How much do you propose charging people to exhale?
So for how much longer does arguments worthy of the flat earth society will be continued to be pushed forward?
This single line is just Republican echo chamber silliness.
Cite? I’m not aware of any clinical trials investigating IV ascorbic acid for cancer therapy.
That’s a blog post with a pretty lame refutation using cherry-picked data. But note that even the researchers involved are quoted supporting exactly what I stated in my original post:
Who do you believe, the actual researchers or some nameless blogger?
Any back pain from shifting those goalposts? (I referred to plenty of vitamin C research in general and potential IV use in cancer therapy, now you’re griping about clinical trials for IV vitamin C in cancer patients). As it happens, we do have trial evidence (as well as extensive in vitro and in vivo work involving cell cultures and animals).
I regret that the data presented does not support your beliefs.
As for “nameless blogger”, Orac is a cancer surgeon and researcher whose name (Dr. David Gorski) and credentials are hardly a mystery to anyone with rudimentary Google skills.
The bottom line remains: Despite vitamin C not being patentable, it’s gotten plenty of research attention. The results don’t seem to justify more intense activity.
If you’re still clinging to the idea that “natural” treatments don’t get researched because they’re not patentable, I suggest reading up on pharmacognosy, a thriving field.
I’m just going to go with Clark’s first law here: “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.”
When you try to clothe and feed an extra 2 billion people things happen. Time to get rid of some people.
Any volunteers?
If you think that patentability isn’t a huge factor in pharmaceutical companies deciding which drugs get researched, you are seriously deluded:
I have never heard the price co2 like bread argument before. I offered what I thought was a reasonable and original answer. People consume bread. people consume co2.
Measure for measure specifically asked why we don’t price one like the other. We have to eat. We have no choice about it if we are not to die. We have to breathe or die. One costs money. One does not. Measure suggests pricing the other the way we price the one, I ask how much.
In what way am I being unreasonable?
I get the sense you think I am making a political argument of some kind. I’m not. I’m honestly baffled by the republican flat earthier thing. You may as well have just called me a numismatist for all the sense that makes.
I’m cant watch your video right now. Device issue.
I’m not sure I understand this. Is “price” the word you are looking for? Is CO2 pollution? If I dump engine oil in the creek, I get fined for polluting. I don’t think of that as a price. I did something wrong and am being punished. CO2 is naturally abundant in the air. We’ve been creating it since before we had prices. Is Co2 production really an economic process. Am I doing something wrong by producing it? Is breathing different from driving in my car, or burning a log in my fireplace?
Didn’t we make a lot of co2 to produce the bread? That’s not in the price. How much do you think it should cost when you add that in?
Not original, it is just a variation on what the Republicans are going on and it is related to the idea that it is natural, forgetting that the problem is what the scientist in the video told congress (And many more scientists did told congress), but the Republicans are really blockheads on this issue. We are adding into the system more CO2 than nature has put before into the atmosphere for hundreds of thousands of years. And the last time that did happen naturally the oceans did rise a lot and mega droughts were the order of those days, and those natural changes took hundreds of thousands of years for critters to adapt.
The CO2 that we are releasing is the same stuff, only that we are doing it in the blink of an eye compared to the geological record and we are now, thanks to inaction from congress and other governments, on the path to a lot of changes and one party does not even want to recognize the most likely changes that are coming and they are not preparing, nor taking the responsible parties to task. The point is that even if changes are coming we have to control emissions so as to not have to deal with even more extreme changes in the future.
Another attempt at goalpost shifting.
Whatever a factor patentability might be in overall drug development, the fact remains that “natural” substances (vitamin C, plant-derived drugs) are in fact patentable, at least for modifications to the basic molecule(s), delivery systems etc. And plant-based drugs are widely used in evidence-based medicine, for cancer treatment and other purposes.
Since vitamin C and plant-based drugs have been and continue to be the subjects of considerable research, the “natural treatments don’t get researched because they can’t be patented” meme is false.
Whether or not IV vitamin C ever gets much use in cancer treatment outside of the woo setting (don’t bet on it), it won’t be because the Evil Pharma Lizards are ignoring/suppressing it.
As usual you ignore the quotes from the researchers and continue on with delusional thinking that pharmaceutical research is not driven largely by profit potential.
Have fun reading (and parroting) your blogs.
I volunteered all but two of my potential children.
Thank you. They say advice only helps he who gives it, so this probably will only benefit me, but I’d suggest you leave the politics and personalities out of your climate change debates. You’re obviously well informed and very good at explaining this stuff. There’s no reason to beat up Dyson or the Republicans. You’ll turn people off and change the topic from where it should be. I’m not really interested in the politics or whether Dyson is being obtuse.
Anyway, sorry. Now on to what you said.
Questions:
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Do you really think there is any chance that we will slow down or limit the amount of CO2, or even the rate at which it is increasing? I don’t. I think it’s a nonstarter. It seems to me that co2 emissions are pretty much inextricably linked to our industrial consumptive nature, and with a growing population and an industrializing third world,mi see no chance that this will slow down. How might I be wrong? If I’m right aren’t we thinking about this problem the wrong way. Maybe instead of futilely trying to slow down the amount of Co2 we are putting into the air, we could better lend our resources thinking about a way to take out the excess. If we can do that, than maybe we can undo some of the bad effects, and not have to sacrifice our living standards.
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Dyson says that climate change might actually be beneficial. Maybe we lose islands, Bangladesh, New Orleans, and other low lying areas, but maybe we gain Greenland, or dare I say Antarctica, or more of Siberia, because Dyson says that global warming is not so much as making the equator or the dimmers hotter, but having its greatest effect on the most severe cold climates and winters. Climate change is maybe just that, neither good nor bad, but a mix of both. Is this wrong?
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In answer to Measures argument about plants I looked up some cites about increased atmospheric exposure to co2 on plants that were outside. They call them FACE studies. The results seem to be that the plants grow bigger, use a lot more of the available atmospheric CO2, but don’t gain the proportional protein or minerals of their non co2 enhanced controls. This would mean that animals and bugs would have to eat more of them to get the same nutrition. The article didn’t say so, but this sounded to me like a pretty natural mechanism o reduce CO2 in the atmosphere. The plants become more carbon rich and more must be eaten which gets excreted and thus sequestered back in the ground. I am not saying that this is true I just read one article, but it seems to me that this might be one of many effects increased co2 concentrations might have that we can’t model because we just don’t know what is going to happen. Again, maybe it will be a lot worse than what we exoect. On the other hand maybe the plants will just take care of it, and be a buffer that stops atmospheric carbon from ever getting above a certain point no matter how much of it we jump into the atmosphere. It could be either way or any of a dozen other things. Please note that this is not an argument for dumping CO2 into the atmosphere without regard. Quite the contrary, as not knowing we are fucking with a system that we don’t understand.
You are wrong because this is a problem brought by technology and it has technical solutions, the big error is to think that we can not decouple our emissions from progress, if that was the case then we should had lost forests already thanks to acid rain, we should had all rivers full of algae because more people would had used detergent, the solutions in those cases involved cap-n-trade and regulations. But more importantly it was also the efforts of industry in applying those solutions that shows how silly is to assume that this only depends on our individual efforts, they are helpful but the bulk of the change in issues like this comes from industry and regulations, changes that did not end “civilization as we know it”.
It has been pointed in studies that a factor on the Syrian civil war was the huge drought in the region made worse by the current observed warming.
It would be funny but by “coincidence” a lot of conservative people are also opposed to help with the migration of refugees, and that tells me that in the case of Bangladesh alone it is very naive to think that the xenophobia shown by many nations will not cause hundreds of thousands, if not millions of deaths that could be prevented first by doing the right thing now, or later by not accepting that a lot of the adaptation will require that a lot of nativists take a hike.
It is a failing argument for the fact that this was also observed in the past, there were also plants and bugs during the last time the CO2 did go to high levels, it did not stop the rise of the oceans nor the precipitation changes or the collapse of many species.
https://scripps.ucsd.edu/programs/keelingcurve/2013/12/03/what-does-400-ppm-look-like/
The problem of keeping politics out of it is that it is really naive to think that powerful interest groups did not make it a political issue, and twisted the Republican party into becoming a denier’s paradise.
Nothing, because there is a carbon cycle to consider. If you want that expressed in economic terms, buying food (which absorbes CO2) compensates for breathing (which puts it out). The externality is already internalized.
The problem with fossil fuel burning is that you are releasing the congealed carbon of natural activity occuring over millions of years.
Bread was a bit of a red herring. I had in mind massive Soviet subsidies of the same, which led to the stuff being used to feed lifestock. Which was obviously inefficient. As noted earlier, pricing anything costly at zero is bound to be problematic, be it cars, aircraft or chicken wings.
Yeah, they are different: carbon cycle. Burning a log is even different as the burning is quicker than forest growing. I suspect burning bamboo might be closer to breathing.
There are different ways of regulating pollution. One is “Command-control”: the state (be it the Feds or Pennsylvania) tells the power company that they must install scrubbers in their power plants. If they don’t, they will be punished with fines. Another way is to charge the power company per ton of sulfur dioxide they dump in the air. (A third way is to issue permits for sulfur dioxide and allow power companies to trade them among themselves. This also puts a price on sulfur dioxide, albeit indirectly.)
So yeah, price is the word I’m looking for.
The price (or tax) put on greenhouse emissions should be set equal to their marginal damages. You are absolutely correct that artificially setting this price to zero distorts production and consumption decisions across the entire economy. Though some parts are more distorted than others.
I think you might be wrong because you are ignoring the ability of ordinarily functioning marketplaces to allocate scarcity. For a concrete example, you can look at gasoline consumption as a function of the price of oil. You can look at energy consumption per dollar of GDP as countries develop.
Have I made a decisive argument at this level of generality? No. And there are difficult political issues to consider. Still, there’s typically a lot of low lying fruit to be harvested when you are far away from rational pricing. Which we are.
Taking another tack, fossil fuels will run out eventually anyway. It’s true that CO2 pollution will doom us before coal scarcity does. But conceptually it’s a given that humanity will have to ease its way to a lower carbon future. I say we should have and could have started the process 25 years ago.
This point is sometimes missed. Our climate models are getting better. But there’s little controversy about the fundamental science. And to the extent that our models are noisy, the noise works in both directions. Typically greater risks justify greater insurance.
I don’t know whether my house will burn down within the next 10 years: my model is poor. So I buy homeowners insurance, I don’t just ignore the possibility of fires.
Of course, that’s exactly what I’ve been saying. :rolleyes:
As for the meme that vitamin C’s potential goes unrealized because it can’t be patented, somebody forgot to tell all these people.
So you might say that climate change is outside his sphere of knowledge?