And it makes me wonder.
Cite? As I understand it, scientists currently hold that the earth would not be warming at this point in the Holocene without anthropogenic influence, but instead would be undergoing slight cooling.
What makes you think “it’s not surprising at all that the Earth is warming up”? AFAICT, the earth wouldn’t be warming at present without anthropogenic GHGs.
I only skim Mr. Stone’s posts, so missed this.
So the invisible hand of the market, operating via short-term price fluctuations, is the way to address long-term climate change!! 
This self-parody of right-wing “thought” is too funny even for BBQ Pit; is there a Comedy Forum?
That’s not what I said. I said that it so happens that the CO2 emission reductions that have happened in the recent past are driven by market forces. I didn’t say this was the solution to the problem. The economy takes a random walk, and all you can see is where it’s been.
Besides, the CO2 emissions market is broken due to externalities. So I don’t deny the possibility that government could improve the efficiency of the market through tariff interventions or other mechanisms. I just haven’t seen a credible plan to do so. You know, it’s one thing to want something, and another to be actually able to do it. Governments are great at coming up with new things to do, but they aren’t very good at execution. So let’s see your plan, and we can debate it and see if it holds together. You want my money, so show me how you’re going to do it.
And this snotty little remark belongs in the pit.
Huh. I thought there was a slight positive natural forcing. It looks like the evidence is for a flat or slightly declining temperature from natural forcing. My bad.
In any event, it doesn’t change my point, on which we both agree: The science on human contribution to global warming is solid enough that it should be the null hypothesis. Opponents of global warming have the burden of proof now. But like I also said, this applies only to the basic science, and not to, say, an argument over whether a carbon tariff is a good idea.
A simple “carbon tax” would be a good start. What’s your view on that?
Sorry if I took your comment out of context – as I say I only skim your posts. Given your hugely misleading comments about liberal views on nuclear energy and your peculiar discussion of bombing or blockading China (#99 in the world by per capita emissions) rather than addressing U.S. emissions (#1 in the world), you certainly seem affiliated more with the “Deniers and Apologists” than the problem solvers.
Sorry if you took offense at my snotty little remark. I thought you were a fan of “colorful language.”
Please don’t cite dubious CBO reports as fact. We all know that they analyze based upon their inputs. You didn’t provide any information about their inputs for this report.
I’m not interested in your evasion of the board rules against insulting posters via sarcasm
Please do not quote statements I did not make; I consider that to be dishonest.
When does China get addressed? When they climb to #55? To 25? In the top 10? Not until they surpass America in per capita emissions?
You mean when should China address China’s emissions? China already does seem to take the climate change problem very seriously. Perhaps they don’t take the problem seriously enough, but they take it more seriously than U.S. does.
The U.S. still emits much more than China per capita and it is wrong, as some in this very thread have done, to use Chinese emissions as an excuse to defer addressing U.S.'s much higher emissions.
The un-farmeability of the world’s hot deserts is linked to lack of water and soil quality; it’s not a matter of temperature.
That sounds scholarly.
Interesting answer, until one figures out that your “links” are not links to anything.
Here is an expert on farming and climate supporting the “anthropogenic climate change” theory. According to he/she/it, farming apparently has nothing to do with temperature. This is the ignorance we’re dealing with.
Lack of water is a *function *of temperature. To give you a practical illustration of this, Kansas gets about 750mm of rainfall a year, and is considered some of the better agricultural land in the country. Contrast that with Northern Australia or Central Africa, where 750mm of rainfall won’t grow any crops at all and is even considered marginal as *grazing *land.
It’s all down to evaporative demand. If the temperature is high, plants lose more water from their leaves, and that needs to be made up with more moisture from the soil. So as temperatures increase you need more rainfall to make land arable. Once you get into truly tropical temperatures your farmland is largely restricted to regions with >900mm of rainfall, which in the US would mean that anywhere west of Chicago-St. Louis would be relegated to grazing land.
IOW, the “un-farmeability” of hot deserts is in large part a matter of temperature. You’re right that water plays a role, but water is limiting in warm areas where it is not in colder regions.
Another witch-hunt. Should we really believe than any drought this area experiences is due to climate change? It’s ridiculous on its face.
Sorry if underlining for emphasis is now considered old-fashioned.
But what browser do you use? Links should have a different color (or other visual appearance) than underlined text. I’m sorry if you have a defective browser environment, and had to waste one second moving the pointer so its appearance would tell you whether a link was present.
But at least you made some response. We’re still waiting to hear what Mr. Stone thinks about carbon tax.
I use Chrome. Can’t say I’m appreciative of your sopping wet sarcasm, nonetheless.
I think this sums up the basis for most of the skepticism regarding AGW. Some people are so wary/afraid of the government that they are willing to ignore the scientific community and pretend there is no problem.
nm
Well, of course. If you sideline Team A entirely, then of course Team B will be the only team that scores. It’s awfully hard for cap-and-trade, in conjunction with carbon tariffs, to reduce CO2 emissions if legislation to implement them is voted down.
Speaking of which, let me know when market forces - other than a global recession - actually reduce emissions, rather than reduce the rate at which CO2 emissions increase.
We didn’t lobby to stop the shift to natural gas. We lobbied to stop the fouling of water supplies, and the man-made generation of earthquakes.
Of course, conservatives are against those profiting from fracking from having to deal with its externalized costs. You guys talk a lot about personal responsibility, but somehow it never applies in situations like these.
Yes, of course I should give examples of something I made no claims about. That’s a perfectly reasonable expectation on your part.
Yeah, I see the breakout of solar and wind power. If I squint real hard, then go to some completely different web page.
Except, well, they did, didn’t they? The absence of the very consequence you claim here is the reason for Solyndra’s failure.
Yer funny. 
Blather.
Recall that the tariffs are to prevent the ‘compliance’ with CO2 goals by shifting CO2 production to other countries, and make no sense in the absence of a domestic carbon tax or cap-and-trade regime. So in the world as it is, carbon tariffs make zero sense - and as a consequence, so does this comment.
Put on your thinking cap for a moment, and try to model such a trade war.
The main relationship between the U.S. and China is that we buy lots of stuff from them: we’re their main export market. So what would they do in a trade war, refuse to export to us? Right now, their biggest problem is all the stuff they’ve produced but can’t sell.
(Yes, we also borrow money from them. But it’s not like the Chinese are responsible for the incredible shrinking Federal bond rates. If they stop buying Treasuries, it won’t exactly cause our borrowing costs to go through the ceiling.)
What global agreement? We’re talking about a tariff. A nation gets to impose tariffs unilaterally.
Also, tariffs are imposed on products from specific countries. And the CO2 output of specific countries is largely a function of how much of what kinds of carbon-based fuel they’re consuming - petroleum, coal, natural gas, wood, whatever. You can look this stuff up.
You don’t need to worry about supply chains. You just hold the exporting country responsible, and let its companies deal with the details.
But everything government does is a bureaucratic nightmare to a conservative, so I guess you have to paint this as one, even if it’s not.
The reason it works is that we’re pretty much everyone’s biggest export market. Not only does China need to sell to us, but so does almost everyone else. (This is an advantage the Kyoto signatories really didn’t have, even collectively - and of course they weren’t instituting controls collectively, but individually.)
No actually, what I was tossing off with a ‘Duuuuuuuh’ was a basic point from Econ 101: if you are a small player in a competitive world, and you raise your prices a little bit, you screw yourself.
a) It’s right there in the box where you quote me. Please read the things you quote, OK? Especially if you’re critiquing them.
b) Do you disagree with that?
Just to repeat myself, the tariffs are to prevent the ‘compliance’ with CO2 goals by shifting CO2 production to other countries, and make no sense in the absence of a domestic carbon tax or cap-and-trade regime.
It’s like asking me what my Plan B is for ensuring a particular speed limit on a road whose construction you’ve prevented.
Maybe not, but when they run out of water, they’ll sure feel dumb.
Good idea! Hand me a brick, willya?
When we’re at the point where anything we do to prevent global warming from becoming self-sustaining is 100% guaranteed to fail, then sure, we should save our money and put it into adapting to a substantially warmer world.
Do you think we’re there yet?