptical of anyone who tries to pretend that a graph that doesn't have labeled axis's is data.
Never mind the fact that the graphs they show aren't labeled with a source.

I have no idea where this thread is at because i didnt read anything but the title. All I have to say about climate change is this:

Welcome to Upstate NY. 9F.

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Decisions are made by those who show up.
and possibly those willing to attend secret meetings in ancient basements

The implication would seem to be that half an inch of snow in Upstate New York in January is such an incredible deviation from the standard in the direction of being colder that it completely disproves the assertion that the global climate could be changing. Obviously, your argument could use some work.

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Tactics yes, Tact no...

He said climate change, not global warming. So it actually supports the claim that climate is chaning - but I can see how a picture of snow triggered your response in a thread about global warming.

Hmmm. When I lived in New England more than 40 years ago, snow in January was a given. How times (and climate) change!

_________________
The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.