(feeling all smug since I just watered my new trees, and haven’t used an ounce of fossil fuels for over 24 hours now)
Yes, the pump is powered by nuclear energy. So is everything else.
No, I think it’s tripe to use public sanitation investment as an example proving that a global campaign to restrict energy to thwart global warming is reasonable and do-able. The incentives are totally different. You might as well argue that we can find the political will to stop global warming because we found the political will to buy televisions and iPads.
If I wasn’t clear before: Public sanitation was an immediate benefit to the people being asked to pay for it. THAT is why the rapid changeover happened. The same thing happened when cars came along - the public happily paid for massive infrastructure changes - because they received immediate, tangible benefits from it.
Climate change mitigation, on the other hand, requires immediate sacrifice from people who will never see its benefits, or if they do it won’t be for decades. There is no precedent at all for any kind of global agreement along those lines, and all the evidence we have says that it will never happen. Hell, just look at what happened with the Kyoto treaty: Not only did the signatories fail to meet their commitments, they were worse than the U.S. when it comes to CO2 increases.
Understand this simple point: Countries do not enter agreements that are against their best interests, unless they are doing so for immediate political benefit and intend to break them as soon as it’s desirable to do so. And it’s going to be damned hard to convince Russia that it’s in her best interest to restrict fossil fuels, since Russia is a cold country that makes a significant part of its income from fossil fuel exports. It’s going to be damned hard to convince China or India that spending more for energy is a good idea when they are in the midst of a shift from a low-energy agrarian economy to a high-energy modern economy.
And if you can’t get big players like that aboard, all your taxes, caps, and credits will be for naught. Just like opposing the Keystone pipeline did not keep all that Canadian dirty oil in the ground - it just shifted it to China, where pollution controls are lax and the energy footprint of products is higher. You probably made the problem worse by opposing the Keystone pipeline, just as the green movement made climate change worse by supporting ethanol when the science and economics of it made no sense. Now you’ve got a permanent industry subsidized with billions of dollars annually - one that has woven its rent-seeking fingers through the Congress and is now squeezing money from taxpayers to line its own pockets while doing nothing to help the environment.
You know, just because ‘experts’ say something is true doesn’t make it so. The economy is a complex adaptive system, and honest economists will admit their limitations when it comes to predicting how it will respond to inputs - especially decades into the future. Have you already forgotten Christina Romer’s claim that the stimulus would keep unemployment below 8%? Would you like to go back and look at how wrong economists in 2006 were in predicting what the economy would look like in 2014? Or how wrong they were in 1996 in predicting what the economy would look like in 2006? Or any other economic forecast well into the future?
Plenty of ‘experts’ in the 70’s said that there would be global famines by now. In fact, I think you could say there was even a consensus that overpopulation was a massive threat and that action needed to be taken.
Anyone who says he can predict what the economy will look like in 20 or 50 years based on some product or technology today is selling something. We can’t even predict what it will be in the next quarter.
Just for fun, go look at how many times the headline for economic news contains the word ‘unexpectedly’.
So you keep saying. Yet last November was globally the warmest on record, December wastied for third warmest on record, and the entire year of 2013 was tied with 2003 for fourth-warmest on record. The warmest year on record was 2006. So there’s no absence of recent warming; saying that the temperature gradient for the past ~15 years is less than what it was during most of the latter half of the 20th century is not the same as claiming that the temperature has not been increasing. But what is also misleading about the line of argument is the implication that there is something fundamentally wrong with energy budget calculations or even AGW theory itself; the fact is, estimates of climate sensitivity have not changed, and CO2 forcings have only increased. It’s a line of argument that seems to suggest that its proponents are looking for this sort of explanation. 
(Bold added to emphasize cherry picking)
The IPCC and it’s feeder organizations are looking for an explanation as to why the global temp has “paused”. Have you explained your reasoning to them? Maybe they really don’t need to be spending all the time and effort looking for something that you so easily dismiss?
No, other people do disagree. Many researchers (although I have no idea why they must be “college level educators,” is that important?) would agree that total solar irradiation and consequent surface insolation has remained essentially constant over the past decades.
Why are the researchers who support your argument more reliable than those who disagree? Serious question.
I am not a “warmer” whatever that is.
I have never said anything of the sort.
Since I have never made the claim, I will assume you’re not being deliberately insulting.
I have no blogs, idiot or otherwise.
I just want to know why the researchers who support your argument are automatically more reliable than those who disagree?
Clean air and less contamination are intermediate benefits too, you are not very convincing there. As pointed before a lot of unrest caused by crop issues and failures due to droughts are already affecting many. What Richard Alley and other refer to is that there is no good excuse to prevent or stop the needed changes.
Unless you assume that forever all the people will be kept in the dark about the need to do more efforts to control our emissions what you are talking about is just an affirmation of a self fulfilling bad prophesy (people will not ever willfully pay for the change), I prefer to be more optimist, but what you will get is that people that you support will be ignored then as they are more a part of the problem rather than part of the solution.
As Scott Denning pointed at a Heartland Institute meeting:
You have it backwards, and sort of a strawman as well.
I don’t have an argument, I challenged the “scientists” who claim the sun hasn’t changed, does not influence the earth’s climate, and insist all warming comes from CO2. Those three things are false, and it’s common knowledge that they are.
It’s why textbooks and teachers have used the solar variation to explain the changes of the last two thousand years, by noting the sun changes, and it influences the earth’s climate.
It’s the asshats that want to change the story that face the burden of proof.
You seem to have forgotten about the ant experts already. 
Or how off the mark you were with the green jobs, not to mention how you ignored the republican moves to prevent their growth.
Or the risks for not making and effort now for that matter, one of the Economists Richard Alley consulted was William D. Nordhaus.
The beautiful, wondrous irony of FXMastermind accusing someone of having something “backwards”. Haven’t you been called out often enough for making ridiculous, nonsensical and totally incorrect claims? About six times in the past two days, as I recall.
And talk about a straw man. No one here – and certainly not I – has ever claimed that “the sun hasn’t changed, does not influence the earth’s climate, and insist all warming comes from CO2.” No one. What I have pointed out is that the scientific understanding of solar variations differs rather markedly from your frankly incompetent other-worldly interpretation of material that you clearly don’t understand, just like you quoted an utterly irrelevant description of seasonal changes in subtropical jet streams in support of your ludicrous and backwards claim about climate-induced changes in polar jets. Frankly you seem to alternate between being completely wrong and just spouting gibberish that makes no sense at all. The statements from the IPCC that I quoted are from the AR5 WG1 assessment which is supported by approximately (at rough count) about 13,440 cited research papers and represents the current state of scientific knowledge on the relevant subject matter, and while neither the science nor the IPCC is perfect, I would consider them and the several thousand scientists who contribute to them a good deal more credible than the track record of your opinions so far.
What did I “dismiss”? What “cherry-picking”? I’m pointing out that it’s still warming (does anyone seriously disagree with that?) but that for awhile now the temperature gradient has been less than in the latter half of the 20th century overall (does anyone seriously disagree with that?). The latest research findings retain basically the same estimates of climate sensitivity as before – since climate equilibrium takes millennia, not decades, needless to say the scientific evidence for changes in ECS estimates would have to be a lot more substantive than a ten-year temperature trend.
Denialists would like us to believe that the past 10 or 15 years is indicative of some monumentally transformational new trend. It isn’t. It’s just barely long enough that there’s some merit in trying to identify the signature of a dominant heat sink, if only to improve the short-term performance of climate models. And I say “heat sink” because there’s been no corresponding change in the radiative transfer balance that would otherwise account for it.
P.S.- what are these “feeder organizations” of which you speak? Perhaps you refer to the 14,000 or so research papers that the IPCC has drawn on for its current WG1 assessment? Are climate scientists now corrupt co-conspirators with the IPCC? Wait – they always have been, right? 
I think Newt is just upset that climate change has overtaken serial adultery as “the greatest challenge to mankind”, which leaves Newt pretty much dethroned in the realm of Great Causes. Admittedly he personified a relatively unpopular side of serial adultery, but still, he was a major figure there.
Newt is forgetting what he was saying in 2007:
I was aware of it via Barry Bickmore’s long video of Bickmore explaining why his conservatism caused his early dismissal about the issue, and how Bickmore saw the evidence and concluded that it was overwhelming.
(How to avoid the truth about climate change)(Long)
In that presentation made at Utah Valley university, Bickmore showed this clip** about Newt Gingrich agreeing with John Kerry back in 2007**:
Sadly, I have to conclude that Newt has been marinating in the conservative news bubble for too much.
I consider climate change to be the greatest moral issue of all time. We’ve had wars and genocides in which millions and millions have died. Climate change is leading to the end of the earth and the deaths of all life forms.
It’s the ultimate tragedy to not work to prevent this. And, why aren’t we doing so? Because the oil and coal and gas companies are the richest companies in the world. And, sadly, they care less about the earth than about their $$$$.
Can’t tell if sarcasm or not
Has the global temperature actually started climbing again or is the IPCC just hoping it will?
But, you can read the whole report here; you tell us.
This old information makes the issue really funny.
I searched the thread and there has been no mention of dimming.This is hysterical: - YouTube
psik
I mentioned contrails in a different thread, but most people are contrail deniers, so yeah, it won’t matter at all.