I'm gonna go with the 'Doc Brown' future
"Your future hasn't been written yet! No one's has. So make it a good one, both of you"
Possible Futures
- Thread starter EmoBorg
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I'm gonna go with the 'Doc Brown' future
"Your future hasn't been written yet! No one's has. So make it a good one, both of you"
None of the above.
Over the next century or two the expense of critical resources will continue to rise. Mobility and standards of living for the vast majority of the world's population will slowly decline. Civil unrest and labor-related violence will become common in the parts of the world that are now pretty stable and prosperous, like the United States. As a result of all of this the effective authority of national governments will diminish. The death tolls from war and disease will surpass those of the last two centuries, and well before the supposed era of Star Trek the world will look a great deal more like it did in 1850 than in 2000 - except that some wealthy people will have shit like iPads.
Over the next century or two the expense of critical resources will continue to rise. Mobility and standards of living for the vast majority of the world's population will slowly decline. Civil unrest and labor-related violence will become common in the parts of the world that are now pretty stable and prosperous, like the United States. As a result of all of this the effective authority of national governments will diminish. The death tolls from war and disease will surpass those of the last two centuries, and well before the supposed era of Star Trek the world will look a great deal more like it did in 1850 than in 2000 - except that some wealthy people will have shit like iPads.
Nope, climatology it is a natural science and denying its implications is like claiming that the world is flat or that chimpanzees are not our distant cousins, i.e. plain ignorant, an adjective one is forced to used quite often when dealing with right-wingers.
I'm sure all the skeptical climatologists like Judith Curry, Roy Spencer, John Christy, Tim Ball, and Richard Lindzen will be shocked to know that.
Skepticism about CAGW isn't like denying that chimps are our distant cousins, it's like denying that chimps will soon learn to talk, then take over the planet with the help of gorillas and orangutangs.
We've been in a cooling cycle since at least 158 BC, with temperatures dropping at 0.3C per millenia. Recently we were going through the grand solar maximum, with the sun possibly the hottest it's been in a thousand years. The sun is now entering a deep dormant cycle that will last until about 2040 (according to the Max Planck institute for Solar Physics), and we've already gone 15 years with no statistical increase in warming. All the CAGW climate models are based on positive cloud feedbacks, but multiple ways to measure feedbacks keep coming up with negative feedbacks, as would be expected for a system that shows long-term stability. Using the range of more accurate negative feedbacks, and ignoring the sun's diminished output, would still only give us about a 1C warming, not a 3-5C warming.
Roy Spencer believes in intelligent design. So much about how scientific the corporate money infused right-wing climate change deniers actually are.
On the economic side the issue is incredibly simple.
If we err on the side of overreacting and tax CO2 while the Earth does not heat up at all the worst that could happen is a slight misallocation of resources because the tax mix (you obviously reduce taxes on labour and capital if you tax CO2) is not optimal. Fairly esoterical and wonkish economic stuff.
If we err on the side of underreacting the costs eat will eat up around 1-10% of annual GDP, not to mention non-economic stuff like migration which causes wars and so on.
On the economic side the issue is incredibly simple.
If we err on the side of overreacting and tax CO2 while the Earth does not heat up at all the worst that could happen is a slight misallocation of resources because the tax mix (you obviously reduce taxes on labour and capital if you tax CO2) is not optimal. Fairly esoterical and wonkish economic stuff.
If we err on the side of underreacting the costs eat will eat up around 1-10% of annual GDP, not to mention non-economic stuff like migration which causes wars and so on.
And Isaac Newton penned an entire book on the prophecies of Daniel and devoted much of his life to alchemy, so Newtonian physics is obvious idiocy...
Note that you attack their funding, their religious beliefs, and cast aspersions about their motives, which is a way a religious fanatic discredits infidels, not the way scientists debate a conjecture.
BTW, the believers get a couple orders of magnitude more corporate funding than the skeptics - as confirmed by all the various document leaks.
Meanwhile the believers delete raw data, make up data points, tweak fudge factors in their models till the output looks like what they want, choose their own reviewers, try to get journals shut down and editors fired, blacklist fellow scientists, engage in actionable fraud and identity theft, and engage in scientific misconduct the likes of which has rarely been seen.
There have been many economic studies comparing the costs of halting CO2 with adjusting for the affects, and adapting is so staggeringly cheaper that it boggles the mind. For example, Australia is set to do massive damage to its economy in an attempt to lower the projected 2020 temperature by 0.00006 degrees C. If we take Australia's program as the model, the cost of mitigating a full 1C is $2.0 quadrillion.
The UK's officially estimated costs for their 80% emission reduction by 2050 is $1.2 trillion US, expected to reduce temperatures by 0.006 C., which is $138 trillion/degree C.
California's carbon trading comes in at $1,150 trillion/degree C.
In most cases the cost of stopping the warming is 20 to 100 times more expensive than adapting, and of course those costs are based on the assumption that the warming will be a bad thing, which as I've said is pretty freaking illogical, requiring us to have been living at the absolute optimal climate by pure coincidence, which is a very old and discredited fallacy stemming right from the belief in the perfection of God's creation.
Note that you attack their funding, their religious beliefs, and cast aspersions about their motives, which is a way a religious fanatic discredits infidels, not the way scientists debate a conjecture.
BTW, the believers get a couple orders of magnitude more corporate funding than the skeptics - as confirmed by all the various document leaks.
Meanwhile the believers delete raw data, make up data points, tweak fudge factors in their models till the output looks like what they want, choose their own reviewers, try to get journals shut down and editors fired, blacklist fellow scientists, engage in actionable fraud and identity theft, and engage in scientific misconduct the likes of which has rarely been seen.
There have been many economic studies comparing the costs of halting CO2 with adjusting for the affects, and adapting is so staggeringly cheaper that it boggles the mind. For example, Australia is set to do massive damage to its economy in an attempt to lower the projected 2020 temperature by 0.00006 degrees C. If we take Australia's program as the model, the cost of mitigating a full 1C is $2.0 quadrillion.
The UK's officially estimated costs for their 80% emission reduction by 2050 is $1.2 trillion US, expected to reduce temperatures by 0.006 C., which is $138 trillion/degree C.
California's carbon trading comes in at $1,150 trillion/degree C.
In most cases the cost of stopping the warming is 20 to 100 times more expensive than adapting, and of course those costs are based on the assumption that the warming will be a bad thing, which as I've said is pretty freaking illogical, requiring us to have been living at the absolute optimal climate by pure coincidence, which is a very old and discredited fallacy stemming right from the belief in the perfection of God's creation.
Intelligent design is not religion but mistaking religion for science. You also see the inverse on the others side of the pond with guys like Dawkins who think that they can speak scientifically about religion.
You do something similar via pretending that there is a wrong, religious climatology which consists of believers and a proper climatology which consists of skeptics. In the real world it is the other way around and a matter of independent vs. corporately-financed-and-thus-corrupted science.
About economics, I am an economist and I know no serious guy in the discipline who doesn't view climate change as the most serious negative externality, not even right-leaning economists like Mankiw. Of course there are plenty of whores who work for Cato or other corporate think tanks but they hardly qualify as serious.
You do something similar via pretending that there is a wrong, religious climatology which consists of believers and a proper climatology which consists of skeptics. In the real world it is the other way around and a matter of independent vs. corporately-financed-and-thus-corrupted science.
About economics, I am an economist and I know no serious guy in the discipline who doesn't view climate change as the most serious negative externality, not even right-leaning economists like Mankiw. Of course there are plenty of whores who work for Cato or other corporate think tanks but they hardly qualify as serious.
But 99% of the corporate financing is going to the believers side of the debate. Peter Gleick pulls a scam on the Heartland Institute, the leading funder of skeptics, and all he came up with was several thousand dollars so Anthony Watts could set up a server to provide TV meteorologists with better tracking of high and low temperature records from the US databases. Meanwhile oil companies have shoveled over one billion dollars to believers, and if you add in government grants, the number shoots into the tens of billions. So who is corrupt? Who acts corrupt based on all the chicanery and fraud that keeps leaking out?
The corporate funding nonsense would be hysterical if so many people didn't believe it. They're like Baptists seeing Satan behind every rock. Even though nobody can produce any evidence of these nefarious activities, even when committing identity theft to procure internal documents, and even while the believers rake in a billion from big oil, all the nuts still believe it.
They believe it because they're convinced they're saving the world (one of the most dangerous beliefs imaginable, which drove the Nazis, the Communists, the Christian Inquisition, and Islamist extremists) and they therefore imagine that those opposed to their crazy schemes must be driven by either capitalist greed or Satan.
In any event, ask some economists to produce the chart that compares world GDP to yearly global average temperatures. Since the yeary global temperature bounces around with a large variation, and since even a slight warming is claimed to be economically devastating, the hot versus cool years should show a strong correlation to huge annual swings in GDP.
But both we and they know the data won't show anything remotely like that, and in fact will show, if anything, somewhat the opposite. Warm years produce higher yields. The recent Texas drought was caused by La Nina, ocean cooling, not El Nino. The rise in global beer prices was caused by a very cold, wet year in Europe that sent barley prices soaring. Global warming is inversely related to extreme weather and hurricane activity.
If you want to dig into details going back to the beginnings of sun spot observation and wheat prices, try here:
http://arxiv.org/ftp/astro-ph/papers/0312/0312244.pdf
Warmer is economically better, with a 98.8% certainty in this study. Yet the alarmists claim otherwise despite evidence, reason, and logic. I argue that they do so because they can't conceive of a universe where the consequences of indulgence are beneficial, instead of a painful punishment for sin, because that universe would violate their sense of moral order and religious sensibilities. If they believe we must live in harmony with nature, how could selfishly upsetting that harmony produce anything but disaster? They're thinking like primitive, superstitious monkeys, not scientists.
And finally, if the claimed economic damage of higher temperatures was real, global GDP should've been decreasing steadily since the early 1980's. That's very much not what's happening. The planet refuses to obey their juvenile notions, and they continually have to change the facts (the 1940's have dropped by as much as 8 degrees in some areas near the arctic, and 1 to 3 degrees in most places), the standards of evidence, and the storyline. All data and ideas must fall to their conviction that they're saving the planet.
The corporate funding nonsense would be hysterical if so many people didn't believe it. They're like Baptists seeing Satan behind every rock. Even though nobody can produce any evidence of these nefarious activities, even when committing identity theft to procure internal documents, and even while the believers rake in a billion from big oil, all the nuts still believe it.
They believe it because they're convinced they're saving the world (one of the most dangerous beliefs imaginable, which drove the Nazis, the Communists, the Christian Inquisition, and Islamist extremists) and they therefore imagine that those opposed to their crazy schemes must be driven by either capitalist greed or Satan.
In any event, ask some economists to produce the chart that compares world GDP to yearly global average temperatures. Since the yeary global temperature bounces around with a large variation, and since even a slight warming is claimed to be economically devastating, the hot versus cool years should show a strong correlation to huge annual swings in GDP.
But both we and they know the data won't show anything remotely like that, and in fact will show, if anything, somewhat the opposite. Warm years produce higher yields. The recent Texas drought was caused by La Nina, ocean cooling, not El Nino. The rise in global beer prices was caused by a very cold, wet year in Europe that sent barley prices soaring. Global warming is inversely related to extreme weather and hurricane activity.
If you want to dig into details going back to the beginnings of sun spot observation and wheat prices, try here:
http://arxiv.org/ftp/astro-ph/papers/0312/0312244.pdf
Warmer is economically better, with a 98.8% certainty in this study. Yet the alarmists claim otherwise despite evidence, reason, and logic. I argue that they do so because they can't conceive of a universe where the consequences of indulgence are beneficial, instead of a painful punishment for sin, because that universe would violate their sense of moral order and religious sensibilities. If they believe we must live in harmony with nature, how could selfishly upsetting that harmony produce anything but disaster? They're thinking like primitive, superstitious monkeys, not scientists.
And finally, if the claimed economic damage of higher temperatures was real, global GDP should've been decreasing steadily since the early 1980's. That's very much not what's happening. The planet refuses to obey their juvenile notions, and they continually have to change the facts (the 1940's have dropped by as much as 8 degrees in some areas near the arctic, and 1 to 3 degrees in most places), the standards of evidence, and the storyline. All data and ideas must fall to their conviction that they're saving the planet.
If one inverts everything you say the result is not too far off the truth. Have a great time in the mirror universe and tell us when you decide to travel to ours.
Ah, so you live in the one where Alabama spends more to deal with the weather than New York or New Jersey, where Mexico has to spend more on infrastructure and home heating than the US, where Greenland grows more food than Mississippi.
Well, even in that world you can check oil company donations, and even in that world all their money goes to alarmists - in part because they need to look concerned with the environment, and in part because oil companies stand to make a fortune off the scam. Oil companies produce both oil and natural gas, and the only competitor to natural gas for power generation is coal.
If they want to make money, the oil companies need to sideline the coal plants, and the best way to do that is politically, because doing it in the marketplace means they have to let gas prices drop to very low levels, which destroys their profit margins. Kenneth Lay of Enron was the biggest backer of SO2 emissions and then CO2 emissions, because his giant natural gas network was in direct competition with coal. If not for his lobbying efforts, the 1990 Clean Air Act probably would've stalled.
And oil companies can make even more money by supplying pricier alternatives. The Koch brothers, for example, can supply about 10% of US ethanol. Oil billionaire T Boone Pickens is the biggest backer of wind farms. Wind farms require natural gas backups, and Pickens happens to supply both the backups and the natural gas to run them.
If you place artificial restrictions on the supply of oil and gas, given that demand is relatively constant, the supply/demand curve says what? Higher prices for the same product, and the higher price is pure profit.
By the way, can you name the companies that were the largest investors in silicon solar cells, going back to the 1960's? I'll give you a hint. Their names are on your local gas stations (Exxon being the largest investor), because oil companies needed a better method of powering remote offshore buoys. Most of the gains in solar cell performance came from oil companies. They're major players.
Looking at their bottom line is why they gave a billion to alarmists, and why you can go through the finances of all the leading skeptics and not find any of this mythical oil money. Anthony Watts, who runs the leading skeptic blog, has to support the site with ads for face cream and T-shirts. If the oil industry was really shoveling millions of dollars to skeptics, as the most prominent skeptic, Watts would have his own fleet of private jets and several mansions. Instead he might have gotten a coffee mug. Al Gore, on the other hand, does have a bunch of mansions and is always flying around the world on private jets. He also makes money from oil and gas investments. He probably sold his millions in coal company stocks (his father used to be a lawyer for one of the largest coal companies).
Econ 101 failure.
If you tax something both producers and consumers bear the costs. Quantitatively the side with the relatively smaller price elasticity (that's how sensitive quantity is to price changes) bears the larger part of the costs. In the extreme case which you described demand is totally price inelastic and thus bears all the costs yet there are no gains to the supply side.
I like your tales from the mirror universe where companies lobby to have their products taxed. Carry on.
Comprehension failure. Taxes are not the mechanism being used (those attempts failed abysmally in the Senate), restrictions on supply are, along with moves to eliminate coal's competition to the oil and gas industry.
Econ 101 failure continues.
If you translate artificial restrictions of any kind, e.g. labour market regulations or drug illegalization, into economics it is usually done via a tax.
In the real world there are not supply restrictions, everybody wants more fossil fuels. Climate change actually implies CO2 taxation which implies less profits which makes the fossil fuel industry spend a lot of money on climate change denial propaganda which you have obviously consumed in raw amounts.
Anyway, I am done with this nonsense about big business spending money to actually propagate climate change. It is a pointless as arguing with somebody who believes that the world is flat, the only difference being that these are harmless fools whereas fact-denying, lying right-wingers are dangerous.
If you translate artificial restrictions of any kind, e.g. labour market regulations or drug illegalization, into economics it is usually done via a tax.
In the real world there are not supply restrictions, everybody wants more fossil fuels. Climate change actually implies CO2 taxation which implies less profits which makes the fossil fuel industry spend a lot of money on climate change denial propaganda which you have obviously consumed in raw amounts.
Anyway, I am done with this nonsense about big business spending money to actually propagate climate change. It is a pointless as arguing with somebody who believes that the world is flat, the only difference being that these are harmless fools whereas fact-denying, lying right-wingers are dangerous.
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To refute your point...
http://articles.cnn.com/2005-06-17/...ification-dust-storms-big-deserts?_s=PM:WORLD
http://www.answerbag.com/q_view/19972
[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghBE_abOGmM[/yt]
[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mUhtFe2ApE&feature=related[/yt]
Please show some evidence to support the fanciful world you envision..
http://articles.cnn.com/2005-06-17/...ification-dust-storms-big-deserts?_s=PM:WORLD
http://www.answerbag.com/q_view/19972
[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghBE_abOGmM[/yt]
[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mUhtFe2ApE&feature=related[/yt]
Please show some evidence to support the fanciful world you envision..
As with all climate alarmists "Don't cite any evidence!!! Don't confuse me with actual facts!" It's like trying to tell a Baptist that Jesus drank alcohol. They're going to scream about Satan.
The lobbying is on the public record. Ken Lay was one of the many people doing it. BP and Shell spend millions touting their green programs. BP even changed their freakin' logo and branded itself a green energy company. Those are facts to those who aren't busy gouging their eyes out to stay in a happy little cocoon where they're saving the world against evil oil companies, desperatly pretending that oil companies would be insane not to push the agenda of high energy prices.
Artificial restrictions in the energy sector are not being done with a tax. They're being done through the permitting process, additional and very expensive requirements on coal plants (Obama proudly said he wanted to shut them down), and so on.
The vast difference between an industry-wide tax and permit restrictions is that restrictions are handled on a case-by-case basis. Oil industry lobbyists are in bed with regulators (literally, as in banging each other in hotel rooms, which got quite a few people fired), to make sure that the only projects that get halted are ones their competitors are pursuing.
Most of the attacks on the coal industry (and believe me, the Kentucky press pays a lot of attention to those) are coming from oil and gas company donations to environmental groups. The oil companies don't even make a secret about it, (how can they have bad press from donating to environmentalists?) and then tout the advantages of clean natural gas over dirty coal. Sure enough, the EPA is trying to set a CO2/kW limit for powerplants that coal can't meet but natural gas can.
Yep. "Saaaaataaannnn!!!!!"
And you people claim it's not a bizarro religion.
The lobbying is on the public record. Ken Lay was one of the many people doing it. BP and Shell spend millions touting their green programs. BP even changed their freakin' logo and branded itself a green energy company. Those are facts to those who aren't busy gouging their eyes out to stay in a happy little cocoon where they're saving the world against evil oil companies, desperatly pretending that oil companies would be insane not to push the agenda of high energy prices.
Artificial restrictions in the energy sector are not being done with a tax. They're being done through the permitting process, additional and very expensive requirements on coal plants (Obama proudly said he wanted to shut them down), and so on.
The vast difference between an industry-wide tax and permit restrictions is that restrictions are handled on a case-by-case basis. Oil industry lobbyists are in bed with regulators (literally, as in banging each other in hotel rooms, which got quite a few people fired), to make sure that the only projects that get halted are ones their competitors are pursuing.
Most of the attacks on the coal industry (and believe me, the Kentucky press pays a lot of attention to those) are coming from oil and gas company donations to environmental groups. The oil companies don't even make a secret about it, (how can they have bad press from donating to environmentalists?) and then tout the advantages of clean natural gas over dirty coal. Sure enough, the EPA is trying to set a CO2/kW limit for powerplants that coal can't meet but natural gas can.
Yep. "Saaaaataaannnn!!!!!"
And you people claim it's not a bizarro religion.
You confuse the propaganda you picked from your intelligent design "scientists", FOX News and right-wing conspiracy sites with evidence and all the restrictions you mentioned are the economic equivalent of a tax. You are still in dire need of reading an economics textbook.
Not that common sense wouldn't suffice to understand why a seller of a particular product (doesn't have to be oil, you can take any good including inputs like labour or capital) neither wants taxes or regulation on this very product.
Cherishing facts and having problems with big lies being spread and believed in has nothing to do with religion. It is actually the very opposite of it. In the hypothetical future of Trek you wouldn't be able to serve in Starfleet.
Not that common sense wouldn't suffice to understand why a seller of a particular product (doesn't have to be oil, you can take any good including inputs like labour or capital) neither wants taxes or regulation on this very product.
Cherishing facts and having problems with big lies being spread and believed in has nothing to do with religion. It is actually the very opposite of it. In the hypothetical future of Trek you wouldn't be able to serve in Starfleet.
From NASA, Goddard:
http://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?R=19990097314
Despite all the bouncing around year-to-year, the Sahara shrunk 13% over the ten years from 1984 to 1994, when the main global temperature step-change occured.
More recently:
http://www.eoearth.org/article/Greening_of_the_Sahel
The question isn't whether the Sahara is greening, it's why.
It would be nice not to have the entire topic sucked into the lightless singularity of playing table tennis against a single poster who's adopting an ignorant, Luddite position.
That's nowhere near a competently constructed metaphor, but you know what I mean.
That's nowhere near a competently constructed metaphor, but you know what I mean.
Well, I'm from Kentucky where our two main products are whiskey and tobacco. Want to know how much those industries care about having the highest tax rates and regulations of any consumer product? Not one little fig, except that the whiskey tax pushes college kids toward beer.
Our whiskey producers probably don't incur one dime of taxes that isn't passed directly to consumers, because all the distillers are taxed at the same rate, so the only effect is pushing the market towards higher end whiskeys because the price differential is artificially low (the rotgut sees a higher relative price increase than the barrel proof bourbon). And what do you know, all our rotgut distillers (like old blind grandma) started side labels, rebranding themselves as ultra-premiums. That's the effects of an across the board tax on the industry.
When it comes to inspections or bizarre regulations, each distiller is going to be trying to get the inspector drunk and have some secretary rip his pants off, because the result of each inspection affects only that distiller. If he wasn't a gentleman, he would also bad-mouth the other distillers and spread rumors about rats in their grain. All the oil lobbyists shagging EPA regulators and paying Greenpeace or WWF to protest a competitor's arctic drilling bid is the same thing, different industry.
Back to oil, take a look at the US versus Europe. Do you think Total Elf Fina, Shell, or BP are really taking a bath in the European market, essentially going broke because taxes raise the cost of gas to $7.00 a gallon, or are they rolling in money over there just as much as they are here?
If, like here, they're were only making 7.4 cents profit per gallon, and then they actually paid even just 10% of the $5.00 a gallon tax rate over there (since you claim economics dictates that they're paying a large share of the tax), they'd lose 43 cents on every gallon they sold. Is it a case of "We lose money on every sale, but we make it up in volume!"? No, they don't pay a penny of the tax, and since the tax is applied to all producers and the entire market, it doesn't matter to them.
But pushing the green agenda against the US and European coal industries, why that would be like our distillers lobbying for an increase in beer and wine taxes and a decrease in whiskey taxes. They do the fuck out of that.
As metaphors go, should I mention that Luddites are the ones who want to stop technological progress, industry, and energy production to maintain inefficient employment and make-work jobs? Some of us don't want to live in a wigwam powered by a toy windmill and drive a golf cart to a carbon-neutral gourd dipper factory.
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