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I got a PM request for an explanation of why I'm critical of AGW, and since we haven't had a climate thread in awhile I figured I'd make one so we can all participate in this discussion

edit: I have officially written past the forum post limit :|
OP continues into second post.

Definitions:

Anthropogenic Global Warming: global warming caused completely or nearly completely by human activity.

Climate Change: a more correct way to refer to the variations in our climate, but has been appropriated by the mainstream media to refer mostly to human activity because they needed a new buzzword once actual observations became a bit more complex than their "temperature rising, graph go up in diagonal line" models thought they'd be.

Consensus Authority: a label 100% made up by the IPCC to refer to themselves. One single entity which refuses to submit to peer review could never be called a consensus, let alone an authority.

What is the debate?

There is a scientific consensus that the climate is definitely changing. A few really divisive questions that linger are: Is the climate changing too quickly? How much of the recent change is driven by human action? Is CO2 as damning as we make it out to be?

We will focus on these three questions. While we can't really answer them outright, we can explore what makes their answers so hard to come by and why our current 100%-anthropogenic-evil-CO2 point of view is not as clear cut as the IPCC and world leaders insist it is, which will hopefully help you be more critical in discussing our ecologic problems and their possible solutions.

Is the climate changing too quickly?

The IPCC says that over 200 years ago, the planet was dramatically cooler than it is now. They say it's the early CO2 emissions from fossil fuels that drove the change we see continuing now.

200 years ago, the planet was indeed significantly cooler. It was a period called the Little Ice Age, which followed a medieval warm blip.

Go back 12,000 years and you see we were leaving an actual ice age (and a single 2000 year period of a time scale of hundreds of millions which can not be arbitrarily designated the climate optimum just because it seems to be working out for humans at this current point in time).

Look at the whole climate history of the planet and it should be obvious that the climate has never been at any sort of steady optimum.

Note that the time scale is going from hundreds of millions to hundreds of thousands to thousands, so the closer to the current year you go, the more you're zooming in and taking things out of a long-term context. (Also note that the two red dots at the end are the IPCC model's apocalypse predictions.)

So what does this mean in regards to how fast the climate is changing today? Well, compared to 200 years ago, in the middle of the so-named Little Ice Age, the climate is warming more quickly today. Compared to 10,000 years ago, the ending of a full blown ice age, it's warming more slowly.

At this point, the question loses context without discussing the second question: can the change today be attributed to natural warming we see at the end of cold eras/ice ages? is it possible the Little Ice Age only ended (in the mid 1800s) because of anthropogenic global warming caused by the Industrial Revolution (beginning in the mid-late 1700s)? We can't discount either of these possibilities, yet they are also not mutually exclusive.

How much of the recent change is driven by human action?

The IPCC attributes all recent climate change to human action with a confidence of 95-100%, a view shared by more than a hundred government organizations across the world blah blah blah says wikipedia.

The reason you never hear any other specific percentages or quantities to combat this claim is because there is no scientist who is willing to provide such a number. How can this be? I'm sure you've all heard claims that 97% of all scientists worldwide have published research which agrees with this claim. NASA also continues cites this 97% figure on their website to this day. This number is the result of an analysis of abstracts which has been thoroughly debunked and caused outrage among some of the authors whose papers were counted as "supporting anthropogenic global warming" when they themselves insist their research does not support a conclusion either way.

The analysis of abstracts was originally lead by John Cook, the creator of Skeptical Science (which sounds like it might be a climate change denier's website, which is intentional in order to get people who have become slightly skeptical of the accepted agenda to click on his website instead of somewhere else that might expose him). I've posted a shit ton about this before, so I'm going to post a summary and links which explain it far more thoroughly.

Cook's analysis was directly refuted by Anthony Watts in the journal Earth System Dynamics (which went on to reject another of Cook's unrelated papers because it lacked scientific basis). Popular Tech contacted many of the authors whose papers were cited by John Cook as supporting anthropgenic global warming and obtained statements from them directly. David Friedman also provided an explanation of how they came to the 97% figure by excluding over 50% of their original sample because they expressed a neutral stance. The National Review debunks John Cook and a few copycat analysis (and features an old video of Ted Cruz questioning an AGW alarmist about the observational pause in warming data, who himself paused an awfully long time before spitting out the "97% of scientists agree!!!" statistic).

{ Dr William Briggs, “Statistician to the Stars”, said: “In any survey such as Cook’s, it is essential to define the survey question very clearly. Yet Cook used three distinct definitions of climate consensus interchangeably. Also, he arbitrarily excluded about 8000 of the 12,000 papers in his sample on the unacceptable ground that they had expressed no opinion on the climate consensus. These artifices let him reach the unjustifiable conclusion that there was a 97.1% consensus when there was not.

“In fact, Cook’s paper provides the clearest available statistical evidence that there is scarcely any explicit support among scientists for the consensus that the IPCC, politicians, bureaucrats, academics and the media have so long and so falsely proclaimed. That was not the outcome Cook had hoped for, and it was not the outcome he had stated in his paper, but it was the outcome he had really found.” }

{ Christopher Monckton of Brenchley, an expert reviewer for the IPCC’s imminent Fifth Assessment Report, who found the errors in Cook’s data, said: “It may be that more than 0.3% of climate scientists think Man caused at least half the warming since 1950. But only 0.3% of almost 12,000 published papers say so explicitly. Cook had not considered how many papers merely implied that. No doubt many scientists consider it possible, as we do, that Man caused some warming, but not most warming. It is unscientific to assume that most scientists believe what they have neither said nor written.” }

So how do we use this information to answer our original question: how much of the recent change is driven by human action? Inconclusive. "Some but not most." That's truly the most real answer science currently has, yet the significant non-anthropogenic aspect is completely overlooked by these global government climate organizations when legislating nothing but CO2 emissions before congratulating themselves for saving the world.

Is CO2 as damning as we make it out to be?

I have gone on and on about how the IPCC and other government organizations have responded to climate change by simply vilifying and regulating carbon emissions though higher taxes, penalties, etc and lauding their heroic efforts. This exasperates our problem in that controlling CO2 emissions will not stop the changing climate nor will it help us adapt to the changing climate. There is little evidence that the amount of CO2 currently in our atmosphere is harmful, in fact historically the amount of CO2 in our atmosphere is rather low right now.

This graph shows the amount of CO2 in our atmosphere vs surface temperature based on what we know of paleoclimatology. There is no correlation whatsoever. This is not to say that CO2 has no effect on our climate, but that it alone and isolated is a very insignificant factor, and so is any response that revolves around CO2 alone.

So, our biggest anthropogenic source of CO2 emissions, how was the coal/etc formed that we burn today?

barren planet → abundance of CO2 in the atmosphere → plant life evolves → vegetation explosion as plant life thrives off the abundance of CO2 → amount of CO2 in the atmosphere decreases → great forests made from abundant CO2 fall → become coal → which we burn thus releasing the ancient abundance of CO2 → CO2 in the atmosphere rises → deserts begin to green → another vegetation explosion in response to the abundance of CO2 in the atmosphere and the whole cycle begins again

Can we thus really consider this CO2 to be anthropogenic? We're only releasing again what was once in the atmosphere.

The larger point, though, is that as the CO2 in the atmosphere goes up, vegetation is supposed to grow larger more rapidly. Instead we've cut down billions of acres of forest and cleared grasslands (which contribute to another huge carbon sink, the soil), leaving the ocean (our current largest carbon sink) with all the burden.

CO2 is not nearly as damning as our failure to manage it correctly.

Lisa, how does this explain to me why you are critical of AGW?

To wrap it all up, a bit of tl;dr!

The IPCC and other government climate agencies have force-spread anthropogenic global warming using misinformation to mislead people into vilifying CO2 producers instead of encouraging sustainable resource management and subsidizing innovation which could help entire populations adapt to the changing climate in the future. Legitimate, peer-reviewed publications contend that there is no quantifiable consensus among global scientists with regard to the amount of climate change which can be attributed to humans, but those that try typically range in their attempts from 10% – 30%. We must adapt to the climate instead of trying to legislate preservation of it as it exists today or as it existed 200 years ago. Better ideas than CO2 regulation include mass restoration of forests and wetlands, a fundamental change in how we interact with trees and plants in our everyday lives including landscaping, and reverting to a primarily individual and community way of living with remaining industries and global resources being logically managed by ecologists rather than hedge fund specialists.

This thread is now open to comments, questions, and additional info sharing~

I did some research on this on my own, since I was bored, and you raised some interesting points.

We've occasionally touched on or near this subject before in various physics and astronomy classes while I worked on my physics minor. Turns out, calling it a Greenhouse effect is a bit of a misnomer, since it doesn't work like a greenhouse, but more like a coat.

The simple version of what I was taught (I'll get to my research next) is that the mechanism behind the heating of literal greenhouses has to do with the fact that different materials react to different wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum in different ways. For example, visible light is mostly transparent to greenhouse glass, while infrared (the most energetic form of electromagnetic radiation behind visible light and what things that aren't "red hot" or "white hot" or super duper cold give off as thermal radiation, due to the Stefan–Boltzmann law). I can't prove or disprove that directly without determining the composition of greenhouse glass and the absorption spectrum of the chemical compounds, but here's some indirect evidence using a thermal camera:

Notice how much less clearly you can "see" the hand with the thermal camera than the visible light camera. You might think it's just because they are similar temperatures, but when the hand touches the glass it leaves a clear "thermal imprint" that lasts a while. It is clear that it is "harder" for infrared waves to permeate the glass compared to visible light. Since greenhouses almost always contain stuff that absorb at least some of the visible light that hits it and turn it into thermal energy, which has trouble escaping. Essentially, visible light can enter and leave at "will" but some of it "turns into" thermal energy inside the greenhouse and becomes "trapped".

This isn't how global warming is supposed to work, I was taught. Think about your clothes. They don't produce any heat on their own, and while they don't "trap" heat like a greenhouse does, they obviously retain it to some degree. You could say it's just insulation and depending on your definition you could be right, from a physics perspective, it's due to increasing the mean free path of the photons of infrared radiation leaving your body. If you're naked, the heat leaving your body as thermal radiation has a clear shot to the outside world. But when you wear clothes, it mush be absorbed and re-emitted a lot in order to "escape". Now, the speed of light (including infrared light) is super fast-- roughly 3 million km/s I believe-- but several factors force that energy's escape WAAY down. The main reason I said before is due to the mean free path in photons in your clothing. Clothing is much more dense than air, so photons travel a much shorter average distance between bumping into another atom. This, coupled with the fact that the direction that the photon is re-emitted is essentially random, and that the emission isn't quite instantaneous, means it's forced to wander around, thus "sticking around" and warming the coat for a while until it escapes. Now, even though the path is random, the amount of time it "sticks around" follows a predictable distribution, which is basically how long your clothes stay warm after drying them.

So this is supposedly what carbon dioxide does to the earth. The light permeates the atmosphere (unless it hits a cloud and bounces back), strikes the ground, and while some of it gets reflected back into light and escapes again (unless it bounces back due to a cloud in which the cycle repeats), while some of it is emitted as thermal energy. So in essence, the earth is like your body and the co2 is like your clothes, causing the thermal energy to stick around longer, supposedly.

Now onto my results. I got a mixed bag. If you look at the emission and absoption spectrum of co2, allegedly co2 isn't enough to account for the "coat effect" and water vapor is five times more effective at this "coat effect" than co2.

However, I've seen other sites (here and here ) that go into detail why the basic explanation for the "greenhouse effect" (which is actually the coat effect and not the literal greenhouse effect I described earlier) is flawed (which agrees with that previous website that looks mainly at the absoption and emission spectrum of co2), and on its own faulty, the reality of the situation is that it's more complicated than the simple explanation that's given in textbooks, but it ultimately is true that more co2 means warmer earth. I tentatively agree with their arguments, although I'll need to take a second look-- the second website takes nine whole blog posts to explain the whole thing, and the first one uses concepts I only vaugely remember. For that reason, I'll let you read them for yourself instead of going into detail.

I have to say Lisa, while I may not always agree with you on what the best tone is for discussions, I appreciate the fact that you value critical insight into commonly held beliefs (I'm going to just hope for the best and assume you're like me and that includes one's own beliefs as well) which is increasingly important in this day in age when views appear to becoming more polarized.

And if anyone actually managed to read this whole thing, I apologize if it ended up a waste of time and thank you for your attention.

Hmm, even if CO2 has nothing to do with the rising global temperatures (and it does), there is also the serious issue of ocean acidification that it's driving. A looooot of marine life stands to be wiped out by it.

I also find it highly suspicious that none of guys cited refuting the scientific consensus are climate scientists themselves. Anthony Watts is a former weather reporter, David Friedman is a Chicago School economist, and Christopher Monckton is a living political cartoon who regularly exaggerates or even fabricates his credentials. It should also be noted that these guys are on the far-right political fringe. For these reasons, I find them untrustworthy. (I should note that I would also find them untrustworthy if they were on the far-left fringe too)

Finally, in regards to the past warm periods. those spikes in temperature didn't often have the same cause. There was always a trigger that changed the climate. It just so happens that this latest spike is being caused by human activity, through the release of CO2 and methane and the destruction of natural carbon sinks. It should also be noted that those same spikes in the temperature coincide with mass extinction events, suggesting that if this change in temperature is indeed preventable, we should do just that.

Like it or not, there is a pretty solid consensus among people who actually study climate science that we're the primary driving force behind climate change, which they started detecting in the 1970s (contrary to popular belief, the "global cooling" theory that the media glommed onto at the time was not consensus, and was rejected by most climate scientists). What the REAL debate should be is what, if anything, we can do about it.

I like some of your ideas, Lisa, but we really cannot avoid doing something about fossil fuel emissions. I dispute the argument that it will damage the economy, and even if it does, economies are able to adapt to shocks faster than ecosystems. The latter evolve slowly over thousands of years; changes that occur within the span of a few decades can decimate them.

For a nice long list addressing each "skeptic" talking point, I will refer you to this handy little site. Scroll down to Part 3 for the relevant counter arguments.

{ Like it or not, there is a pretty solid consensus among people who actually study climate science that we’re the primary driving force behind climate change }

Oh come on, at least read the post first, you'll find out why it's immediately obvious that you didn't.

Hint: the entire second question.

I also briefly addressed ocean acidification in the third question/second post.
like really.

The IPCC models have been in doubt for the past 20 years and it only gets worse and worse with the more real observational data we have.

There is absolutely no observational data, aka there is no data that is not based on the IPCC's models, that shows a correlation between CO2 alone and surface temperature. The temperature has been steadily rising since the end of the Little Ice Age despite the initial surge of the Industrial Revolution and the continued emissions from China and India, who don't even try to pretend to care about the rest of the world's pledges and agreements. CO2 emission has exponentially increased, yet the temperature has not. There's simply nothing to support this view that you cling to.

You will also note that the observational thirty year warming and cooling cycles match up perfectly with government scientists global cooling alarmism transition to global warming alarmism. There's plenty of recent research out there that supports the trend, that the sun's activity might be waning (NASA discusses solar sun spot cycles and why we're likely headed toward a period of decreased activity) and we could even be headed toward another Maunder Minimum (a more controversial claim at this time). IPCC scientists say this wouldn't be able to account for anthropogenic global warming regardless, but again, they contribute all warming to anthropogenic causes. It becomes far more difficult to predict and respond to when you start taking every other natural factor into consideration, which the IPCC simply refuses to do.

Where as many people love to point out that fossil fuel industries have a vested interest in confusing the data, or providing opposing viewpoint to AGW for their own gain, it implies that support for AGW has no such vested interest. This is in fact false.

What better case for various governments to instigate far-reaching industry regulations, control the extent of which industries can produce and where, and at the same time create new forms of taxation via carbon credits?

It is sad that so many environmental groups have embraced AGW wholly – as it gives them the political, and often times the financial backing to lobby for legislation that attacks industries they feel are the greatest polluters.

It is even sadder, to me, that people completely ignore real, tangible, and horrendously devastating environmental and ecological disasters such as major oil spills, the great Pacific Garbage Patch, major deforestation that is poorly regulated and managed (hint: most of the severest deforestation happens in places where there are poor private property laws) and focus entirely on what they view is a bigger threat, AGW.

Many have put this debate into the realm of left vs right, and framed it as one side has facts, the other doesn't. Many on the left has embraced these beliefs in scientific consensus, and even mild worship of scientists and academics, and go out of the way to call people on the right as ignorant and stupid for ignoring "science". On the other hand, many on the right have held opposing views to AGW for all the wrong reasons, and express their disbelief in it through faith rather than rationale.

Does no one ever ask: "Why are all the solutions for AGW always favor left-wing ideology, that is, greater industrial regulations, greater government control over resource management?" Is it because the right has no solutions? On the contrary, the realistic solutions; innovative technology, increasing the capital and wealth in countries, economic and market forces, strong private property laws, greater economic freedom, have been the biggest driving force of what's been creating solutions to combat environmental challenges. These become an anathema to the belief that the state should regulate, invest in, and control how this issue is handled. Nor is it flashy, immediate, or far reaching enough for them to like.

The reality is, AGW has created an anti-Industry, anti-Capitalist, and to some extremes, anti-Human belief system that is based not on science, but on personal and group perceptions, emotions, and the belief that you must do something for the greater good, regardless of how effective or costly it is.

And isn't it strange, one would ask, that the continual push by many in the first world international community for AGW to be not only a dire reality, but one that is coming sooner than later, happen to give them "legitimate" reasons to essentially go to developing nations (which many of them have been decimated by the very first world countries 100+ years ago) and tell them how they can and cannot control their industries, their economies?

Is it no wonder that European leaders and the Europeans themselves are the biggest proponents of AGW, when their continent is rapidly losing competitive edge in the world arena? After all, the EU project itself was borne out of a necessity to stay relevant and competitive with a post-war economies of the world rapidly expanding. And why wouldn't it be? Europe seeing after WW2 nearly 10% of it's population decimated, it's industrial base and infrastructure totally destroyed, and post WW2 population growth to be relatively low in comparison of their former imperial states.

Europeans, especially Germany, also see themselves as being on the fore front of "Green" technology, and innovation. Technology that is expensive to produce, implement, and maintain, technology that will continually give them a market edge in global green energy and industry.

Germany's vested interest is it suddenly going from a hard energy producer to one that is becoming increasingly dependent on import. "Hard coal used to be the basis of the German economy. Up until the mid-1960s (see Appendix), the German energy sector, heating sector and railway transport heavily relied on hard coal and, to some extent, lignite. One proof that coal was so important is the fact that one of the main goals of the European Coal and Steel Community was to limit Germany’s advantage in European coal deposits. In 1956 (when coal consumption reached its peak in Germany), 86% of the energy used was produced from German coal, most of which was mined in the Ruhr region (71% from hard coal and 15% from lignite). Subsequently, hard coal mining began to fall back relatively rapidly, and coal’s share in energy production was nearly halved within the next twenty years. This happened for many reasons, the most important of which were: the depletion of easily accessible coal deposits in Germany, the introduction of substitute fuels to the market (crude oil, natural gas and nuclear energy), greater accessibility to imported coal and the environmental protection issue (during the combustion process coal emits more pollution than oil or gas)."
http://www.osw.waw.pl/en/publikacje/osw-commentary/2015-10-20/uncertain-future-coal-energy-industry-germany

But for this kind of cost to be justified you have to create a market willing to pay for it…and what better tool than the continual fear of AGW to spark innovation and massive resources to green technology?

Maybe it's just tin-foil conspiracy theory. Or maybe it's just real-politik.

Don't present a bunch of fact and then say maybe it's just a tin foil conspiracy theory. It's obviously not any kind of theory, India et al have been referring to exactly what you describe as "carbon imperialism" from the West for the past 20 years (edit to include a link, you got downvoted so apparently some people DO think this is a conspiracy theory: Through the smog, coal-hungry India sees ‘carbon imperialism’ in the West. and how's that for a neutral news reporting headline?). We built our economies on the Industrial Revolution that's being blamed for AGW, and now we want developing countries to stay out of the global economy because we've arbitrarily decided their continued use will doom us all to literal hell on Earth, what with the IPCC's soaring apocalypse temp models.

Excerpt from the link above:

{ If there is one thing that Western countries can agree on, it is that dirty, polluting coal needs to be phased out.

Unfortunately, that isn’t something India, already the world's third-largest polluter, is about to do.

Faced with a rapidly growing population, a buoyant but fragile economy blighted by constant power shortages and millions still living in abject poverty, India argues that it cannot simply decide between renewable and non-renewable power – it needs both.

So a breakneck dash for coal is taking place across the country, where on average one new mine is opening every month.

As a result, India’s carbon dioxide emissions, are expected to rise from 1.7bn tonnes in 2010 to 5.3bn – about a sixth of all the carbon dioxide released in the world last year – by 2030. And even that is unlikely to satisfy India’s ravenous demand for energy. }

Everybody else might be interested in reading that bolded stat and then wondering exactly how the temperature wouldn't soar to apocalypse levels even faster than the IPCC predicted in their original models before India became a great manufacturing country… China and India have been exponentially increasing their CO2 output, yet the temperature aint following. IPCC literally declines to comment on this whenever it's brought up (recall the scandal surrounding certain government agencies who claim the ~20 year pause in warming we see in observational data isn't actually happening at all thanks to their new math formulas).

{ but it ultimately is true that more co2 means warmer earth. }

Yes, the greenhouse gas (all of them not just CO2) effect is not really up for debate even though its specific effects may not be fully understood, but that doesn't make it a negative. A warmer Earth means a more productive planet that is more suited to large hairless mammalian life (and more CO2 means more plant life → thus herbivores → which feed primary+ consumers → which feed us).

Putting aside the anthropogenic controversy completely, there are many climate scientists who have written to discuss the BENEFITS of a warming climate. A study originally by C.G. Bentham, Director, Centre for Environmental Risk, School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia, which has been peer reviewed and replicated many times since, estimates that a 3C degree rise in global temperature would reduce deaths by 17,500 per 50M people (who currently die annually from cold weather illnesses and conditions that would be eradicated with such a temperature increase).

& that's just one benefit when discussing human health specifically. Wouldn't you love it if winter was more mild and summer stayed the same? Because that's what would happen if the global temperatures rose, thanks to the thousands of other weather/wind patterns that effect seasonal temperature. Stanford finds that for each degree the average annual temperature rises, summer temperatures rise only .5 degree while winter temperatures rise 1.5 degrees.

That Stanford link also refers to the mortality rate improvement that I mentioned in the last paragraph: "In summary, the monthly figures for Washington, DC, between 1987 and 1989, indicate that a climate warmer by about 2.5deg. Celsius would reduce deaths nationwide by about 37,000; the regressions on 89 counties for 1979 point towards a saving in lives of about 41,000. These data sets produce roughly the same conclusion: a warmer climate would reduce mortality by about the magnitude of highway deaths, although the latter deaths are more costly in that they probably involve a much higher proportion of young men and women."

It actually has a lot of good information about the benefits of a warmer climate (even attempting to analyze studies referring to the effect of a warmer climate on wages and rent prices), ya'll should skim over the whole thing if you have a few minutes.

What better case for various governments to instigate far-reaching industry regulations, control the extent of which industries can produce and where, and at the same time create new forms of taxation via carbon credits?

There might also be the case that said industries might just be horribly irresponsible in regards to environmental degradation. Where might one get that idea?

It is even sadder, to me, that people completely ignore real, tangible, and horrendously devastating environmental and ecological disasters such as major oil spills, the great Pacific Garbage Patch, major deforestation that is poorly regulated and managed (hint: most of the severest deforestation happens in places where there are poor private property laws)

Oh, right.

Please stop pretending your pet invisible hand understands the concepts of externalities.

{ There might also be the case that said industries might just be horribly irresponsible in regards to environmental degradation. Where might one get that idea? }

Then why isn't the government regulating the pollution and waste which directly contribute to immediately observable local weather and environmental changes, like acid rain and freshwater pollution and land disturbance? You know the hugely catastrophic landslides that keep happening in Asian countries where we've exported our whole agricultural industry?? We know for a fact that these thousands of deaths and tens of millions of dollars in damage are 100% caused by anthropogenic environmental degradation from poor farm management… but those trade agreements keep on rolling out~

Then why isn’t the government regulating…

I have guesses and no way to prove which of them are correct. Evil corporate lobbying of congress. Badly mismanaged use of funds to protect the wrong things. Lack of funds or power to accomplish relevant regulations. Deliberate decision to prioritize other goals over environment.

None of this, however, points to the government being this evil communist cult that wants to regulate everything just because it can.

Gee I wonder why people are under the impression the government regulates things just because they can and want the revenue, you would think all of the past government regulations which successfully solved or positively contributed to solving the problems they were meant to would stand out more…. oh.

The entire rest of your post is the whole point.

The government pushes AGW instead of focusing on real environmental problems because of: "Evil corporate lobbying of congress. Badly mismanaged use of funds to protect the wrong things. Lack of funds or power to accomplish relevant regulations. Deliberate decision to prioritize other goals over environment."

Corporations would much rather pay a small fine or sign statements that they're working on lowering their CO2 emissions than pay to innovate clean technology and replace their entire working systems. The funds we could be using to innovate such technology instead goes towards global climate summits where we spend billions of dollars to collectively sign agreements saying we're working on lowering our CO2 emissions which enables us to ignore further environmental legislation in favor of other goals, thus we lack the funds to accomplish relevant regulations.

You can't complain that a solution failed because it was never implemented in the first place, which is the most common theme among regulations.

People want better control of the stock market so very wealthy con men will stop building entire economies of fraud that crash down and burn every decade or so. Laissez faire didn't stop 2007. The government was only there after the fact to bail out all the failing banks.

People want the government to stop signing trade deals with third world countries that constantly exploit loopholes that come to the detriment of America's labor force.

People (in this thread anyway) want the government to implement effective regulations to slow or stop massive wads of plastic and fertilizer runoff to poisoning the oceans. Laissez faire sure as hell isn't going to stop people from buying that shit and then dumping it in landfills.They also want the government to stop subsidizing agricultural corporations to produce unfairly priced garbage that floods foreign markets.

If there's a theme to this rambling it's that the solutions to many of the problems people are complaining about here is more regulation and not less, and more often then not the government is doing more to favor big industries then the lowly taxpayer and entrepreneur. Turns out the name 'market failure' isn't an oxymoron.

(then I did think of a success of regulation: airports. people like to complain about them all the fucking time but since when was the last hijacking of an american airliner?)

I'll leave this here: https://wattsupwiththat.com/

^ I cited some of Anthony Watt's actual research in my OP (obvs that's his blog, for everyone else).

It looks like he actually posted today about John Cook's 97% consensus scamming. What good timing! Apparently John Cook is trying to publish another consensus paper – this time titled CONSENSUS ON CONSENSUS (lmfao).

Look, here's a press release about it!

{ Consensus on Consensus: Expertise Matters in Agreement Over Human-Caused Climate Change

A research team confirms that 97 percent of climate scientists agree that climate change is caused by humans. The group includes Sarah Green, a chemistry professor at Michigan Technological University.

“What’s important is that this is not just one study--it’s the consensus of multiple studies,” Green says. This consistency across studies contrasts with the language used by climate change doubters."

In it, the team lays out what they call “consensus on consensus” and draws from seven independent consensus studies by the co-authors. This includes a study from 2013, in which the researchers surveyed more than 11,000 abstracts and found most scientists agree that humans are causing climate change. (Note From Me: This is the original John Cook study which has been thoroughly discounted!! See, they're STILL citing this thing like it's fact!!) Through this new collaboration, multiple consensus researchers--and their data gathered from different approaches--lead to essentially the same conclusion. }

Anthony Watts is awaiting the publication of another rebuttal to Cook's newest paper, which I will post here when he does.

{ people like to complain about them all the fucking time but since when was the last hijacking of an american airliner?) }

When was the last one before 9/11?! Now we have to get to airports 2 hours before our boarding time to go through security that seriously compromises our Constitutional freedoms, and more people than ever in the history of American airports are filing claims and lawsuits because expensive items were stolen out of their checked bags by the TSA. SUPER SUCCESSFUL!

{ If there’s a theme to this rambling it’s that the solutions to many of the problems people are complaining about here is more regulation and not less }

One solution to many of the problems that people are complaining about is more regulation*, not the only solution, and though more regulation might help immediately, it's what we've witnessed increased regulation do in the long run that makes people want to avoid it.

{ Laissez faire sure as hell isn’t going to stop people from buying that shit and then dumping it in landfills. }

Nor are even more regulations which say what should and should not be dumped in landfills, which already exists, which is already ignored. Some government regulations are necessary for consumer protection, like trade agreements are supposed to incorporate (which also exposes the problem of government regulations which are necessary but don't actually get implemented or regulate the wrong thing), but extremely few of those have to do with environmental policy.

When was the last one before 9/11?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_hijackings#1990s

it’s what we’ve witnessed increased regulation do in the long run that makes people want to avoid it.

The long term solution for many of these problems often involves giving people ownership of the previously shared property that they can then have due cause to worry about it being damaged (the classic communal pasture problem!) Whose job is it to, say, parcel out sections of the ocean to private owners? (Hint: not the plastic manufacturers)

Nor are even more regulations which say what should and should not be dumped in landfills, which already exists, which is already ignored.

Then is the solution to give more teeth to these practices or to just write them off as a failure from the start?

{ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_hijackings#1990s }

Okay, so, never. Never before 9/11 had there been a successful hijacking of an American airline which departed from American soil. And never has there since.

{ often involves giving people ownership of the previously shared property that they can then have due cause to worry about it being damaged }

Ownership to who, tho? They give ownership to other public government agencies, and we all know how competently those are handled. There's land own by the BLM that is deteriorating on its own because the BLM wont let it be used for recreation or agriculture by private citizens, huge swathes of wetlands going absolutely stagnant because it's being perfectly preserved by the gov agencies which regulate it. The goddamn plastic manufacturers could probably do better.

{ Then is the solution to give more teeth to these practices or to just write them off as a failure from the start? }

The solution is a new approach, as this one and those like it have been failing for at least a century.

My knowledge of this issue is basically nil, so I'm just gonna go into devil's advocate mode here. I was impressed by the amount of research packed into the top two posts and think you make a good point, but your summary paragraph raised my eyebrow:

We must adapt to the climate instead of trying to legislate preservation of it as it exists today or as it existed 200 years ago. Better ideas than CO2 regulation include mass restoration of forests and wetlands, a fundamental change in how we interact with trees and plants in our everyday lives including landscaping, and reverting to a primarily individual and community way of living with remaining industries and global resources being logically managed by ecologists rather than hedge fund specialists.

The most common accusations I see leveled against climate change alarmists are that (1) they are misanthropes who want to revert civilization to a pre-industrial age, leading to one hell of a drop in quality of life, and (2) they are arrogant scientists using apocalyptic rhetoric to convert scientific prowess into political power. Baring that in mind, although the entire point of your posts was to poke holes in the theories of climate change zealots, your proposed solutions to what you see as more legitimate environmental threats set off some alarms. What is it that differentiates your proposed solutions to those of the climate change crowd? Can you provide more details about the "primarily individual and community way of living"? Do you wish to be one of the powerful geologists ruling the world?

Ownership to who, tho?

Private owners who stand to benefit from seeing it preserved. For oceans you would give them to individual fishermen or fishing companies who stand to benefit from keeping the fish population consistent and healthy over time. Corral the communal pasture and give everyone their own plot.

The solution is a new approach, as this one and those like it have been failing for at least a century.

That… didn't really answer my question.

{ Can you provide more details about the “primarily individual and community way of living”? }

ahh admittedly I was tossing in my whole personal theory for the future of human ecology, BUT my whole personal theory revolves exactly around convincing people that we don't need to revert to cavemen and eat grasshoppers and live in shacks to become a sustainable planet.

My ideal museum/community center vision, which is why I went to college and what I'm currently working towards, includes eventually establishing a commune on site which displays exactly the kind of lifestyle I envision. I don't like to talk much about the specifics for that reason, but the whole concept primarily surrounds basic survival becoming much more local and small scale because it's the single largest drain on our natural resources thanks to its industrialization. This is not just gardening, but smarter/sustainable livestock choices and wildlife management, the way we design buildings and landscape (especially ponds/water features), and our everyday behaviors.

For example, we don't need to eat grasshoppers, but rabbits could be a hell of a lot more common for dinner. Beef production is the single largest agricultural consumer of freshwater in this country, they also need a huge amount of land, they reproduce singularly, and they take a long time/a shit ton of resources to reach slaughter weight/age (18 months). Rabbits are not water hoarders, they can thrive in small areas, they reproduce like rabbits, and they're meant to be eaten within 8-12 weeks of their birth.

We could also eat a lot more python (it tastes like frog and that's a delicacy!) because of the environmental damage they do as an invasive species. It's not very cost effective to hunt down a bunch of big ass pythons that are super good at hiding in the middle of the Everglades just to kill them and discard them (because there's a social stigma around wearing animal skins now, thanks PETA), but if you could sell that meat to processing facilities you're killing like six birds with one stone by the time you get through the list of benefits.

So much more to it than these very basic examples, but I hope that at least gave you some sort of idea.

The context of regulations that I mentioned was towards AGW. Note that even I pointed out that there is lack of any attention given to real pollution problems like ecological degradation and deforestation.

Regulation in of itself isn't a bad thing. Nor is de-regulation. However, when you're creating regulations to combat AGW, based on faulty science, while outright ignoring the real problems then you're regulatory practices are wrong. In the same vein I don't believe de-regulating industries to allow them to pollute wherever they please is great idea, and no where did I imply that it was. However, given that the government can create stronger tort and contract laws giving people the ability to sue large industries for pollution would create a financial risk for those industries to continue to pursue industrial waste and pollution.

Carbon credits, regulating CO2 output, and stifling those industries on faulty regulatory reasons is absurd, and self-defeating.

"often involves giving people ownership of the previously shared property that they can then have due cause to worry about it being damaged"

You mean a stronger enforcement of private property rights like I've mentioned before? You m ean when people or groups own private land or resources they tend to be more encouraged to look after it? When you have the government owning something for a collective greater good it rarely is ever treated as well as it would have been in private hands, in fact it often obfuscates existing property rights, or outright ignores them. Brazil for example gave 20% of the Amazon rain forest to the indigenous people – they in turn have a vested interest in preservation of their ecosystem, not the government. In fact! It is one of the reasons why the government was so poor at tackling the deforestation issue in the first place, it held a monopoly on land ownership, and how it was used, and gee-golly-whiz it was rampant with officials tacking huge bribes. When that stopped and when the government began actually enforcing existing laws on illegal timber industries the rate of deforestation dropped.

Don't get me wrong. I'm no anarchist on this issue. Strong government regulations should exist when it comes to actually protecting people from REAL pollution, and not imaginary ones. And there are many MANY ways governments can engage this without affecting the majority of people's lives, rights, or liberties. In fact, this is a realm of government I believe that is legitimate and should be used, to enforce and strengthen the people's rights from being shat upon literally, by pollution or polluters.

"Whose job is it to, say, parcel out sections of the ocean to private owners?"
As far as I understand it, the government owns the ocean parcels which it can either lease, or sell. If it wishes to sell that ocean parcels to private hands that then could use it for manufacturing goods such as fish, or underwater mining or whatever, then they can create laws that protect or give strength to any kind of damage that said private companies or people create.

{ That… didn’t really answer my question. }

I don't think we should continue letting government agencies regulate, and writing them off as failures doesn't change anything either way, so, new approach. What the approach should be is going to depend on the direction we decide to go. Environmentally, anyway, idk if you can tell but I'm at least trying to get you to keep the conversation relevant to environmental policy.

{ Corral the communal pasture and give everyone their own plot. }

The ocean is a really bad location for this example, as you would literally collapse the global ecosystem in doing so. & industrial fishing (in most first world countries anyway, most Western countries we should really say) has been completely destroyed in some cities because of bad regulating. Catch limits, since we're sticking with this ocean example, surely do limit the number of fish caught, but it doesn't do anything about the fact that there aren't enough fish in that population. We also eat a lot of really unsustainable fish (like tuna, which doesn't mature until it's nearly ten years old), so this problem truly goes beyond simply regulating or leaving it to private industry.

In the same vein I don’t believe de-regulating industries to allow them to pollute wherever they please is great idea, and no where did I imply that it was.

previously wrote by chewybunny…

On the contrary, the realistic solutions; innovative technology, increasing the capital and wealth in countries, economic and market forces, strong private property laws, greater economic freedom, have been the biggest driving force of what’s been creating solutions to combat environmental challenges. These become an anathema to the belief that the state should regulate, invest in, and control how this issue is handled

Catch limits, since we’re sticking with this ocean example, surely do limit the number of fish caught, but it doesn’t do anything about the fact that there aren’t enough fish in that population.

Surely fisherman who exclusively own their own ocean plot and have a passing understanding of reality would realize to get a stable fish population to harvest you have to let them breed up first? If people would still ignore that and continue depleting the seas anyway I would be a sad panda.

I don’t think we should continue letting government agencies regulate, and writing them off as failures doesn’t change anything either way, so, new approach. What the approach should be is going to depend on the direction we decide to go.

That's too vague for my tastes.

If it weren't vague we wouldn't be able to have this discussion, we'd know what to do. Most realistically it would probably be some combination of public oversight and private local management by hopefully regional environmental scientists with no political interests.

{ Surely fisherman who exclusively own their own ocean plot and have a passing understanding of reality would realize to get a stable fish population to harvest you have to let them breed up first? }

That's why I said it's not just a regulatory problem, the ocean fish we really like to eat don't mature very fast. Going back to bluefin tuna, it's almost 8-12 years before they can even breed. It's currently impossible to keep them, or even harvest eggs from wild mature fish and farm raise them, because their needs are too great for captivity. It would be easier to just stop eating tuna, but that's a choice consumers have to make on their own. That's also why I can't be more specific about your other question, a lot of my ideal solutions involve consumers consciously making the decision to stop doing certain things and start doing other things differently because that's what the planet needs.

An additional question regarding conservation and where I usually lose people, but this is a good example for it, is: what does the bluefin tuna provide for the ocean? It's a top predator, it helps keep other species of fish in check/etc etc bio 101. Like other top predators, we as humans have mostly taken over its role. It suffers because it can't compete with us depleting its own population nor can it compete with us competing for its food sources (which it, as a top predator, needs to consume a lot of in order to sustain itself, and we then eat a lot of it, which doesn't help). Besides us, it also has wild competitors which would benefit from taking its place. What I'm saying here is that the bluefin tuna is essentially useless. Why shouldn't we just go ahead and open fishing and if it goes extinct it does? That makes room for a faster maturing fish to eventually evolve up and take its place.

That is another way of thinking that the world could take. Giant pandas? Goddamn useless. Billions of dollars to try to get them to stay collectively alive as a species for one more year. We could use that money for literally anything else and it would be less of a waste of it. It's a bit extreme, but I truly don't believe it's a good use of our resources or time to concentrate on saving species that nature clearly did not create with the intention for them to stand the test of time. Crocodiles are millions of years old because they can live anywhere and eat anything. Pandas literally eat one specific plant. It's a niche species. It's an accomplishment that they've made it this far while other critical species have disappeared without much fanfare, but it's time to let them go.

what's agw?

Anthropogenic Global Warming: global warming caused completely or nearly completely by human activity.

Basically the fancy and/or quick way of saying "global warming caused by people, as opposed to natural long- or short-term effects"

"In the same vein I don’t believe de-regulating industries to allow them to pollute wherever they please is great idea, and no where did I imply that it was.
previously wrote by chewybunny…
On the contrary, the realistic solutions; innovative technology, increasing the capital and wealth in countries, economic and market forces, strong private property laws, greater economic freedom, have been the biggest driving force of what’s been creating solutions to combat environmental challenges. These become an anathema to the belief that the state should regulate, invest in, and control how this issue is handled

Sure thing buddy."

Yes. Greater economic freedom ≠ total regulation free industry.
Yes. Economic and market forces ≠ total regulation free industry.

These become an anathema to the belief that the state should regulate, invest in, and control how this issue is handled.

Putting it in context for you there.

The IPCC has formally agreed to publish a special report on how to limit warming to 1.5 degrees C above pre-industrial times.

{ The U.N.'s scientific panel on climate change will write a special report on how to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) compared with pre-industrial times.

Many scientists say it will be virtually impossible to keep warming below that level without removing vast quantities of heat-trapping greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.

Temperatures have already risen almost 1 degree C (1.8 F) since humans started burning fossil fuels -- the biggest source of greenhouse gases -- on an industrial scale in the 19th century. }

We've got -

• delusion that we can ultimately control the weather and stop the planet from warming past an arbitrarily set point
• unsourced and vague consensus agenda pushing which is demonstrably false (most scientists don't believe we can limit warming period)
• selective cherry picking of data which seems to support their agenda (how high did temperatures rise during the 100 year period before humans starting using fossil fuels on an industrial scale? They state it as though temperatures haven't been rising steadily for 12,000 years)

& some of you are still willing to refer to them as an authority who can't be questioned :|

unsourced and vague consensus agenda pushing which is demonstrably false

selective cherry picking of data which seems to support their agenda

Honestly, Lisa, at least accuse them of doing something you haven't done a thousand times yourself.

As this is Serious Debate and not General, I'm going to need you to source your claim there.

The IPCC, much like you've just done, doesn't even attempt to source their claims. This is why they do their own in-house peer review, after which it gets shipped to all of the governments participating for a government review period, after which it finally gets released to the public as the authority consensus.

Here's a newly released 5 min vid by MIT atmospheric scientist Richard Lindzen which attempts to break down the views on climate change into three groups: knowledgeable scientists who mostly agree with the IPCC that recent warming can be attributed to anthropogenic causes (labelled the IPCC group), knowledgeable scientists who mostly disagree with the IPCC and believe that anthropogenic causes contribute to relatively little of observed recent warming (labelled the skeptics), and politicians/environmentalists/journalists.

Note that its group 1 label is knowledgeable scientists who agree with the IPCC's anthropogenic theory for the most part, not the IPCC itself, as many of the shared agreements he mentions are refuted by the IPCC (eg burning fossil fuels does not lead to catastrophe) though not refuted by knowledgeable scientists who support a mostly anthropogenic cause.

Ladies and gentlemen, the YouTube channel that brought to you a video on Richard Lindzen on climate change also brought to you: "There is a correlation between fossil fuels and increased clean water therefore more fossil fuels means cleaner water. I can't even.

Prager U is like TED Talks, they're vids featuring relevant, highly educated speakers on various different topics. But speaking of sketchy sources, your HuffPo link cites John Cook and his blog Skeptical Science, the topic of the very second question in my OP… and the person you continuously cite in every thread of mine you post in, despite him being debunked continuously in numerous legitimate peer-reviewed studies and analysis.

{ "There is a correlation between fossil fuels and increased clean water therefore more fossil fuels means cleaner water. }

Did you actually watch the vid? Because that's the "clickbait" phrase used within the first 30 seconds to grab attention. The argument is that even as fossil fuel use has exponentially grown, our simultaneous improvements in the technology which harvests/consumes those fuels have also grown cleaner. Our environmental conditions have improved dramatically since the Industrial Revolution when we were indiscriminately dumping and burning.

Compare this to the recent "green energy" endeavors. It's no mystery that they're completely inefficient right now, but do you also know about their environmental impacts? Wind farms, for example, currently have the kind of environmental impact we saw from logging. The turbines themselves are often built on land already cleared, but the sites require further land clearing for access and new roads, habitat destruction to build pipes and electric grids, disturbing bat and bird populations because they literally change the air currents and pressure of whole local ecosystems. There's a human health detriment being found in communities near wind farms called Shadow Flicker, the constant passing of a turbine blade shadow into houses is literally driving people insane through sleep deprivation and up to 40% increased rates of depression in communities near wind farms.

Much of the same applies for solar, though it's much easier to mitigate the environmental effects of solar because the most efficient location for industrial solar farms is in the middle of desolate deserts. Once the storage/transfer technology catches up to what the sun can produce, solar has a good chance to take over.

Until then, natural gas is the cleanest feasible energy.

and the person you continuously cite in every thread of mine you post in, despite him being debunked continuously in numerous legitimate peer-reviewed studies and analysis

Like when?

Did you actually watch the vid? Because that’s the “clickbait” phrase used within the first 30 seconds to grab attention.

Clickbait? Wtf. Are you being serious? 0:44 and 1:50 going into the video is clickbait? Given that after 2:50 is about anti-climate change, how the hell is going more than halfway in the video still clickbait? You can add in whatever extra you want to his argument, doesn't change the fact that he made the dumbest argument ever in that video.

I suggest you watch 1:28 again.

Compare this to the recent “green energy” endeavors. It’s no mystery that they’re completely inefficient right now, but do you also know about their environmental impacts? Wind farms, for example, currently have the kind of environmental impact we saw from logging. The turbines themselves are often built on land already cleared, but the sites require further land clearing for access and new roads.

Oh it's that bad huh? Remind me, how many petroleum refineries, coal burning plants, methane burning power plants are there in the world? The environment destruction from those must have been relatively catastrophic, guess they did what had to be done right?

habitat destruction to build pipes and electric grids, disturbing bat and bird populations because they literally change the air currents and pressure of whole local ecosystems.

Disturbing the bat and bird population must be a high price to pay as opposed to, oh I dunno, dissolving the coral reefs, calcium carbonate shells of invertebrates, and destroying the base of the ocean's ecosystem?

There’s a human health detriment being found in communities near wind farms called Shadow Flicker, the constant passing of a turbine blade shadow into houses is literally driving people insane through sleep deprivation and up to 40% increased rates of depression in communities near wind farms.

I guess we should stop right now if sleep deprivation and depression is at stake initially and I guess we should have also stopped when coal mining brought out a large portion of the toxic mercury deposits and acid rain inducing sulfur compounds. And are we going to forget about the myriad of carcinogenic materials that workers had to endure? Or is that not a big deal in the grand scheme of things as much as depression and sleep deprivation is?

{ Like when? }

Like in the second question brought up in my OP, which is literally the next line in that sentence… there are multiple links to multiple peer reviewed studies which debunk John Cook's consensus claims. There's also a link which describes how John Cook's recent first actual attempt at a study instead of an analysis of abstracts was rejected by the Journal he submitted it to on the basis that it wasn't scientific enough.

{ Oh its that bad huh? Remind me, how many petroleum refineries, coal burning plants, methane burning power plants are there in the world? The environment destruction from those must have been relatively catastrophic, guess they did what had to be done right? }

They aren't nearly as damaging to the environment as they were 100 years ago, and they are currently less damaging to the environment than the inefficient and misguided attempts at green energy have been. & if we want to include economically on top of it, we can discuss all of the failed billion dollar green energy projects subsidized by taxpayers which collapsed within months.

{ And are we going to forget about the myriad of carcinogenic materials that workers had to endure? }

Had. Past tense. That's literally the point. We're in an energy limbo where our technology for truly green energy isn't efficient enough to make it worthwhile, economically or environmentally, but innovation in fossil fuel technology has made it both cleaner and more efficient to harvest and consume than any other option at this time.

{ Disturbing the bat and bird population must be a high price to pay as opposed to oh I dunno dissolving the coral reefs, calcium carbonate shells of invertebrates, and destroying the base of the ocean’s ecosystem. }

Literally addressed this in my OP too. Destroying the largest carbon sink in the world, aka forests and wetlands, is why the ocean has been left to take up the burden and why its makeup is fundamentally changing. We'd cleared the land long before we were burning fossil fuels.

In reference to coral, did you know the oldest coral colony we have ever found is only just over 4,000 years old? Coral reefs are a very recent ecosystem development, they haven't been around for millions of years building and supporting the Earth, they were only able to evolve initially when the Earth's oceans had substantially cooled thanks to the era of Ice Ages. Coral will be lost to time regardless of what humans do, and it's not the industrial energy sector's fault.

Like in the second question brought up in my OP, which is literally the next line in that sentence…

That's not an answer to my question. I asked for an example of the supposedly consistent posts that have me citing this person whom I didn't even know of until you mentioned him.

They aren’t nearly as damaging to the environment as they were 100 years ago, and they are currently less damaging to the environment than the inefficient and misguided attempts at green energy have been. & if we want to include economically on top of it, we can discuss all of the failed billion dollar green energy projects subsidized by taxpayers which collapsed within months.

That doesn't even make any sense. The magnitude of "land clearing" and its damage to the environment isn't subject to change due to time. Your argument was deforestation remember? Land clearing for the same coal plant 100 years ago versus clearing now takes up the same amount of space unless you can prove otherwise.

Had. Past tense. That’s literally the point.

No. The point is you're making frivolous arguments against green energy and for fossil fuels by using disturbances like sleep deprivation and depression from wind turbines when workers in petroleum and mining plants were literally going to work to get carcinomas.

We’re in an energy limbo where our technology for truly green energy isn’t efficient enough to make it worthwhile, economically or environmentally, but innovation in fossil fuel technology has made it both cleaner and more efficient…

Being cleaner and more efficient is the lesser evil compared to fossil fuel burning 100 years ago. It is not the lesser evil of green energy. Do you even know what being more efficient means? It means getting more bang for your buck, it means more complete combustion per gram of coal to make CO2 instead of CO and less soot. Being more efficient is making things even worse in terms of climate change because CO and soot/unburned hydrocarbons are being converted into CO2. In addition, being more efficient means getting rid of sulfur oxides and nitrogen oxides from exhaust gas. These are secondary problems which nobody didn't even give a crap about until we got acid rain and people in China couldn't see across the street from pollution. But according to you, green energy is strictly, and unequivocally unfeasible because X even though fossil fuels ran into and continues to run into road block after road block. The biggest weak point of your argument is that you are under the impression that burning fossil fuels is better because it has been around longer, but you completely ignore the fact that the industrial revolution was largely an empirical endeavor while green energy has tremendous amount of research and theoretical implications which make it a lot "older" than you'd think. Speaking of which. you mentioned several times with your concern that if we reduce carbon emissions, other countries will not follow and leave us behind. What makes you think that if nations are so underhanded to do something like that, that they would even follow and pay more money for efficient coal and methane burning guidelines? Sounds like a double standard to me.

to harvest and consume than any other option at this time.

That's true, only because renewable energy sources don't consume resources to operate by definition.

Literally addressed this in my OP too. Destroying the largest carbon sink in the world, aka forests and wetlands, is why the ocean has been left to take up the burden and why its makeup is fundamentally changing. We’d cleared the land long before we were burning fossil fuels.

Literally addressed nothing because that's literally not how it even works. The solubility of a non-condensable gas in a liquid solvent increases with increased partial pressure of the gas in the gas phase. Look up Henry's law and Raoult's law. This passive action is not accounted for by the the loss of active higher order capturing of CO2 lost from deforestation (let me remind you that plants also release CO2 as they respire) photosynthesis. Or do you think if all the trees were still around then the partial pressure of CO2 wouldn't have changed from the partial pressure that existed pre-industrial revolution? Please.

In reference to coral, did you know the oldest coral colony we have ever found is only just over 4,000 years old? Coral reefs are a very recent ecosystem development, they haven’t been around for millions of years building and supporting the Earth, they were only able to evolve initially when the Earth’s oceans had substantially cooled thanks to the era of Ice Ages. Coral will be lost to time regardless of what humans do, and it’s not the industrial energy sector’s fault.

People also die every day, all the time. Why do we blame people when they shoot others?

{ whom I didn’t even know of until you mentioned him. }

If you don't know who he is, why are you linking sources that cite him and his blog as factual information??? & the first thing you did in this thread was lecture about my source, what a hypocrite.

{ Land clearing for the same coal plant 100 years ago versus clearing now takes up the same amount of space unless you can prove otherwise. }

We have regulations about what kind of land can be used/cleared for new plants/factories etc, that's not just a rule that applies to the energy industry either. 100 years ago, an entire forest ecosystem could be wiped out in a week. That could never happen today with the regulations and land use permits that have to be assessed and granted. We also "recycle" cleared land today, where the land was cleared for logging and destroyed is the site where they build new manufacturing plants instead of clearing new ground, for example.

{ Do you even know what being more efficient means? }

Do you understand that to harness the energy produced by solar/wind/etc we have to use dirty manufacturing methods? Do you understand that even though solar produces more energy than coal, we don't have the technology to store that energy in batteries without losing a large percentage of it to heat? Green energy right now compounds inefficient new technology with the same energy practices we're trying to get away from, the net damage from so called green energy can only be WORSE than fossil fuels until the technology improves. This isn't rocket science.

{ Being more efficient is making things even worse in terms of climate change because CO and soot/unburned hydrocarbons are being converted into CO2. }

Can you please read this graph and explain to me how CO2 effects the temperature change which we now have observational data for?

{ That’s true, only because renewable energy sources don’t consume resources to operate by definition. }

It's true because renewable energy consumes resources in order to harvest, at this point in time. I can't use solar energy without a solar panel, battery, and inverter at least. I can't produce any of those things without using fossil fuels, plus whatever land I cleared to install my miles of panels, plus whatever damage I did to hook my system to the existing electrical grid, etc etc etc.

{ Look up Henry’s law and Raoult’s law.}

{ "At a constant temperature, the amount of a given gas that dissolves in a given type and volume of liquid is directly proportional to the partial pressure of that gas in equilibrium with that liquid." }

Well there's your first problem, plus the ocean loses its potential to retain CO2 as it heats… second problem is that you've apparently misunderstood the statement. It's not up for debate that the loss of forests has cost us the largest carbon sink. We lost about 3/4 the world's vegetation in the early Holocene, which was part of a growing snowball of reasons the temperature is increasing, which causes the oceans to increase in temperature, which means they can't operate as an effective carbon sink, and so on. Initial ocean acidifcation occurred early on when CO2 exponentially increased yet the temperature had not, allowing the ocean to absorb past its "safe for life" threshold. Now that the temps are catching up, the ocean can't retain the CO2 which has made it more acidic (which also casts doubt on all the "as the climate gets warmer the ocean will get more acidic!! claims because the ocean can't both retain CO2 to become more acidic and heat simultaneously) which leaves more CO2 in the atmosphere, exasperating the lesser effect it does have on the climate.

{ Speaking of which. you mentioned several times with your concern that if we reduce carbon emissions, other countries will not follow and leave us behind. }

This is not a concern, this is reality. Look up China and India's CO2 emissions. They have only increased and will only continue to increase.

{ that they would even follow and pay more money for efficient coal and methane burning guidelines }

Third world countries don't, that's why their emissions are soaring are they're seeing the same environmental impacts we saw during our Industrial Revolution while our environmental problems have been greatly reduced, but our manufacturing/etc has fled to third world countries.

They wont follow along with our reductions and they wont invest in cleaner industry, where's the double standard?

{ People also die every day, all the time. Why do we blame people when they shoot others? }

Because a gun is not a product of nature which had been in motion for millions of years before humans arbitrarily decided they can halt it. :|

"Being cleaner and more efficient is the lesser evil compared to fossil fuel burning 100 years ago. It is not the lesser evil of green energy. Do you even know what being more efficient means? It means getting more bang for your buck, it means more complete combustion per gram of coal to make CO2 instead of CO and less soot. Being more efficient is making things even worse in terms of climate change because CO and soot/unburned hydrocarbons are being converted into CO2. In addition, being more efficient means getting rid of sulfur oxides and nitrogen oxides from exhaust gas. These are secondary problems which nobody didn’t even give a crap about until we got acid rain and people in China couldn’t see across the street from pollution. But according to you, green energy is strictly, and unequivocally unfeasible because X even though fossil fuels ran into and continues to run into road block after road block. The biggest weak point of your argument is that you are under the impression that burning fossil fuels is better because it has been around longer, but you completely ignore the fact that the industrial revolution was largely an empirical endeavor while green energy has tremendous amount of research and theoretical implications which make it a lot “older” than you’d think. Speaking of which. you mentioned several times with your concern that if we reduce carbon emissions, other countries will not follow and leave us behind. What makes you think that if nations are so underhanded to do something like that, that they would even follow and pay more money for efficient coal and methane burning guidelines? Sounds like a double standard to me."

Efficiency at what financial costs? Right now green energy is far more expensive to build, and to operate. It is fine for a wealthy first world nation to engage dropping a truck load of money on building that kind of infrastructure but a good chunk of the non-first world, you know, 2/3rds of the world out there, are incapable of doing this. They don't have the financial, the economical, and the brain infrastructure to keep this system going effectively for their people. Not to mention, a lot of this deforestation and pollution comes out in regions which are politically unstable, and susceptible to a lot of economic and ecological problems.

Fossil Fuels are better for a good chunk of the world that desperately needs energy and needs it cheap. Fossil fuels are better in many MANY countries RIGHT NOW. Maybe not 20 years from now. But we aren't dealing with 20 years. We are dealing right now.

It's so easy to talk about how we should transform our energy sector into highly expensive green technology when we, as a society, don't have to worry about putting food on our table.

But the reality is, the first world is essentially saying to the rest of the world "Ey, sorry about us pumping out so much bad CO2 gas into the atmosphere, we just discovered it's actually bad. so you know, can you NOT build your economies on this? And instead maybe you should consider buying our, super expensive, but really clean energy technology?"

The problem with the Pro-AGW Environmentalist argument is that they simply ignore practicality. They ignore how clean nuclear energy is. They ignore how much cleaner nat-gas is. They focus so much on these emerging but not consumer-friendly technology that sounds great on paper, but in practical sense is not where it needs to be to replace the infrastructure we, and tons of other countries have.

There's a practical side to dealing with these issues. But it demands that those environmentalists get their heads out of the clouds and look at what could be done today, right now, at the most cost-effective and most realistic way of handling the situation. But they can't, and they won't, because it's not about practicality, or reality, it's about ego, it's about market interests (mostly from Europeans), and it's about ignorance about how much the rest of the non first world country is living.

Efficiency at what financial costs? Right now green energy is far more expensive to build, and to operate. It is fine for a wealthy first world nation to engage dropping a truck load of money on building that kind of infrastructure but a good chunk of the non-first world, you know, 2/3rds of the world out there, are incapable of doing this. They don’t have the financial, the economical, and the brain infrastructure to keep this system going effectively for their people. Not to mention, a lot of this deforestation and pollution comes out in regions which are politically unstable, and susceptible to a lot of economic and ecological problems.

Don't you think it's a little hypocritical to criticize green energy as being far too expensive, not ready to use, unpractical etc. when we have these conservative authoritative figures on t.v that feel compelled to convince the world that climate change is a scam perpetuated by scientists/activists?
The whole point of acknowledging climate as a unified society is to push change. If we take Lisa's and your cynical view on humanity, do you think that the ceo's of the refinery plants are going to feel inclined to waste their time and energy to do something about green energy? Probably not. They're probably going to do the minimal amount they need for show and continue to make the six figure salary because that way they are set for life and for a few more generations. By acknowledging climate change it means that these industries are put under strict deadlines to do something, which means they will be forced to invest more money into green energy research and come up with a better solution otherwise we rely only on the government funded research which is being bullied by the public by climate change deniers.

But it demands that those environmentalists get their heads out of the clouds and look at what could be done today,

Its funny that you say environmentalists have their head in the clouds, but you say something like this:

when we, as a society, don’t have to worry about putting food on our table.

Do you really think that if a country recognizes climate change it means that the next day everyone in the coal plants will lose their jobs? If so that's pretty foolish. Where were you crying when the milkman was replaced? When the telephone operator was gone? Or the road conductor? People lose their jobs; it's a fact of life. People in the coal and natural gas industry will lose their jobs eventually while new jobs open up in different fields; the loss of jobs is a poor argument.

and the person [the person, John Cook] you [as in I, windy] continuously cite in every thread of mine you post in,

If you don’t know who he is, why are you linking sources that cite him [as in not me, but the sources do for reasons which I have never used as premises] to and his blog as factual information??? & the first thing you did in this thread was lecture about my source, what a hypocrite.

So you didn't mean myself citing this person I take it? That was a mistake and you meant I cite sources that cite this person? Oh I get it, you're saying if I get to cite sources that cite this person, you can cite youtube channels that give a platform to the video I posted? Tu quoque , way to take the high road huh? But I wont argue with you, I'll let the others decide if citing sources that support someone who's algorithm may or may not have been imperfect is just as bad as you posting videos that support someone who blatantly says correlation is causation lmao.

{ Oh I get it, you’re saying if I get to cite sources that cite this person, you can cite youtube channels that give a platform to the video I posted? }

I cited the person responsible for the information in the video, MIT atmospheric scientist Richard Lindzen. That his video is hosted on a YouTube channel makes no difference. It's your due diligence to cite the person responsible for the information in the news article you linked, which would be John Cook. That his information was "hosted" on HuffPo makes no difference. All you did was Google for a headline that sounded like it supported what you were talking about instead of understanding the information it was actually presenting, there's the difference between how you and me post.

On CO2, here's a brand new study from Nature Climate Change reported by the BBC (Nature and its sub-journals are subscription based).

Rise in CO2 has 'greened Planet Earth'

{ The scientists say several factors play a part in the plant boom, including climate change (8%), more nitrogen in the environment (9%), and shifts in land management (4%). But the main factor, they say, is plants using extra CO2 from human society to fertilise their growth (70%).

"The greening reported in this study has the ability to fundamentally change the cycling of water and carbon in the climate system," said a lead author Dr Zaichun Zhu, from Peking University, Beijing, China.

"This suggests that projected atmospheric CO2 levels in IPCC scenarios are significantly too high, which implies that global temperature rises projected by IPCC models are also too high, even if the climate is as sensitive to CO2 increases as the models imply." }

Many of the 30+ scientists who contributed to this study are also IPCC contributors.

More importantly, from the same article:

{ And Prof Judith Curry, the former chair of Earth and atmospheric sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, added: "It is inappropriate to dismiss the arguments of the so-called contrarians, since their disagreement with the consensus reflects conflicts of values and a preference for the empirical (i.e. what has been observed) versus the hypothetical (i.e. what is projected from climate models).

"These disagreements are at the heart of the public debate on climate change, and these issues should be debated, not dismissed." }

She correctly illustrates the fundamental difference between scientists who support the AGW theory and scientists who do not: those who support the AGW theory rely on hypothetical evidence constructed by models which were built based on assumptions of how CO2 effects the climate. Those who do not support the AGW rely on actual observations of the climate and CO2's interactions. How people can accept hypothetical, model-based scenarios when we have observational data that directly refutes it is beyond me, but that's the climate change "debate" for you.

"Don’t you think it’s a little hypocritical to criticize green energy as being far too expensive, not ready to use, unpractical etc. when we have these conservative authoritative figures on t.v that feel compelled to convince the world that climate change is a scam perpetuated by scientists/activists?"

As opposed to progressive authoritative figures that would use AGW to push forward solutions which: increase government regulation of industry, increase government control over the economics, allocate tons and tons of resources in terms of money towards government projects that may or may not have any influence whatsoever, force third world nations to slow down their economic growth, force the world to purchase expensive technology on potentially questionable basis, to manipulate markets to better export the technology, ala Germany, and in some cases even give justification for mandatory birth control?

Gee and you wonder why people are skeptical.

"The whole point of acknowledging climate as a unified society is to push change. If we take Lisa’s and your cynical view on humanity, do you think that the ceo’s of the refinery plants are going to feel inclined to waste their time and energy to do something about green energy?"

I don't speak for Lisa. But my view of humanity is far from cynical. I thoroughly believe that prosperous economies and countries are better equipped at combating ground pollution, water pollution, air pollution, toxic waste, unnecessary and uncontrolled deforestation. I thoroughly believe that people, who live in the third world, have a right to strive for the same quality of life we enjoy in the west. And I thoroughly believe that the best solutions for those people is to construct realistic forms of energy like cleaner-coal, cleaner nat gas, and even nuclear.

I in fact find it very cynical of people who come from your camp that believe that they have the right and the ethical responsibility to dictate how other people behave, on individual and societal levels, because YOU feel so guilty about AGW.

"By acknowledging climate change it means that these industries are put under strict deadlines to do something, which means they will be forced to invest more money into green energy research and come up with a better solution otherwise we rely only on the government funded research which is being bullied by the public by climate change deniers."

That right there is why I find it so hard to buy the solutions proposed by environmentalists. They are so much more eager to FORCE industries and economies to behave the way THEY feel is right, whether or not they have the practical sense, or the understanding of how those industries and economies work is irrelevant. It's all about feelings isn't it?
You know. You COULD decide to stop eating beef. You COULD start using less gas, and actually buy a Tesla. You COULD force a MARKET change to industry without having to force everyone to comply to whatever moral beliefs you have.

"Do you really think that if a country recognizes climate change it means that the next day everyone in the coal plants will lose their jobs? If so that’s pretty foolish. Where were you crying when the milkman was replaced? When the telephone operator was gone? Or the road conductor? People lose their jobs; it’s a fact of life. People in the coal and natural gas industry will lose their jobs eventually while new jobs open up in different fields; the loss of jobs is a poor argument."

No, not at all. A country recognizing climate change means little when they got millions of people to feed. When the average person has an 8th grade education. Where there is barely an infrastructure to support a technology that demands a large base of highly educated skilled workers to operate and implement.
Except the milkman lost his job because more efficient and cheaper alternatives came about through super markets, which responded quickly and efficiently and took over a lot of mom and pop shops. Guess what, no one FORCED t he milkman to lose their job. It just became cheaper to go the store and buy it yourself.
When alternative, clean energy like solar and wind become as efficient and cheaper than fossil fuels, and those gas-refiners and coal miners lose their jobs, mazeltof, to them. It is efficient and cheaper because the average consumer can now invest into them. But not all countries have the same economic power. So right now, installing 24,000 dollars worth of solar panels on your roof seems like a do-able and actually affordable thing to do in o say Southern California, where the average salary of people is in the upper 60,000s, yeah, that's great. But when you're talking about Habib Habibistan making 5k a YEAR in Tajikistan having to be forced to now buy 24,000 dollars worth of solar equipment then we have a problem.

Here's a clue; you're using AGW as an excuse to force people to change their behavior, purchase things that they may not need or can afford, and force industries through heavy handed regulatory and legislative power to bend over backwards and create a product that YOU feel is better for everyone. So who's the authoritarian now?

believe that they have the right and the ethical responsibility to dictate how other people behave, on individual and societal levels, because YOU feel so guilty about AGW.

That's what the govern in government means lmao. Do you really think every regulation was created by unanimous agreement? The government also wants to dictate how long it takes you to go to work and how you behave when you approach a school bus stop sign because WE feel so guilty about the children that could be in car accidents. Its crazy…

Guess what, no one FORCED t he milkman to lose their job. It just became cheaper to go the store and buy it yourself.

What employer in their right mind is going to continue to pay for a declining service? If you want to continue doing job, but you can't and wont be paid for it. You are forced. You're grasping at straws. (That is, more so than before at least.)

Honestly I am not even going to bother with the rest of your post, not only is hard to decipher what you are saying and what the context is. But you seem to have this weird paranoia thing with the government and a conspiracy theorist vibe going on or is it just me….?

"That’s what the govern in government means lmao." Right, because governments don't get their power from the consent of the people…and by proxy if the people are grieved by the government they can then pursue legal redress – isn't that the ideal? And considering that our government, and hell, the western governments in general have been founded and operate on the concept of high individual freedom, liberty, and participation in the electoral system wouldn't one think that maybe, just maybe, the government's role isn't control your daily activities? Or, were you thinking of an authoritarian state, one that uses it's government force to force down morality that you may or may not agree?

"Do you really think every regulation was created by unanimous agreement? The government also wants to dictate how long it takes you to go to work and how you behave when you approach a school bus stop sign because WE feel so guilty about the children that could be in car accidents. Its crazy…" And you agree whole-hardidly that it has every right to do so because of some sort of grace? Regulations were created often at be hest of special interest groups including industries themselves to use legislative power to stiffle competition. Other times regulations were created to prevent worker exploitation, or guarantee worker's rights. In the case you brought up of controlling how long it takes you to go to work, well, strangely enough by the 1930s when the government dictated the 40 hour work week, it kind of already was there. Interestingly, it dropped from about a 90 hour work week a hundred years prior.

"What employer in their right mind is going to continue to pay for a declining service? If you want to continue doing job, but you can’t and wont be paid for it. You are forced. You’re grasping at straws. (That is, more so than before at least.)" You're forced by market pressure, you either compete or you don't and lose your business. The method you prescribe is that instead of market pressure and individual effort, the government should come in and force them, against their will probably, to do something that it may or may not even have the full knowledge of doing so.

Did you, at all, read history? Did you, at all, take any kind of civic classes as it pertains to the US or Western Democracy? I mean, you complained about conservative authoritarians, but you are literaly advocating authoritarianism.

I'd like to know what "read(ing) history" means. Like, from where? The United States does have a founding history of individual liberties and that is highly ingrained legally and culturally but people misunderstand what this means. Government at every level has police power and it has been validated by the courts over and over again. Look at zoning ordinances. Look at eminent domain, or the Clean Air Act, or the power of states to tax and the power of cities to plan subdivisions. Look at the power of the government to tax, or to manage public spaces and to stop an adult video store from being constructed near a school. For that matter, look at the government's authority to decide that a trailer park cannot be constructed right next to your nearest business district. As for the market, the agriculture market is heavily distorted. The stock market is heavily regulated. Should every institution be thrown out because any use of police power is "authoritarian"? By such a loose standard the only defensible position is anarchy, which I'm guessing you don't really want to propose. The United States isn't anarchist and by no reasonable interpretation of American democracy is what Windy saying "authoritarian", that's a serious abuse of the term and it's denigrating to American legal tradition.

India prefers to call it climate imperialism.

{ “By acknowledging climate change it means that these industries are put under strict deadlines to do something, which means they will be forced to invest more money into green energy research and come up with a better solution otherwise we rely only on the government funded research which is being bullied by the public by climate change deniers.” }

The government funded models have been proven wrong and continue to be proven wrong by actual observations, what they predicted was completely off base and isn't what we see happening at all. Why is this so hard for you? You're hellbent on buying into government propaganda, but I guess that's proof it works.

The government has been subsidizing green energy production for decades, they're subsidizing the wrong industry. They subsidize wind farms and solar plants which fail because they literally can't use the energy they produce ( how quickly we all seem to put the Solyndra Scandal out of mind, ) when they need to be subsidizing research and innovation in batteries and the production of solar panels and everything else we need to efficiently USE the energy. Those subsidies and other tax credits received in exchange for developing and implementing new infrastructure, not threats and fines and regulations that come with stacks of paperwork, are what encourages corporate innovation.

They subsidize and penalize the wrong industries because they're acting based on faulty research that itself is based on faulty models which were programmed to show a causation between CO2 increasing and the temperature rising when there has been absolutely no correlation between the two on their own at any time during this planet's history, as the observational data graph which I have posted multiple times already shows.

& that only addresses what they've been subsidizing in terms of energy production, they've been completely ignoring other polluting actions (and fuckups by their own environmental agencies!) which cause immediate changes to local weather and the local ecosystem, but hey if it's not a billion dollar corporation emitting CO2 which can be taxed and fined, the government has no interest in hearing about it.

All of those powers you mentioned have their limitations, and when those powers become abused the people in this country have the power to elect representatives that would change things. Not everyone consents to these laws and institutions, and sometimes these institutions go too far, hence why people in this country have the right to combat those laws. When they become abusive, when they become tyrannical you can bet that they are then authoritarian. Just because government exercises these rights and institutions doesn't mean it's justified because it can. It's justified because it has the consent of the people, the people who elected the representatives that implemented these institutions.

Should industries be indiscriminately regulated to death because government has the authority to do so? We only have to look at the countries that adopted these kinds of economic models to see where that leads.

Justifying government authority over people because you believe Government is just is making an authoritarian argument. That is what I interpreted from what Wing said.

Can you provide one example of those limitations? At what point do you draw the line between legitimate democracy and authoritarianism? You seem to draw a very thin line. You aren't providing any criteria, just vague descriptions of when they go too far. How is any example that I listed not "tyranny" if you think that the possibility of any group, no matter the size, combatting a law is sufficient to deem it unjustified? Take eminent domain takings for the sake of economic revitalization that some of those affected disagree? Tyranny or upheld as constitutional? You tell me!

Sure, take eminent domain, not only is there a compromise between respecting private property rights, as in that the person who's property is being seized by eminent domain is has to be compensated, but the land itself has to be "used" by the public. Compensation has to be just, so usually that means market value. Furthermore, for the government to do that it would have to go through legislative process that gives the power to do this to certain groups. On top of that limitation, the US Supreme Court has upheld consistent that the term "public use" is to be defined by states themselves. Some people in the US argue that it still undermines the core private property rights, and they have, within the US framework to fight for that kind of change in understanding of how eminent domain is used.

Take zoning laws for example, which although cities use to plan expansion and city construction and use still are continually subject to private lawsuits. So for example, if the city decides to change the zoning that your property is on you can actually prove that it is detrimental to you, and it trumps the zoning law: “The presumption that a governmental zoning decision is valid can be overcome only by a plaintiff landowner’s showing by clear and convincing evidence that the zoning classification is a significant detriment to him, and is insubstantially related to the public health, safety, morality and welfare. Only after both of these showings are made is a governing authority required to come forward with evidence to justify a zoning ordinance as reasonably related to the public interest. If a plaintiff landowner fails to make a showing by clear and convincing evidence of a significant detriment and an insubstantial relationship to the public welfare, the landowner’s challenge to the zoning ordinance fails.”

Cities and States employ public police force to enforce laws, it is true. However there have been cases in the US for use of Private Police which actually was more cost effective, and efficient, but ran afoul of local public police unions, which are a powerful force indeed. No where is it written in our constitution that police can only and ONLY be done by the Government.

The Clean Air Act is also limited to it's powers by congress and what congress allots to it: http://www.wri.org/blog/2010/11/what-are-limits-epa-clean-air-act-holds-answers

As far as drawing a line, I have a big gray area about what constitutes as absolute authoritarian state. The US is not near it, mostly because our government is inefficient, the vast majority of it's citizenry have some levels of animosity of too much government encroachment into their lives, and they have a healthy level of suspicion on government authority in general. That's not what worries me.

What worries me is that people like Wind who believe that government power is justified by the fact that it is government. Or the belief that government powers can have no limit, and are justifiable. That is a dangerous line of thinking because that is the kind of reasoning that justifies authoritarianism.

To the extreme scale, you can make the argument that any government that has a monopoly on force is by nature authoritarian. But I am not that extreme in that view, and I don't consider myself an Anarchist. I believe private individuals and private institutions can do most of what government can, better, cheaper, and more efficiently, and I also believe that market forces are the most just means of pushing forward change, as it doesn't force anyone by some statute or legislation to behave a certain way, or buy products that they don't need (like Affordable Health Care Act).

There are some actual examples of what our current government is doing is authoritarian and unjust; letting police seize other people's property without warrants, is an example. Wouldn't you agree that this is an unjust practice? Wouldn't you think that it is tyrannical?

Note that I'm responding to key points here, a lot of what you said is, of course, something we can agree upon.

The US Supreme Court has upheld consistent that the term “public use” is to be defined by states themselves. Some people in the US argue that it still undermines the core private property rights, and they have, within the US framework to fight for that kind of change in understanding of how eminent domain is used.

I'm not 100% sure what you're getting at here. It is up for the states to define but they have to meet a federal floor. States can only go further in the direction of protecting individual property rights, not in the other direction. While the "correct" nature of property values is debated, I don't think that the court's decision to differ to the legislatures and the power they vest in municipalities to determine what qualifies as public use changes the fact that the power exists and that one can torture definitions as much as they want to claim that eminent domain is overreach, much like conservatives did with the plaintiff of the Kelo case.

Take zoning laws for example, which although cities use to plan expansion and city construction and use still are continually subject to private lawsuits.

Yes, but there are rather well established limits defining what zoning laws can and cant' do. While there will always be new legal ground, that isn't really material. It is still the government deciding what people can and can't do with land, and that affects property owners. Clearly there is a difference between what is overreaching and what is not overreaching, but why I drew the comparison to begin with is that what Windy suggested seems analogous to what the courts have ruled zoning laws can do.

Cities and States employ public police force to enforce laws, it is true. However there have been cases in the US for use of Private Police which actually was more cost effective…

You've lost me here. By "police power" I refer to the power of government to act and enforce laws. If it involves private police or not is irrelevant. I could have used a more common term and that's fine, I just want to make clear that this has nothing to do with that issue.

The Clean Air Act is also limited to it’s powers by congress and what congress allots to it

Yes! We can argue over how far the law as written can apply, and the SCOTUS has punished the EPA for overstepping the law, but would you argue that a CAA expansion couldn't take some of the action that Windy discussed? What legal challenge could be brought then?

That is a dangerous line of thinking because that is the kind of reasoning that justifies authoritarianism.

If you yourself say that there is a huge grey area then that isn't very helpful for making any determination. Perhaps with more time we could work out some of that grey area in this discussion but you aren't exactly giving a specific reasoning against Windy's proposals. What if the government claimed to have a compelling interest and drafted a law that was not unconstitutional? We could call it regulatory, burdensome or whatever but what is the reason for calling it authoritarian? What makes any other law not susceptible to the same slippery slope that you're suggesting exists here?

But I am not that extreme in that view

You have my thanks, I was afraid that you were going to be an ancap. I won't make a sweeping claim that the market is wholly unjust or inefficient but, when it it comes to environmental issues there are an awful lot that exist and that can't, in my view, be explained by government intervention in the market in a manner that is satisfying (we can agree to disagree here, it isn't what I want to argue right now).

There are some actual examples of what our current government is doing is authoritarian and unjust; letting police seize other people’s property without warrants, is an example. Wouldn’t you agree that this is an unjust practice? Wouldn’t you think that it is tyrannical?

That's slightly too abstract for me, with a generous enough definition of "seize" or "unjust" we could call taxes, the collection of criminal evidence-excluding abuse, zoning depriving an owner of potential value or many other just practices "tyrannical". In a more general sense then yes, I would consider it tyrannical. I think you'd struggle to find a person who doesn't think that some action of the government today is tyrannical. I'd argue that the concentration of urban toxic waste sites in minority neighborhoods is the tyranny of the market, but many others would disagree.

In all though, how can we determine that what Windy proposes is tyrannical? Would it depend on a debate over if the seriousness of environmental issues warrants the policies made in response to them?

I’m not 100% sure what you’re getting at here. It is up for the states to define but they have to meet a federal floor. States can only go further in the direction of protecting individual property rights, not in the other direction. While the “correct” nature of property values is debated, I don’t think that the court’s decision to differ to the legislatures and the power they vest in municipalities to determine what qualifies as public use changes the fact that the power exists and that one can torture definitions as much as they want to claim that eminent domain is overreach, much like conservatives did with the plaintiff of the Kelo case.

The power certainly exists, but it's extent can be altered. Some, like Donald Trump support and like the idea of eminent domain. Others, like Ron Paul do not. There are many people in the US that feel that the extent of how far eminent domain should be used should be highly curtailed. I happen to agree with that side of the aisle because I personally value individual property rights as fundamental. If for example the government goes on an eminent domain spree and it gains headline traction, like government over-reach in people's privacy, it can gain a lot of support towards my position, since it would cause a lot of unrest and grievances. The limitations of eminent domain exist precisely because our government and politicians are keenly aware of what happens when there is an over-reach. However, believing that the government should have the power of eminent domain because it is government is essentially making an argument for authoritarian state. There should be a limit to such powers, and we are lucky to enjoy them.

Clearly there is a difference between what is overreaching and what is not overreaching, but why I drew the comparison to begin with is that what Windy suggested seems analogous to what the courts have ruled zoning laws can do.

I don't think Windy made mention of zoning laws. What caught my ire is this particular statement "That’s what the govern in government means lmao", essentially she's justifying government authority on the grounds that it is government, there fore it has the authority. Why there are limitations to that authority, or how those limitations are often challenged is irrelevant, which is why I contest that authority is derived from the consent of the people.

If you yourself say that there is a huge grey area then that isn’t very helpful for making any determination. Perhaps with more time we could work out some of that grey area in this discussion but you aren’t exactly giving a specific reasoning against Windy’s proposals.

What proposals? She is justifying government authority on the grounds that it is government, therefore, it has the authority. Me questioning that authority and believing that authority should come at the consent of the people evidently makes me, paranoid government conspiracy guy, according to Windy. Having a distrust of the extent the intentions of government isn't paranoia. It's vigilance.

As far as grey areas, let me be more clear. Me and my family came from the USSR. I have a firm grasp of what I would define as authoritarian because I have, to an extent, and my family to a larger extent, experienced it first hand. I can measure American policy against USSR authoritarian state, and come to the conclusion as to how close we are getting to that point. Hearing someone making an argument that government should have the right to control a large section of our economy or industry, or have the right to control our lives and what we can and cannot do within reason, just because they are government is very similar to the kind of hard-patriotism I heard from people back in the good ol' USSR, where government cannot do wrong.

You have my thanks, I was afraid that you were going to be an ancap. I won’t make a sweeping claim that the market is wholly unjust or inefficient but, when it it comes to environmental issues there are an awful lot that exist and that can’t, in my view, be explained by government intervention in the market in a manner that is satisfying (we can agree to disagree here, it isn’t what I want to argue right now).

To me, the ultimate ideal is Anarcho-Capitalism. But I've always believed it's important to have a fundamental core view, and then find rational, and practical solutions build on top of that view. Like a base to a house. So I consider myself more libertarian. However, even there, I believe that libertarian ideals are not enough to deal with the realities of our country, and the world, so even though I very much agree with the fundamental viewpoints, I also believe strongly that we need to be practical about those viewpoints. I don't believe we could and should achieve a total Libertarian paradise overnight, as a lot of people aren't capable, mentally, or economically, to deal with it. To even accomplish what a lot of people on my side want would require a revolution, just like a lot of self-professed communists and socialists. And those revolutions, from my viewpoint end up always more violent, and destructive, and usually result in an authoritarian violent regime that tries to purge the counter-revolutionary views. I would rather support policies, politicians, and laws that point towards that direction gradually, i.e more freedom of trade, stronger private property laws, less regulation on many industries, and end to unwarranted licensing (which I give total hoorah! to President Obama for also tackling this issue), end of the war on drugs, marriage equality (Ideally getting government out of it entirely). So I guess in some ways I consider myself a "Pragmatic Libertarian".

That’s slightly too abstract for me, with a generous enough definition of “seize” or “unjust” we could call taxes, the collection of criminal evidence-excluding abuse, zoning depriving an owner of potential value or many other just practices “tyrannical”. In a more general sense then yes, I would consider it tyrannical. I think you’d struggle to find a person who doesn’t think that some action of the government today is tyrannical. I’d argue that the concentration of urban toxic waste sites in minority neighborhoods is the tyranny of the market, but many others would disagree.

There are many on my side that stand by defiantly that Taxation is theft. And on a fundamental level it is. But as I said. Im practical about this, I understand the necessity of taxation for now. But that also means t hat I believe that we should all have universally low taxes. What I would consider fair is 1/5th of your income should go to the government, at most. Progressive taxes don't bother me as long as the cap is at 20-25%. But we have a system where practically speaking, the bottom 20% actually not only do not pay any income taxes, but are actually subsidized, by about 2-3 billion a year.

In all though, how can we determine that what Windy proposes is tyrannical? Would it depend on a debate over if the seriousness of environmental issues warrants the policies made in response to them?

By her arguing that government has the authority to do what it does on the grounds that it is government. I originally questioned the justification government has to force you to consume a particular product or service. I questioned the justification government has to force industries, to seriously undermine themselves in the name of a science that is still up for debate. Her response is that government should do that because that's what government does. She's not tyrannical. Her arguments justify tyranny.