118 replies to this topic

[Alex Libman]

[...] Water resources [....] Food shortages [...] weather [...]

The human ability to access food, water, and comfortable shelter mostly depends on technology, which in turn depends on economic growth. The damage to those things done by the ever-changing climate, anthropogenic or not, is a politically convenient excuse, but it is a tiny rounding error compared to the damage done by socialist monopolies that stand in the way of free trade and progress!

Sea levels are expected to rise between 80cm and 2m this century.

Baseless speculation. The sea levels have been slowly rising for thousands of years, and any correlation with anthropogenic emissions remains to be demonstrated. They may rise 0% more or 10% more than in the 20th century, but not 1000% more!

My understanding is that we will run out of fissionable uranium sometime in the next 100 years. If this is wrong please feel free to cite me...

These kinds of estimates are just plain silly. We've barely scratched the surface of the earth's crust! You don't know what new deposits will be discovered in the next 100 years, or what new extraction and refining technologies will be developed, what other elements will be found usable for nuclear reactions, how the nuclear waste efficiency will increase, etc. Imagine worm-like nano-robots crawling through the earth, filtering the soil, retaining useful elements, and then bringing them to the surface. And then there's asteroid mining...

Its this kind of black and white thinking that is the problem. Believing in AGW doesnt suddenly align you with luddite anti-civilisationists...

That may not be your conscious intention, but nonetheless that is the effect.

Nevertheless, fossil fuels will be cheaper until the government taxes them to represent their true cost including externalities

Like I said, the government only stands in the way of the price mechanism encouraging the most rational energy choices. When you have one hand holding a blowtorch trying to set the house on fire and the other hand holding a fire extinguisher, the first thing ya gotta do is turn off the blowtorch!

Edited by Alex Libman, 23 April 2010 - 02:12 AM.

[eternaltraveler]

My understanding is that we will run out of fissionable uranium sometime in the next 100 years. If this is wrong please feel free to cite me...

You are speaking of presently known rich ores where we only use the U 235 as fuel. Presently the cost of uranium makes it a virtual inconsequential piece of the equation in calculating the cost of nuclear energy. A uranium cost many times as much would remain economical, and you're right, we still have a century of the very cheapest and easiest to access uranium ore available or 3000 years worth if we use breeder reactors or fast neutron reactors. Keep in mind uranium is as common in the earth's crust as tin.

Here is an old article I read maybe 10 years ago. Short sweet and too the point.

http://www-formal.st...ress/cohen.html

Edited by eternaltraveler, 23 April 2010 - 02:28 AM.

[RighteousReason]

Bend over -- here it comes again.

http://www.humaneven...le.php?id=36633

Senate Democrats Put Reconciliation for Cap and Trade National Energy Tax in Budget Language

Senate Democrats have included language in their 2011 budget resolution that would allow Democrats to try to ram through the massive cap and trade tax increase with only 51 votes in the Senate, according to a report in The Hill newspaper today.

[RighteousReason]

"Fear of AGW provides a way to engage everyone in the movement. Socialists of all stripes no longer have to spew Marxist notions that turn most people off; now, they can talk the science of global warming and hurricanes and massive floods and such, and, using fear, trample the average guy into their socialist goals of stifling capitalism, growth, and having the government take over the economy through this environmental back-door." - A Layman's Guide to Anthropogenic (Man-Made) Global Warming

"No matter if the science is all phony, there are collateral environmental benefits ... Climate change provides the greatest chance to bring about justice and equality in the world." - Christine Stewart, Canadian Environment Minister

[Alex Libman]

"No matter if the science is all phony, there are collateral environmental benefits ... Climate change provides the greatest chance to bring about justice and equality in the world." - Christine Stewart, Canadian Environment Minister

Quote of the (new) century!

Edited by Alex Libman, 23 April 2010 - 03:24 AM.

[platypus]

[...] Water resources [....] Food shortages [...] weather [...]

The human ability to access food, water, and comfortable shelter mostly depends on technology, which in turn depends on economic growth.

Growing food for billions requires good soils and dependable rainfall over them. If climate-change alters rainfall patterns like monsoons etc. the resulting food shortages can be severe.

Sea levels are expected to rise between 80cm and 2m this century.

Baseless speculation. The sea levels have been slowly rising for thousands of years, and any correlation with anthropogenic emissions remains to be demonstrated. They may rise 0% more or 10% more than in the 20th century, but not 1000% more!

The response of ice-caps to warming is highly nonlinear, so your argument does not hold. The ice-streams in Greenland and parts of Antarctica have alread sped up drastically in just a decade.

Like I said, the government only stands in the way of the price mechanism encouraging the most rational energy choices. When you have one hand holding a blowtorch trying to set the house on fire and the other hand holding a fire extinguisher, the first thing ya gotta do is turn off the blowtorch!

Government support is needed to fund projects where the possible pay-off is decades in the future. Markets cannot deal with such long-term issues effectively.

[JLL]

Yeah because bureaucrats have the ability to think decades ahead!

[Alex Libman]

Growing food for billions requires good soils and dependable rainfall over them. If climate-change alters rainfall patterns like monsoons etc. the resulting food shortages can be severe.

Growing food requires neither soil nor rainfall, but that's getting too far ahead of the issue. A light probability of a fraction of a degree of warming for several decades simply isn't the catastrophe the alarmist political agenda wants it to be.

The response of ice-caps to warming is highly nonlinear, so your argument does not hold.

Yes, and if a giant comet hits the earth then we're even more screwed, but the likelihood of those events happening is very remote.

The ice-streams in Greenland and parts of Antarctica have alread sped up drastically in just a decade.

False. Icecaps are a complex system that involves some ice being added and some removed all the time. They're only showing you a part of the cycle.

Government support is needed to fund projects where the possible pay-off is decades in the future. Markets cannot deal with such long-term issues effectively.

Yes, people investing money for their retirement, for their (grand)children's college fund, or for their "cryonic resuscitation fund" are far more shortsighted than politicians elected to 4-year terms...

Edited by Alex Libman, 23 April 2010 - 10:46 AM.

[platypus]

Growing food for billions requires good soils and dependable rainfall over them. If climate-change alters rainfall patterns like monsoons etc. the resulting food shortages can be severe.

Growing food requires neither soil nor rainfall, but that's getting too far ahead of the issue. A light probability of a fraction of a degree of warming for several decades simply isn't the catastrophe the alarmist political agenda wants it to be.

Disruption of weather patterns and loss of top soil to dust storms etc. would be a catastrophe to a world that can barely feed itself now.

The ice-streams in Greenland and parts of Antarctica have alread sped up drastically in just a decade.

False. Icecaps are a complex system that involves some ice being added and some removed all the time. They're only showing you a part of the cycle.

Your source is so clueless that it even mixes sea ice with glaciers . I'm talking about ice-caps and ice-sheets, i.e. huge glaciers. Historical records show that sea-level rise of 2 meters a century is certainly not out of the question when the ice-sheets start to react. The West Antarctic Ice-Sheet (WAIS) is inherently unstable and could raise the global sea-level by metres if it disintegrates.

[platypus]

Yes, people investing money for their retirement, for their (grand)children's college fund, or for their "cryonic resuscitation fund" are far more shortsighted than politicians elected to 4-year terms...

Long-term public funding is needed for basic research for example.

[Alex Libman]

Disruption of weather patterns and loss of top soil to dust storms etc. would be a catastrophe to a world that can barely feed itself now.

The world can feed dozens of times more people than are alive today, and that's just using the technologies we already have. The very first thing the government should do is stop interfering with the price mechanisms that cause animal products to cost as much as 1/10th of what they would cost in the free market, and end all other agricultural subsidies, which would naturally lead to average human diet becoming far more agriculturally efficient. Then you have barriers to trade, which are the real reason why people anywhere in the world are starving. And then you have the environmental nuts who value wild land more than soy farms and are willing to impose their values through the barrel of a gun. Etc, etc, etc.

If we can build 600 million motor vehicles and 5 billion cell phones, then building enough privately owned greenhouses on otherwise agriculturally-unproductive land (or floating greenhouses over water) should be a piece of cake!

[...] Historical records show that sea-level rise of 2 meters a century is certainly not out of the question when the ice-sheets start to react. [...]

Yes, and the CO2 levels were much higher once as well, but what does that have to do with humans in the 21st century?

Long-term public funding is needed for basic research for example.

That's more of a politically biased opinion than an economic fact. And remember that the free market will only encourage things like "open source" science, NGO's, private universities, private research hospitals, multi-business research alliances, etc, etc, etc.

[Lallante]

Disruption of weather patterns and loss of top soil to dust storms etc. would be a catastrophe to a world that can barely feed itself now.

The world can feed dozens of times more people than are alive today, and that's just using the technologies we already have. The very first thing the government should do is stop interfering with the price mechanisms that cause animal products to cost as much as 1/10th of what they would cost in the free market, and end all other agricultural subsidies, which would naturally lead to average human diet becoming far more agriculturally efficient. Then you have barriers to trade, which are the real reason why people anywhere in the world are starving. And then you have the environmental nuts who value wild land more than soy farms and are willing to impose their values through the barrel of a gun. Etc, etc, etc.

If we can build 600 million motor vehicles and 5 billion cell phones, then building enough privately owned greenhouses on otherwise agriculturally-unproductive land (or floating greenhouses over water) should be a piece of cake!

[...] Historical records show that sea-level rise of 2 meters a century is certainly not out of the question when the ice-sheets start to react. [...]

Yes, and the CO2 levels were much higher once as well, but what does that have to do with humans in the 21st century?

Long-term public funding is needed for basic research for example.

That's more of a politically biased opinion than an economic fact. And remember that the free market will only encourage things like "open source" science, NGO's, private universities, private research hospitals, multi-business research alliances, etc, etc, etc.

In a free market, why would ANYONE do anything for any reason other than self-interest. Research into preventing climate change would never occur in a free-market because it wouldnt make anyone any profit.

[Lallante]

What stops exploitation and slavery in a true free-market?


What stops monopoly power?


What stops violence?


What stops spreading false information?

[JLL]

If what you say about climate change is true then it seems like it would be a big blow to profits... no?

[Lallante]

If what you say about climate change is true then it seems like it would be a big blow to profits... no?

For some companies, yes. The Trent report found that to fix climate change we would have to accept a 1% dip in GDP until 2050.

[bobdrake12]

[
Yes, and the CO2 levels were much higher once as well, but what does that have to do with humans in the 21st century?

And what is the impact of increased levels of CO2?

Check out the abstract of the the article below.

Environmental Effects of Increased Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide

A review of the research literature concerning the environmental consequences of increased levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide leads to the conclusion that increases during the 20th and early 21st centuries have produced no deleterious effects upon Earth's weather and climate. Increased carbon dioxide has, however, markedly increased plant growth. Predictions of harmful climatic effects due to future increases in hydrocarbon use and minor greenhouse gases like CO2 do not conform to current experimental knowledge. The environmental effects of rapid expansion of the nuclear and hydrocarbon energy industries are discussed.

Click here to read the Summary which includes numerour charts

[bobdrake12]

What stops exploitation and slavery in a true free-market?


What stops monopoly power?

The United States does *not* have a true free-market. For example, the current Administration under President Obama and the previous Administration under President Bush both promoted and funded a Too Big to Fail Economic Policy.

Check out the excerpt below from the article, Too Big to Fail by Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

"Too Big to Fail" is a phrase referring to the idea that in economic regulation, the largest and most interconnected businesses are so large that a government cannot allow them to declare bankruptcy because said failure would have a disastrous effect on the overall economy. The term has emerged as prominent in public discourse since the 2007–2010 global financial crisis.

The original use of this phrase, however, was to indicate that a large interconnected business was so diversified that it was immune to failure.[citation needed] Due to such a company's investments in various countries and businesses any downturn in one part of its portfolio would be counteracted by successes in another, thereby insulating from failure. Because this premise was quickly disproved by a near-worldwide economic downturn, the phrase "too big to fail" began to be used in the way outlined in the first paragraph.

The problems of "Too Big To Fail" are related to the concept of moral hazards. Because of society's implicit guarantee of their survival, firms considered "too big to fail" have more incentive to take positions with high-risk, high-reward positions, since rewards would accrue to their directors and shareholders, while catastrophic losses would be borne by taxpayers (e.g., through a government bailout). A secondary effect is to reduce or eliminate a firm's incentive for proper risk management, normally a complex and expensive aspect of business. The phrase has also been more broadly applied to refer to a government's policy to bail out any corporation.

Some critics see the policy as wrong and counterproductive. They think big banks should be left to fail if their risk management was not effective. Moreover, some assert that the "too big to fail" policy has been explicitly refuted in the People's Republic of China, with the bankruptcy of Guangdong International Trust & Investment Corporation in 1998.

Click here to read the entire "Too Big to Fail" article

Edited by bobdrake12, 24 April 2010 - 01:54 AM.

[Alex Libman]

In a free market, why would ANYONE do anything for any reason other than self-interest. Research into preventing climate change would never occur in a free-market because it wouldnt make anyone any profit.

First of all, you need to understand the epistemology of "evolutionary pragmatism". Our understanding of Natural Law (aka Natural Rights, the Non-Aggression Principle, individual self-ownership, etc) is not an axiom in of itself, but a consequence of our present scientific knowledge. Just as our knowledge of mathematics or physics can change, so can our knowledge of economic principles through which we understand Natural Law.

The following quote from me above bares repeating: "The burden of proof is on the alarmists to prove that (1) the past temperature measurements are accurate and statistically significant, (2) that the earth is indeed warming, (3) that the change is indeed anthropogenic and not explainable by dozens of natural cycles which science still has very little understanding of, (4) that the change is economically significant, (5) that the change is economically harmful, and (6) that their "world government" agenda is the ideal solution for this problem, considering all downsides and risks involved. The only thing they have proven so far is their capacity for deceit!"

If AGW alarmists' claims 1 through 5 could be be proven true beyond a reasonable doubt, then the polluters would be initiating aggression against everyone, and everyone has the Right to stop them as an act of self-defense, which would probably be formalized into something resembling a "cap and trade" system that would raise the cost of pollution and make "clean energy" R&D ever-more attractive. If pollution externalities were indeed global, then this would necessitate a legal alliance (or several non-overlapping legal alliances) that all property owners all over the world would be able to join, which would be able to do as much to stop AGW as a World Government would, while remaining a non-governmental entity that is vastly limited in its powers.

But, as noted above, the alarmists are nowhere close to being able to prove anything, while technology continues to become cleaner, "enabling technologies" for further innovations (including private sector access to space) continue to become cheaper, and human population growth is beginning to level off and will eventually decline. Another quote from me bares repeating: "All the solutions to human problems come from attaining sufficient economic growth, and if we can do that then exporting all energy production, manufacturing, and mining to space would be attainable within decades, and by the end of the century they'd actually have to import some CO2 back to earth in the form of plant fertilizer!"

What stops exploitation and slavery in a true free-market?
[...] What stops violence?

The 6+ billion people who don't want to be aggressed against - and have instant access to information (including live streaming security cameras), individual self-defense technologies (ex. the Right to bear arms), and/or are able to hire independent experts for their security needs. The few stupid people (who control an even lesser fraction of the world's wealth) who won't accept the Non-Aggression Principle will quickly be weeded out and forced to pay restitution to their victims. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, but for most people the costs would be very low compared to what the government costs today.

What stops monopoly power?

The 6+ billion people who, as consumers, wouldn't continue to do business with a monopoly if it became malevolent - and, as potential entrepreneurs, can enter the marketplace as its competitors. Furthermore, with the exception of the "divine right of government" delusion, people tend to have a psychological bias against global mega-corporations that come anywhere close to being a monopoly. People want to be different. There always be local bias: driving a Hyundai is frowned upon in Detroit, just like driving a Chevy (or even more-so Toyota) might be frowned upon in Ulsan - without any need for government force. This will especially apply to survival necessities like food, and I think local greenhouses will become ever-more popular as people will see the value of not having to depend on food trucked in from across the continent. And then there's consumer activism, "corporate karma", social pressure, etc.

What stops spreading false information?

Web-of-trust reputation systems, personal / corporate "karma" wikis, etc. "You can fool some of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time" - and as soon as you are outed earning trust in the future will not be easy. "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow."

For some companies, yes. The Trent report found that to fix climate change we would have to accept a 1% dip in GDP until 2050.

LOL... And Apostle Paul said "end of days" would be within his lifetime...

Edited by Alex Libman, 24 April 2010 - 05:43 AM.

[platypus]

Long-term public funding is needed for basic research for example.

That's more of a politically biased opinion than an economic fact. And remember that the free market will only encourage things like "open source" science, NGO's, private universities, private research hospitals, multi-business research alliances, etc, etc, etc.

Will patents be forbidden in a free market or how does investing private money result in "open source" science?

[platypus]

The United States does *not* have a true free-market.

If a truly free market was such a great thing one would think that a society having one would already exist and be prosperous.

[platypus]

What stops monopoly power?

The 6+ billion people who, as consumers, wouldn't continue to do business with a monopoly if it became malevolent - and, as potential entrepreneurs, can enter the marketplace as its competitors.

So did this ever happen in the history of the world or is that what should happen in theory?

[platypus]

[...] Historical records show that sea-level rise of 2 meters a century is certainly not out of the question when the ice-sheets start to react. [...]

Yes, and the CO2 levels were much higher once as well, but what does that have to do with humans in the 21st century?

The ice-sheets are already shedding mass at an accelerated rate and there are tipping points (collapse of parts of WAIS (West-Antarctic Ice-Sheet) for example) that will dial in several meters of sea-level rise without a possibility of reversing the situation.

[Alex Libman]

Why reply in 4 posts instead of 1? C'mon, it just elongates threads into many pages and makes things inconvenient for other people...

Will patents be forbidden in a free market or how does investing private money result in "open source" science?

In absence of the "positive right" to government-enforced patent monopoly, some of the similar effects would still be obtained through contractual agreements that will emerge between corporations, but for the large part any company will be able to copy anyone else's innovations - if they can. (This shouldn't be confused with the negative Right to intellectual property that does exist - if someone damages your information that it is an act of aggression, but copying is not damaging.)

The corrupt race to the patent office will be replaced with the more merit-based race to make an invention useful, manufacture products, and gain consumer trust. Corporate secrecy will play some role in this, but consumers tend to frown on secrecy, especially in things that might affect their privacy or safety. This naturally creates an incentive for competing entities to nonetheless share information, as we are starting to see today with software projects like Linux or Eclipse.

If a truly free market was such a great thing one would think that a society having one would already exist and be prosperous.

History is not a collection of infinite experiments - modern commercial history is only a few hundred years old, and the information age is only a few decades old. Anarcho-Capitalism is a 21st century idea, and it will be experimented with when the world is ready (i.e. when initially small groups of pioneers will be able to secede on privately owned land or seasteads, and public opinion, no longer under the full grip of the mainstream media, will restrain the governments from sending in the tanks / navy to arrest or blockade them).

In the meantime, the fact remains - economic freedom leads to prosperity. Having come from the Soviet Union, I was amazed how much better some things (ex. cars, consumer products, supermarkets) in America were, while other things (ex. schools, government bureaucracies, police, military) were about the same. The difference, I learned, is that all societal institutions that are subject to competition and having to persuade people to do business with them voluntarily have a much greater incentive for efficiency and innovation than institutions backed by government force. What few private roads, schools, parks, charities, protection agencies, and arbitration agencies exist in the world are also more innovative and cost-effective than their government-funded counterparts - the only reason why we don't have more of those institutions privatized is blunt government force.

So did this ever happen in the history of the world or is that what should happen in theory?

Once again - history is not a collection of infinite experiments, and all modern historical cases of monopoly or near-monopoly were either helped by governments or weakened by them. The former is very significant, and the latter does not mean they couldn't be managed without government intervention any more than not having heavier-than-air flight prior to late 19th century proved that airplanes would never be possible.

The ice-sheets are already shedding mass at an accelerated rate and there are tipping points (collapse of parts of WAIS (West-Antarctic Ice-Sheet) for example) that will dial in several meters of sea-level rise without a possibility of reversing the situation.

Once again, read both sides of the story. Some ice-sheets are losing mass, others are gaining mass. The climate is a very complicated system with many cycles that take centuries to play out, and our ability to measure it was ridiculously inaccurate until just a few decades ago. It will take many decades more to achieve any measure of certainty about what's actually going on, and nothing that we presently see warrants handing the reigns of human civilization to a cabal of central planners who will likely never release them!

Edited by Alex Libman, 26 April 2010 - 11:52 AM.

[platypus]

If a truly free market was such a great thing one would think that a society having one would already exist and be prosperous.

History is not a collection of infinite experiments - modern commercial history is only a few hundred years old, and the information age is only a few decades old. Anarcho-Capitalism is a 21st century idea, and it will be experimented with when the world is ready (i.e. when initially small groups of pioneers will be able to secede on privately owned land or seasteads, and public opinion, no longer under the full grip of the mainstream media, will restrain the governments from sending in the tanks / navy to arrest or blockade them).

I don't think anarcho-anything has ever done well in the competition between societies/countries. Why artificially try to support a system that is not self-sustaining and victorious on it's own??

In the meantime, the fact remains - economic freedom leads to prosperity.

I don't doubt that but I would not make it an overarching ideology and answer to everything - that's just silly.

The ice-sheets are already shedding mass at an accelerated rate and there are tipping points (collapse of parts of WAIS (West-Antarctic Ice-Sheet) for example) that will dial in several meters of sea-level rise without a possibility of reversing the situation.

Once again, read both sides of the story. Some ice-sheets are losing mass, others are gaining mass.

Wrong. All the major ice-sheets & ice-caps including Greenland and Antarctica are losing mass. There are some mountain glaciers that are gaining mass but the vast majority of these smaller glaciers are losing mass as well.

The climate is a very complicated system with many cycles that take centuries to play out, and our ability to measure it was ridiculously inaccurate until just a few decades ago. It will take many decades more to achieve any measure of certainty about what's actually going on, and nothing that we presently see warrants handing the reigns of human civilization to a cabal of central planners who will likely never release them!

So you'd prefer anarchic markets which don't even have a mechanism for ensuring long-term planning and execution?

[Alex Libman]

I don't think anarcho-anything has ever done well in the competition between societies/countries.

I am not promoting "anarcho-anything", I am promoting "Anarcho-Capitalism" - an advanced stage of free market capitalism where even the most core governmental functions are no longer held by vast regional monopolies. That doesn't mean governments don't exist, but they become as open to competition and as voluntary as churches are today. It has about as much to do with anarchy as chickpeas have to do with chickens.

Why artificially try to support a system that is not self-sustaining and victorious on it's own??

How would you define "artificially"? I am merely using reason to deduct an ideal political solution based on known economic facts. That solution is anything but artificial (in fact it's even called "Natural Law"), and artificiality is what's holding it back - blunt government force.

I don't doubt that but I would not make it an overarching ideology and answer to everything - that's just silly.

I'm not trying to "answer everything" - I merely point out the irrationality of the current political systems, their detrimental consequences to the future of civilization, and what the rational alternative would be. Capitalism is culturally neutral in regard to everything else. Like the scientific method, it doesn't tell you what hypothesis to test, just how to test them.

So you'd prefer anarchic markets which don't even have a mechanism for ensuring long-term planning and execution?

It never stops being funny how people who believe in government, like the people who believe in god(s), just refuse to even contemplate the possibility of something happening in the world without central planning by an all-powerful being.

[platypus]

Why artificially try to support a system that is not self-sustaining and victorious on it's own??

How would you define "artificially"? I am merely using reason to deduct an ideal political solution based on known economic facts. That solution is anything but artificial (in fact it's even called "Natural Law"), and artificiality is what's holding it back - blunt government force.

I haven't seen it demonstrated in practise that anarcho-capitalism is a) ideal and b) stable as a system. That talk about "natural law" is bullcrap, there are no "laws" in nature.

So you'd prefer anarchic markets which don't even have a mechanism for ensuring long-term planning and execution?

It never stops being funny how people who believe in government, like the people who believe in god(s), just refuse to even contemplate the possibility of something happening in the world without central planning by an all-powerful being.

So how can you ensure long-term (decades) endeavours in such a system? One cannot even trust that the laws or currency stay more or less stable over such a period of time.

[bobdrake12]

Wrong. All the major ice-sheets & ice-caps including Greenland and Antarctica are losing mass. There are some mountain glaciers that are gaining mass but the vast majority of these smaller glaciers are losing mass as well.

http://www.iceagenow...not_melting.htm

Our glaciers are growing, not melting

More falsehoods from Al Gore

By Robert Felix

8 Mar 10 - "Almost all of the ice-covered regions of the Earth are melting — and seas are rising," said Al Gore in an op-ed piece in the New York Times on February 27.

Both parts of Gore's statement are false.

Never mind that Mr. Gore makes only passing reference to the IPCC's fraudulent claims that the Himalayan glaciers will all melt by 2035. ("A flawed overestimate," he explains.)

Never mind that Mr. Gore dismisses the IPCC's fraudulent claims that the oceans are rising precipitously. ("Partly inaccurate," he huffs.)

Never mind that Mr. Gore completely ignores the admission by the CRU's disgraced former director Phil Jones that global temperatures have essentially remained unchanged for the past 15 years.

I'll let someone else dissect Gore's lawyering comments, and concentrate on just the one sentence about melting ice, because neither part of that sentence is true.

Contrary to Gore's assertions, almost all of the ice-covered regions of the Earth are growing, not melting — and the seas are not rising.

Let's look at the facts.

If you click on the words "are melting" in Gore's article, you're taken to a paper by Michael Zemp at the University of Zurich. Mr. Zemp begins his paper by warning that "glaciers around the globe continue to melt at high rates."

However, if you bother to actually read the paper, you learn that Zemp's conclusion is based on measurements of "more than 80 glaciers."

Considering that the Himalayas boast more than 15,000 glaciers, a study of "more than 80 glaciers" hardly seems sufficient to warrant such a catastrophic pronouncement.

Mar 10 - Page 2 of 3

"These are the biggest mid-latitude glaciers in the world," says John Shroder of the University of Nebraska-Omaha. "And all of them are either holding still, or advancing."

And get this. Eighty seven of the glaciers have surged forward since the 1960s.

So much for Mr. Gore's "more than 80 glaciers."

(I don't know how many Himalayan glaciers are being monitored, but my guess would be fewer than a thousand, so it's possible that hundreds more are growing. There aren't enough glaciologists in the world to monitor them all.)

But we don't need to look to the Himalayas for growing glaciers. Glaciers are growing in the United States.

Yes, glaciers are growing in the United States.

Look at Washington State. The Nisqually Glacier on Mt. Rainier is growing. The Emmons Glacier on Mt. Rainier is growing. Glaciers on Glacier Peak in northern Washington are growing. And Crater Glacier on Mt. Saint Helens is now larger than it was before the 1980 eruption. (I don't think all of the glaciers in Washington or Alaska are being monitored either.)

Or look at California. All seven glaciers on California's Mount Shasta are growing. This includes three-mile-long Whitney glacier, the state's largest. Three of Mount Shasta's glaciers have doubled in size since 1950.

Or look at Alaska. Glaciers are growing in Alaska for the first time in 250 years. In May of last year, Alaska’s Hubbard Glacier was advancing at the rate of seven feet (two meters) per day - more than half-a-mile per year. And in Icy Bay, at least three glaciers advanced a third of a mile (one-half kilometer) in one year.

Oh, by the way. The Juneau Icefield, with its "positive values," covers 1,505 square miles (3,900 sq km) and is the fifth-largest ice field in the Western Hemisphere. Rather interesting to know that Gore's own source admits that the fifth-largest ice field in the Western Hemisphere is growing, don't you think?

But this mere handful of growing glaciers is just an anomaly, the erstwhile Mr. Gore would have you believe.

Well, let's look at a few other countries.

o Perito Moreno Glacier, the largest glacier in Argentina, is growing.

o Pio XI Glacier, the largest glacier in Chile, is growing.

o Glaciers are growing on Mt. Logan, the tallest mountain in Canada.

o Glaciers are growing on Mt. Blanc, the tallest mountain in France.

o Glaciers are growing in Norway, says the Norwegian Water Resources and Energy Directorate (NVE).

o And the last time I checked, all 50 glaciers in New Zealand were growing.

But this is nothing. These glaciers are babies when you look at our planet's largest ice masses, namely, the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets.

Contrary to what you may have heard, both of those huge ice sheets are growing.

In 2007, Antarctica set a new record for most ice extent since 1979, says meteorologist Joe D'Aleo. While the Antarctic Peninsula area has warmed in recent years, and ice near it diminished during the summer, the interior of Antarctica has been colder and the ice extent greater.

Antarctic sea ice is also increasing. According to Australian Antarctic Division glaciology program head Ian Allison, sea ice losses in west Antarctica over the past 30 years have been more than offset by increases in the Ross Sea region, just one sector of east Antarctica.

The Antarctic Peninsula, where the ice has been melting, is only about 1/50th the size of east Antarctica, where the ice has been growing. Saying that all of Antarctica is melting is like looking at the climate of Oregon and saying that this applies to the entire United States.

There was not any evidence of significant change in the mass of ice shelves in east Antarctica nor any indication that its ice cap was melting, says Dr. Allison. "The only significant calvings in Antarctica have been in the west." And he cautioned that calvings of the magnitude seen recently in west Antarctica might not be unusual.

"A paper to be published soon by the British Antarctic Survey in the journal Geophysical Research Letters is expected to confirm that over the past 30 years, the area of sea ice around the continent has expanded."

What about Greenland?


Especially when you learn that of those 80 glaciers, several are growing.

Growing. Not melting.

"In Norway, many maritime glaciers were able to gain mass," Zemp concedes. ("Able to gain mass" means growing.)

In North America, Zemp also concedes, "some positive values were reported from the North Cascade Mountains and the Juneau Ice Field." ("Displaying positive values" means growing.)

Remember, we're still coming out of the last ice age. Ice is supposed to melt as we come out of an ice age. The ice has been melting for 11,000 years. Why should today be any different? I'm guessing that most Canadians and Northern Europeans are very happy that the ice has been melting.

Unfortunately, that millenniums-long melting trend now appears to be changing. No matter how assiduously Mr. Gore tries to ignore it, almost all of the ice-covered regions of the Earth are now gaining mass. (Or, displaying positive values, if you will.)

For starters, let's look at those Himalayan glaciers. In a great article, entitled "World misled over Himalayan glacier meltdown," Jonathan Leake and Chris Hastings show that the IPCC's fraudulent claims were based on "speculation" and "not supported by any formal research."

As a matter of fact, many Himalayan glaciers are growing. In a defiant act of political incorrectness, some 230 glaciers in the western Himalayas - including Mount Everest, K2 and Nanga Parbat - are actually growing.

8 Mar 10 - Page 3 of 3

Greenland's ice-cap has thickened slightly in recent years despite wide predictions of a thaw triggered by global warming, said a team of scientists in October 2005.

The 3,000-meter (9,842-feet) thick ice-cap is a key concern in debates about climate change because a total melt would raise world sea levels by about 7 meters.

But satellite measurements show that more snow is falling and thickening the ice-cap, especially at high altitudes, according to the report in the journal Science.

The overall ice thickness changes are approximately plus 5 cm (1.9 inches) per year or 54 cm (21.26 inches) over 11 years, according to the experts at Norwegian, Russian and U.S. institutes led by Ola Johannessen at the Mohn Sverdrup center for Global Ocean Studies and Operational Oceanography in Norway.

Not overwhelming growth, certainly, but a far cry from the catastrophic melting that we've been lead to believe.

Think about that.

The Antarctic Ice Sheet is almost twice as big as the contiguous United States.

Put the Antarctic and Greenland Ice Sheets together, and they're one hundred times bigger than all of the rest of the world's glaciers combined.

More than 90 percent of the world's glaciers are growing, in other words, and all we hear about are the ones that are shrinking.

But if so many of the world's glaciers are growing, how can sea levels remain the same?

They can't. The sea level models are wrong.

During the last ice age, sea levels stood some 370 feet (100 meters) lower than today. That's where all of the moisture came from to create those two-mile-high sheets of ice that covered so much of the north.

And just as the ice has been melting for 11,000 years, so too were sea levels rising during those same years.

But the rising has stopped.

Forget those IPCC claims. Sea levels are not rising, says Dr. Nils-Axel Mörner, one-time expert reviewer for the IPCC.

Dr. Mörner, who received his PhD in geology in 1969, is one of the greatest - if not the greatest - sea level experts in the world today. He has worked with sea level problems for 40 years in areas scattered all over the globe.

"There is no change," says Mörner. "Sea level is not changing in any way."

"There is absolutely no sea-level rise in Tuvalo," Mörner insists. "There is no change here, and there is zero sea-level rise in Bangladesh. If anything, sea levels have lowered in Bangladesh."

"We do not need to fear sea-level rise," says Mörner. "(But) we should have a fear of those people who fooled us."

So there you have it. More falsehoods from Al Gore, the multimillionaire businessman who some say is set to become the world's first carbon billionaire.

Our glaciers are growing, not melting — and the seas are not rising.

I agree with Dr. Mörner, but I'd make it a tad stronger. We should have a fear of those people who have conned us.

[bobdrake12]

http://news.bbc.co.u...ure/8299079.stm

Page last updated at 15:22 GMT, Friday, 9 October 2009 16:22 UK

What happened to global warming?
By Paul Hudson
Climate correspondent, BBC News

This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998.

But it is true. For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.

And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise.

So what on Earth is going on?

Climate change sceptics, who passionately and consistently argue that man's influence on our climate is overstated, say they saw it coming.

They argue that there are natural cycles, over which we have no control, that dictate how warm the planet is. But what is the evidence for this?

During the last few decades of the 20th Century, our planet did warm quickly.

Sceptics argue that the warming we observed was down to the energy from the Sun increasing. After all 98% of the Earth's warmth comes from the Sun.

But research conducted two years ago, and published by the Royal Society, seemed to rule out solar influences.

The scientists' main approach was simple: to look at solar output and cosmic ray intensity over the last 30-40 years, and compare those trends with the graph for global average surface temperature.

And the results were clear. "Warming in the last 20 to 40 years can't have been caused by solar activity," said Dr Piers Forster from Leeds University, a leading contributor to this year's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

But one solar scientist Piers Corbyn from Weatheraction, a company specialising in long range weather forecasting, disagrees.

He claims that solar charged particles impact us far more than is currently accepted, so much so he says that they are almost entirely responsible for what happens to global temperatures.

He is so excited by what he has discovered that he plans to tell the international scientific community at a conference in London at the end of the month.

If proved correct, this could revolutionise the whole subject.

Ocean cycles

What is really interesting at the moment is what is happening to our oceans. They are the Earth's great heat stores.

According to research conducted by Professor Don Easterbrook from Western Washington University last November, the oceans and global temperatures are correlated.

The oceans, he says, have a cycle in which they warm and cool cyclically. The most important one is the Pacific decadal oscillation (PDO).

For much of the 1980s and 1990s, it was in a positive cycle, that means warmer than average. And observations have revealed that global temperatures were warm too.

But in the last few years it has been losing its warmth and has recently started to cool down.

These cycles in the past have lasted for nearly 30 years.

So could global temperatures follow? The global cooling from 1945 to 1977 coincided with one of these cold Pacific cycles.

Professor Easterbrook says: "The PDO cool mode has replaced the warm mode in the Pacific Ocean, virtually assuring us of about 30 years of global cooling."

So what does it all mean? Climate change sceptics argue that this is evidence that they have been right all along.

They say there are so many other natural causes for warming and cooling, that even if man is warming the planet, it is a small part compared with nature.

But those scientists who are equally passionate about man's influence on global warming argue that their science is solid.

The UK Met Office's Hadley Centre, responsible for future climate predictions, says it incorporates solar variation and ocean cycles into its climate models, and that they are nothing new.

In fact, the centre says they are just two of the whole host of known factors that influence global temperatures - all of which are accounted for by its models.

In addition, say Met Office scientists, temperatures have never increased in a straight line, and there will always be periods of slower warming, or even temporary cooling.

What is crucial, they say, is the long-term trend in global temperatures. And that, according to the Met office data, is clearly up.

To confuse the issue even further, last month Mojib Latif, a member of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) says that we may indeed be in a period of cooling worldwide temperatures that could last another 10-20 years.

Professor Latif is based at the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at Kiel University in Germany and is one of the world's top climate modellers.

But he makes it clear that he has not become a sceptic; he believes that this cooling will be temporary, before the overwhelming force of man-made global warming reasserts itself.

So what can we expect in the next few years?

Both sides have very different forecasts. The Met Office says that warming is set to resume quickly and strongly.

It predicts that from 2010 to 2015 at least half the years will be hotter than the current hottest year on record (1998).

Sceptics disagree. They insist it is unlikely that temperatures will reach the dizzy heights of 1998 until 2030 at the earliest. It is possible, they say, that because of ocean and solar cycles a period of global cooling is more likely.

One thing is for sure. It seems the debate about what is causing global warming is far from over. Indeed some would say it is hotting up.

[bobdrake12]

http://article.natio...a/deroy-murdock

May 2, 2008 7:00 A.M.

Chill Out on Climate Hysteria
The Earth is currently cooling. (excerpt)

Dr. Phil Chapman wrote in The Australian on April 23. “All those urging action to curb global warming need to take off the blinkers and give some thought to what we should do if we are facing global cooling instead.”

Chapman neither can be caricatured as a greedy oil-company lobbyist nor dismissed as a flat-Earther. He was a Massachusetts Institute of Technology staff physicist, NASA’s first Australian-born astronaut, and Apollo 14’s Mission Scientist.

Chapman believes reduced sunspot activity is curbing temperatures. As he points out, “The reason this matters is that there is a close correlation between variations on the sunspot cycle and Earth’s climate.”

Anecdotally, last winter brought record cold to Florida, Mexico, and Greece, and rare snow to Jerusalem, Damascus, and Baghdad. China endured brutal ice and snow. Dr. Oleg Sorochtin of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Oceanology advised: “Stock up on fur coats and felt boots!”

NASA satellites found that last winter’s Arctic Sea ice covered 2 million square kilometers (772,204 square miles) more than the last three years’ average. It also was 10 to 20 centimeters (4 to 8 inches) thicker than in 2007. The ice between Canada and southwest Greenland also spread dramatically. “We have to go back 15 years to find ice expansion so far south,” Denmark’s Meteorological Institute stated.

“Snows Return to Mount Kilimanjaro,” cheered a January 21 International Herald Tribune headline, burying one of the climate alarmists’ favorite warming anecdotes.

While neither these isolated facts nor one year’s statistics confirm global cooling, a decade of data contradict the “melting planet” rhetoric that heats Capitol Hill and America’s newsrooms.




“The University of Alabama, Huntsville’s analysis of data from satellites launched in 1979 showed a warming trend of 0.14 degrees Centigrade (0.25 degrees Fahrenheit) per decade,” Joseph D’Aleo, the Weather Channel’s first director of meteorology, told me. “This warmth peaked in 1998, and the temperature trend the last decade has been flat, even as CO2 has increased 5.5 percent. Cooling began in 2002. Over the last six years, global temperatures from satellite and land-temperature gauges have cooled (-0.14 F and -0.22 F, respectively). Ocean buoys have echoed that slight cooling since the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration deployed them in 2003.”



As marine geologist Dr. Robert Carter of Australia’s James Cook University recently observed: “The real-world global average temperature...exhibits no significant increase since 1998, and the preliminary 2007 year-end temperature confirms the continuation of a temperature plateau since 1998, to which is now appended a cooling trend over the last three years.”

“I don’t make climate predictions because I don’t know what the Sun will do next,” says Dr. S. Fred Singer, University of Virginia emeritus professor of environmental sciences and founding director of the U.S. Weather Satellite Service. “But analysis of the best data of the past 30 years has convinced me that the human contribution has been insignificant — in spite of the real rise in atmospheric CO2, a greenhouse gas.”

These researchers are not alone. They are among a rising tide of scientists who question the so-called “global warming” theory. Some further argue that global cooling merits urgent concern.

[Alex Libman]

Thank you very much, bobdrake12. I tend to get too focused on the big picture that I at times forget to source the obvious.

I haven't seen it demonstrated in practise that anarcho-capitalism is a) ideal and b) stable as a system.

Of course not, because nothing close to Anarcho-Capitalism has existed yet - it is merely a logical extrapolation of the consequences of ever-more free access to information and ever-greater inter-governmental competition. (Unless of course a global government enslaves us all, in which case anything is possible, including a new dark age.)

What you can see currently is the economic evidence of causation (not just correlation) between economic freedom and prosperity. Just compare East and West Germany, North and South Korea, China before and after its gradual reform toward capitalism, Cuba and Chile, Syria and Dubai, Italy and Ireland, Rhode Island and New Hampshire, etc, etc, etc.

That talk about "natural law" is bullcrap, there are no "laws" in nature.

So things like mathematics, physics, chemistry, economics / econometrics, etc simply don't exist? One moment 2 + 2 == 4, another moment 5?

So how can you ensure long-term (decades) endeavours in such a system? One cannot even trust that the laws or currency stay more or less stable over such a period of time.

How can you trust anything in a system controlled by governments, which can arbitrarily steal anything they want and kill anyone they want, as they have directly killed hundreds of millions of people in the 20th century alone? How can you call governments "stable" when the vast majority of them ignore their own laws, rewrite their constitutions whenever they see fit, or get ever-deeper in debt with impunity (until they default or have a war or a revolution to nullify their debts)?! The names of countries might not change, but most governments are much younger than you'd think...

In a private system, a contract is a contract no matter how many people it involves, and a legal entity (i.e. a corporation) can sustain itself as many generations of stakeholders come and depart. There is absolutely no reason why private institutions can't perpetuate themselves for hundreds, even thousands of years!

A market of private currencies would be far more stable than the current government-controlled currency system, which the governments can inflate however they wish and there's nothing you can do about the money in your bank account losing its value. Private issuers of currency would have to convince their customers that their currency is trustworthy, which would require backing it with tangible assets (the most popular of which has historically have been precious metals like gold), or ensuring enforceable contractual obligations against inflation.

Edited by Alex Libman, 27 April 2010 - 06:24 AM.