President Obama

[Dante]

And the running around screaming that the sky is falling nonsense is laughable not to mention detrimental to the economy.  If there is just cause, we should move on it.  Otherwise, the wellbeing of the economy should come first.

Since when is the economy the be all and end all? It can and should suffer for the sake of something more important.

[chatfsh]

In case you haven

[Sneakgab]

(for the record I typed this during Hwi's post, having to refresh and post after as a result. Just so that it is known that it wasn't intended as a direct reply)

This reminds me of the recession. Is it impossible to make the bosses pay instead if necessary?

Can we take it out of their pockets and avoid/reduce/whatever global warming while maintaining the level of living for pretty much everyone (the lives of the uber rich will hardly be affected by them becoming merely very rich and everyone else will remain the same).

Of course to this, someone will surely propose that any attempt at such will harm the economy, negatively affecting everyone. I have nothing to say about the correctness of that and the possibility of the initial idea in this post.

[Dante]

Hwi: That suggests that the economy is terribly flawed already and could perhaps benefit from a few more shocks, so that something better can take its place. It's still less important than the planet on which it is based.

Sneakgab: What you're advocating is basically a massive resdistribution of wealth, which is one of the things that Edric and his ilk have been advocating for years.

[Andrew]

I doubt 6 billion people and 200 years of industrialization have any impact on warming/cooling trends. Only the solar system and natural factors affect global warming/cooling. So we can feel free to pollute as much as we want. In fact China is polluting itself real nice so Westerners can have nice cheap crap.

And once the Arctic ice melts, it can refreeze itself very easily, as the sun bounces off water more than ice.

/sarcasm

[chatfsh]

Hwi: That suggests that the economy is terribly flawed already and could perhaps benefit from a few more shocks, so that something better can take its place. It's still less important than the planet on which it is based.[c]

Abruptly breaking the present economic system will likely result in mass chaos and anarchy.  Governments will crumble and what will rise in there place?  Who said that it will necessarily be something better? We may someday look back on this time and remember it as the good old days.

[Dante]

At least we'd be able to look back at all.

[chatfsh]

Again with this doomsday mentality.  If we don

[Dante]

Not necessarily. But I believe that it's a risk worth taking.

[Sneakgab]

Well, even if global warming is natural, as long as it continues there will be payment of some kind (though, ''things may still go up'').

It is very simple:

A: We go out of our way (loss via pay up) and respond to global warming OR

B: We don't do anything and lose via global warming damage.

I suspect that with the correct research, we can employ efficient and eco-freindly means of production. However, there is no profit incentive for these things (or at least, none comes immediately to mind. Perhaps I should think about that). If there is no profit incentive, it basically cannot happen under pure capitalism. Government or people intervention is required.

Without any legislation and enforcement of said legislation to make eco-friendly routes more profitable, they will not be pursued.

In light of this, and the fact that damage will be done to the economy either way, in one generation or another, it seems a strong argument exists to at least pass the carbon trading legislation.

Personally, I have already said that carbon trading has been lauded as a scam so that the govt can say they're doing something without actually compromising capitalism or big business, so I have my doubts about the efficacy and significance of this legislation (though I don't know any details or anything really about it).

[Edric O]

Excuse me, but when did I ever indicate that I was hoping for an ice age? I'm merely indicating that there exists, at least for the present, a converse relationship between CO2 levels and global temperatures. That may change in the next year or next decade, but for now, the inverse relationship exists.

Come on, Hwi, you're grasping at straws. The relationship between CO2 levels and global temperatures shows an obvious positive trend, and there's no reason to believe that the current short-term situation isn't a brief blip like the other ones that happened before during the past century.

In case you haven

[chatfsh]

Come on, Hwi, you're grasping at straws. The relationship between CO2 levels and global temperatures shows an obvious positive trend, and there's no reason to believe that the current short-term situation isn't a brief blip like the other ones that happened before during the past century.

Hardly.  A positive relationship does not prove causation; there is no conclusive evidence that CO2 emissions are driving the increase in temperatures any more than it drove the rise in the Medieval Warm Period.  It makes far more sense that there are natural causes beyond our control that are influencing global temperature changes.

Yes, and given that the current economic system ensures the poor will periodically have to pay the same price for the misdeeds of the rich, breaking the economy completely (and the associated suffering) may be worth the cost if it results in the rise of a better system. IF...

That

[Dante]

Wait wait, let me guess Edric's reply.

1: Purging by bloodbath is not ideal, but if necessary then yes.

2: It might be a good thing should a violently right-wing government arise, as it would galvanise the workers/left/masses into rising up to overthrow them at last.

Huh, huh?

Anyway, while correlation does not prove causation, you could say that about just about anything.

"I turned the oven on, and it warmed up."

"Are you sure it didn't just warm up of its own accord at the same time as you turned the switch?"

[chatfsh]

Ah, but if that oven has a history of heating up without anyone turning the knob, you could no longer assume that turning the knob is the cause of the oven heating up.

[Dante]

How wonderful then that the Earth has never heated up this much this quickly. No precedent, as it were.

[chatfsh]

So the concern is with the speed at which the earth is heating up and not the temperature itself, because it has been this warm before, if not warmer.

[Edric O]

Hardly. A positive relationship does not prove causation; there is no conclusive evidence that CO2 emissions are driving the increase in temperatures any more than it drove the rise in the Medieval Warm Period. It makes far more sense that there are natural causes beyond our control that are influencing global temperature changes.

On the other hand, we can't really expect to significantly change the chemical composition of the atmosphere (which is what we are doing) with no effects at all. It would be odd if all our emissions didn't cause something.

And yes, correlation is not causation. To establish causation, you need a scientific theory to explain exactly how you can get from the supposed cause to the supposed effect. But wait... we have that for climate change. We know that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. We didn't just look at some graphs and say "hey, look, those things are increasing at the same time - maybe they're related somehow."

That

[Edric O]

Wait wait, let me guess Edric's reply.

1: Purging by bloodbath is not ideal, but if necessary then yes.

That's a very big IF. It had better be damn essential before I support it. And even then, many communists argue that if you use excessive violence - even if you were left no choice - the resulting post-revolutionary system is very likely to go badly wrong. To a certain extent, I agree with them. You can definitely see how the violence used in the Russian Civil War led to the creation of laws and institutions that were later responsible for the USSR ending up the way it did.

2: It might be a good thing should a violently right-wing government arise, as it would galvanise the workers/left/masses into rising up to overthrow them at last.

Hell no. That's what the German Communists thought when the Nazis came to power. "Hey, maybe it won't be so bad... these right-wing nuts are bound to get the workers angry, and then maybe the people will turn to us and a revolution will happen."

Yeah... that didn't go so well.

[Dante]

You know, even I'm not sure if I was being sarcastic.   :(

[Wolf]

I havn't read through everything--as there's been more activity in the past 24 hours than there has in the last 2 weeks--but I do want to take issue with Hwi's interpretation of the data trends that were posted here and there.

Sure, in the last 8-10 years, there has been a single decline in average surface temperatures. And there were single instances of decline between 1965 and 1970, 1945 and 1950, 1920 ad 1930, and so on. That isn't because the surface of the planet is "cooling," it's only because there's a wide variation in temperatures from year to year. In fact, every so often, it "declines" by a degree or two simply because there is that amount of background noise in the system. Moreover, notice how the graph jumps up and down by about the same amount per year over that span of 100 years--none of those individual jumps get any bigger, up or down. That means the temperate actually occurs within a specific range of possible temperatures every year, and it is the range itself that is increasing--getting hotter. Say there's a 3 degree temperature range, and in 2008, the average temperature were 75. If 2009 is 74, is the planet getting colder? No, because 2010's value could easily be 77. Edric and Dante are right that there's a trend, and the trend is for hotter weather.

*EDIT: And regarding Edric's

The fastest way to break the system would be by a general strike. If all the workers said to their bosses "you know what, we won't work for you any more," then capitalism would be defeated practically overnight, completely without violence. That is the best case scenario.

Nyet! Ochen plokho! If all the workers said, "screw you" all at once, then it isn't a matter of the employer's saying, "Gee whiz, can't make any money this way, the most profitable course of action is now to acquiesce," it's a matter of the Workers' existing stockpile of resources vs. the Employers'. If the Employers individually have more food/medicine/shelter/capital than the Workers, then there's the chance that they outlast the Workers' general strike and are able to scab the weak links that surrender first. It's more of a siege than a strike, and the odds are on the Employers' side. Even then, it's hard for me to imagine how this could ever possibly, possibly occur without violence, as eventually, one or both sides would attempt to secure more resources to "outlast" the other through force of arms. In which case, I should add guns to the "stockpile of resources" list. Really, I see this developing more into some sort of feudal medieval system, whereby former Employers and their heavily-armed Boys (origin for the word "vassal") strong-arm some former Workers into doing their jobs again and  slaughtering the ones who won't. We regress in this scenario.

[Edric O]

Nyet! Ochen plokho! If all the workers said, "screw you" all at once, then it isn't a matter of the employer's saying, "Gee whiz, can't make any money this way, the most profitable course of action is now to acquiesce," it's a matter of the Workers' existing stockpile of resources vs. the Employers'. If the Employers individually have more food/medicine/shelter/capital than the Workers, then there's the chance that they outlast the Workers' general strike and are able to scab the weak links that surrender first. It's more of a siege than a strike, and the odds are on the Employers' side.

You are forgetting the overwhelmingly larger numbers of the workers, and the fact that, being workers, they know how to make stuff for themselves. How will the former capitalists get more food if the agricultural workers refuse to cooperate with them? How will they keep their existing food fresh if the workers have cut them off from the electrical grid? How will they buy anything if the retail workers are on strike? How will they travel anywhere if the workers refuse to sell them plane tickets or gas for their cars? The workers, meanwhile, can occupy factories and continue to produce stuff and sell it or give it to themselves. After all, how will the former capitalists even know that factories are occupied if the workers have cut off their flow of information? By word of mouth? That would take too long. Such a total standoff could not possibly last more than a few days.

In fact, if workers in the police and army join the strike, it doesn't even need to be a strike at all - the working class can continue working as before, and simply pretend the capitalists don't exist (refuse to take any orders from them and refuse to give them any goods or services). Power is not what you have, it's what other people think you have. If all other people suddenly decide you have no power, then you have no power.

Of course, like I said, this is the best case scenario, and it is highly unlikely. It's much more probable that some workers will always continue to be on the capitalists' side, and that the capitalists will use those workers to try to suppress the strike/uprising/revolution by force (capitalists rarely, if ever, fight for themselves; instead, they get others to fight for them). And that is why most revolutions eventually turn violent.

Really, I see this developing more into some sort of feudal medieval system, whereby former Employers and their heavily-armed Boys (origin for the word "vassal") strong-arm some former Workers into doing their jobs again and slaughtering the ones who won't. We regress in this scenario.

You are forgetting that it is workers who make all the guns in the first place. They would have control over the arms and munitions factories - or at least some of them.

[Wolf]

Well, right, it can go either way--it all really comes down to how many Workers stick with the cause and how many defect to become Vassals of the Employers. Either way, I think we can agree that a general strike wouldn't happen nonviolently... at least, not for long.

[chatfsh]

I havn't read through everything--as there's been more activity in the past 24 hours than there has in the last 2 weeks--but I do want to take issue with Hwi's interpretation of the data trends that were posted here and there.

On a number of occasions, within this very thread, I have stated that I am not arguing that global warming has taken place.  I have been debating whether or not humans are responsible for it.  So my comments concerning the graphs were not meant to contradict the overall warming trend of the past century, but simply to point out that the last decade has experienced a decline in temperature.  Apparently I am not the only one who has taken notice of this as even the head of the IPCC, chairman Rajendra Pachauri, has stated that

[Dunenewt]

Split topic?

[Edric O]

Split topic?

I don't think that's necessary. We are still debating the policies of the Obama administration.