2005 set to be second-hottest year on record

[tristano's ghost]

Don't worry, though, global warming's just a myth concocted by leftwing environmentalist wackos... party on, dudes!

Getting hotter

[tristano's ghost]

It's interesting to me that the insurance industry and other elements of the private sector are becoming concerned about this. Unlike the Bushies, they have to deal with the potential fallout to their bottom line.

[Brian Olewnick]

Originally Posted by tristano's ghost

It's interesting to me that the insurance industry and other elements of the private sector are becoming concerned about this. Unlike the Bushies, they have to deal with the potential fallout to their bottom line.

Hey! Stop making libertarian arguments for me!

[jazzy mary]

I think hte first hottest was the summer of 1993 when I was 9 months pregnant in August w/ my second daughter. I remeber the Lexington Ave. subway escalator was ALWAYS broken, so I'd have to climb a huge, looooong set of steps every day.

[Enforcer]

The leaders of the world aren't just going to let something like this become a problem. They'll deal with it when the time comes and get something done.

[Monte Smith]

I hope it stays hot in the final quarter because my house leaks heat, is three stories tall, and warmed by natural gas (which is estimated to rise in cost 60% over last year). I'll be swaddling my palace in saran wrap before long.

[lynn]

Can't you apply for the true believer discount?

[Monte Smith]

Originally Posted by lynn

Can't you apply for the true believer discount?

If they have one, I'm sure I'm on the list. Does it apply to the Prius? Because I'm going to get one when the price comes down and they have a proven history of decent reliability and maintenance costs. I know there was some recall thingy recently, but that's just to be expected in new technology. And it is new technology (along with prudent conservation)--not a reversion to iron age social patterns--that'll get us to where we want to be.

[rollhead]

Libertarian argument? ha!

How about an argument showing that not all huge global cartels benefit from the uninhibited and gluttonous burning of fossil fuel?

Libertrarians are another crackpot group -- just modestly better than rightwingers

Here is an Introduction to Libertarianism written by Mike Huben

One of the most attractive features of libertarianism is that it is basically a very simple ideology. Maybe even simpler than Marxism, since you don't have to learn foreign words like "proletariat".

This brief outline will give you most of the tools you need to hit the ground running as a freshly indoctrinated libertarian ideologue. Go forth and proselytize!


Philosophy
In the beginning, man dwelt in a state of Nature, until the serpent Government tempted man into Initial Coercion.
Government is the Great Satan. All Evil comes from Government, and all Good from the Market, according to the Ayatollah Rand.
We must worship the Horatio Alger fantasy that the meritorious few will just happen to have the lucky breaks that make them rich. Libertarians happen to be the meritorious few by ideological correctness. The rest can go hang.
Government cannot own things because only individuals can own things. Except for corporations, partnerships, joint ownership, marriage, and anything else we except but government.
Parrot these arguments, and you too will be a singular, creative, reasoning individualist.
Parents cannot choose a government for their children any more than they can choose language, residence, school, or religion.
Taxation is theft because we have a right to squat in the US and benefit from defense, infrastructure, police, courts, etc. without obligation.
Magic incantations can overturn society and bring about libertopia. Sovereign citizenry! The 16th Amendment is invalid! States rights!
Objectivist/Neo-Tech Advantage #69i : The true measure of fully integrated honesty is whether the sucker has opened his wallet. Thus sayeth the Profit Wallace. Zonpower Rules Nerdspace!
The great Zen riddle of libertarianism: minimal government is necessary and unnecessary. The answer is only to be found by individuals.

Government
Libertarians invented outrage over government waste, bureaucracy, injustice, etc. Nobody else thinks they are bad, knows they exist, or works to stop them.
Enlightenment comes only through repetition of the sacred mantra "Government does not work" according to Guru Browne.
Only government is force, no matter how many Indians were killed by settlers to acquire their property, no matter how many blacks were enslaved and sold by private companies, no matter how many heads of union members are broken by private police.
Money that government touches spontaneously combusts, destroying the economy. Money retained by individuals grows the economy, even if literally burnt.
Private education works, public education doesn't. The publicly educated masses that have grown the modern economies of the past 150 years are an illusion.
Market failures, trusts, and oligopolies are lies spread by the evil economists serving the government as described in the "Protocols of the Elders of Statism".
Central planning cannot work. Which is why all businesses internally are run like little markets, with no centralized leadership.
Paternalism is the worst thing that can be inflicted upon people, as everyone knows that fathers are the most hated and reviled figures in the world.
Government is like fire, a dangerous servant and a fearsome master. Therefore, we should avoid it entirely, as we do all forms of combustion.

Regulation
The FDA is solely responsible for any death or sickness where it might have prevented treatment by the latest unproven fad.
Children, criminals, death cultists, and you all have the same inalienable right to own any weaponry: conventional, chemical, biological, or nuclear.
All food, drugs, and medical treatments should be entirely unregulated: every industry should be able to kill 300,000 per year in the US like the tobacco industry.
If you don't have a gun, you are not a libertarian. If you do have a gun, why don't you have even more powerful armament?
Better to abolish all regulations, consider everything as property, and solve all controversy by civil lawsuit over damages. The US doesn't have enough lawyers, and people who can't afford to invest many thousands of dollars in lawsuits should shut up.

Libertarian Party
The Libertarian Party is well on its way to dominating the political landscape, judging from its power base of 100+ elected dogcatchers and other important officials after 25 years of effort.
The "Party of Oxymoron": "Individualists unite!"
Flip answers are more powerful than the best reasoned arguments, which is why so many libertarians are in important government positions.
It's time the new pro-freedom libertarian platform was implemented; child labor, orphanages, sweatshops, poorhouses, company towns, monopolies, trusts, cartels, blacklists, private goons, slumlords, etc.
Libertarianism "rules" Internet political debate the same way US Communism "ruled" pamphleteering.
No compromise from the "Party of Principle". Justice, happiness, liberty, guns, and other good stuff come only from rigidly adhering to inflexible dogmas.
Minimal government is whatever we say it is, and we don't agree.
Government is "moving steadily in a libertarian direction" with every change libertarians approve of; no matter if it takes one step forward and two steps backwards.
Yes, the symbol of the Libertarian Party is a Big Government Statue. It's not supposed to be funny or ironic!

Political Debate Strategy
Count only the benefits of libertarianism, count only the costs of government.
Five of a factoid beats a full argument.
All historical examples are tainted by statism, except when they favor libertarian claims.
Spiritually baptize the deceased as libertarians because they cannot protest the anachronism: Locke, Smith, Paine, Jefferson, Spooner, etc.
The most heavily armed libertarian has the biggest dick and thus the best argument.
The best multi-party democratic republics should be equated to the worst dictatorships for the purposes of denouncing statism. It's only a matter of degree.
Inviolate private property is the only true measure of freedom. Those without property have the freedom to try to acquire it. If they can't, let them find somebody else's property to complain on.
Private ownership is the cure for all problems, despite the historical record of privately owned states such as Nazi Germany, Czarist and Stalinist Russia, and Maoist China.
Require perfection as the only applicable standard to judge government: libertarianism, being imaginary, cannot be fairly judged to have flaws.
Only libertarian economists' Nobel Prizes count: the other economists and Nobel Prize Committee are mistaken.
Any exceptional case of private production proves that government ought not to be involved.


Copyright 2005 by Mike Huben

[Brian Olewnick]

Man, what powerful arguments. I'm duly chastised. What a fool I've been.

[rollhead]

Originally Posted by Brian Olewnick

hat a fool I've been.

Nothing new there.

[tristano's ghost]

Originally Posted by Monte Smith

And it is new technology (along with prudent conservation)--not a reversion to iron age social patterns--that'll get us to where we want to be.

Folks, what we got here is a potential outbreak of enlightened conservatism.

[Juju]

Monte, I've researched the Prius and other forms of alternative transportation pretty well--you should go for it. Check out this article I helped to write. My section is about the plug-in Prius, which charges at your home and gets you 100 mpg. Prices for this will be coming down in future years.

http://www.motherearthnews.com/Alter...rid-Revolution

Originally Posted by Monte Smith

If they have one, I'm sure I'm on the list. Does it apply to the Prius? Because I'm going to get one when the price comes down and they have a proven history of decent reliability and maintenance costs. I know there was some recall thingy recently, but that's just to be expected in new technology. And it is new technology (along with prudent conservation)--not a reversion to iron age social patterns--that'll get us to where we want to be.

[crawjo]

One thing that I don't think gets discussed enough is that global warming is not a new phenomenon. There was significant global warming back in the early Middle Ages, for instance. The earth's climate has always been in flux, either warming up over time or cooling down over time. These changes have real consequences for people's lives, of course, but I don't think that we can expect to create a "stable" environment where the temperature is always the same.

[Lazaro Vega]

Originally Posted by Larry Nagel

The leaders of the world aren't just going to let something like this become a problem. They'll deal with it when the time comes and get something done.

Too late. The leaders of the world have already declared it a problem and have moved to deal with it but been blocked by people who dont' understand the imagination is a gift from God, not some heretical instrument of the devil. In other words, the leaders of the U.S. are stopping the leaders of the world from doing the right thing by the planet. It already is a problem and has been for decades. Geological time is not political time. You have to get in front of it because the patterns are so huge the time frame for change much, much slower than this quick fix idea. In other words the once the ice cap melts and New York is submerging, what are you proposing? Let's move Manhattan to Dayton? If you talk to the people in Alaska, even the Republican politicos, you'll see that state's environment is changing drastically. Been to Glacier National Park lately? Better hurry because the glaciers in it are almost gone.

[Enforcer]

Originally Posted by Lazaro Vega

Too late. The leaders of the world have already declared it a problem and have moved to deal with it but been blocked by people who dont' understand the imagination is a gift from God, not some heretical instrument of the devil. In other words, the leaders of the U.S. are stopping the leaders of the world from doing the right thing by the planet. It already is a problem and has been for decades. Geological time is not political time. You have to get in front of it because the patterns are so huge the time frame for change much, much slower than this quick fix idea. In other words the once the ice cap melts and New York is submerging, what are you proposing? Let's move Manhattan to Dayton? If you talk to the people in Alaska, even the Republican politicos, you'll see that state's environment is changing drastically. Been to Glacier National Park lately? Better hurry because the glaciers in it are almost gone.

SUCKA!!!!!!!!!!!

Never claiming to be mature,
Larry

(Laz, I was just kidding around when I posted that. Sarcasm and what not)

[Brian Olewnick]

Crawjo's point is the salient one with the implied reference to the tacit, quasi-religious belief, held I think by a majority of people, that the Earth and its climate operates, if left alone, for the benefit of humans--a laughable assumption. There have obviously been periods of global warming and cooling as long back as we can determine. Its peaks and valleys are generally of greater amplitude than the possible effects of industrialization so, whether or not one thinks that humans are contributing significantly to the current trend, it may be very difficult to separate out that contribution in an objective manner. Indeed, as Lazaro infers, it is impossible to know whether today's trend will be of a century's duration, a thousand years, ten thousand years. As difficult as it may be for people to comprehend, especially those with religious convictions, these things happen regardless of their convenience to humanity and may well be absolutely irreversible.

[walto]

Originally Posted by Brian Olewnick

Crawjo's point is the salient one with the implied reference to the tacit, quasi-religious belief, held I think by a majority of people, that the Earth and its climate operates, if left alone, for the benefit of humans--a laughable assumption. There have obviously been periods of global warming and cooling as long back as we can determine. Its peaks and valleys are generally of greater amplitude than the possible effects of industrialization so, whether or not one thinks that humans are contributing significantly to the current trend, it may be very difficult to separate out that contribution in an objective manner. Indeed, as Lazaro infers, it is impossible to know whether today's trend will be of a century's duration, a thousand years, ten thousand years. As difficult as it may be for people to comprehend, especially those with religious convictions, these things happen regardless of their convenience to humanity and may well be absolutely irreversible.

There are maybe a half-dozen claims here, some of them sensible, some so qualified as to not really be saying anything at all, some, I think, just confused. For example, the fact that there have been warming/cooling cycles that are identifiable over extremely long periods wouldn't make it impossible (or even necessarily 'very difficult') to identify the effects of industrialization on Earth temps. In fact, at MIT, they're currently working on the effects of surface ocean warming on the frequency and severity of windstorms, knowing full well that there's a 20-or-so year frequency cycle in the North Atlantic. They've got computers, simulation models, etc.

Your beloved insurance companies use these too, btw.

Returning for a second to Rollie's excoriation of libertarianism, I think Hardin's mid-60s argument of the problems with the laissez-faire handling of environmental problems have never been successfully answered. Libs just go on as if nobody ever made them....or as if resources were infinite and human breeding were bound to always be done sensibly.

[Brian Olewnick]

hey, at least you think some of it is sensible.

Obviously, I'm not in the field, but from articles I've read in the past (not libertarian ones), I get this impression: If the temp swing during natural periods of fluctuation is, say, as much as 10 degrees and the swing possible by virtue of human action is 2-3 degrees, then, at the onset of a (presumed) change, not knowing how small or great the change will be, it can be "difficult" to parse out how much of the change, if any, is due to human factors, how much not, especially over a very short time span (decades being "very short", possibly). One can argue for the "better safe than sorry" approach and one may, of course, ultimatelye proven right, but you can understand why that might be a tough sell.

The environment is indeed a gnarly issue for libertarians, though not so much when property rights are more clearly understood, including the right to breathable air, a sine qua non of existence. Much of this is already taken into account in existing laws--I can't spew noxious gas into your backyard without incurring penalties. A stricter application against, say, a factory spewing noxious gas into a community's air would, I would think, fall entirely under libertarian sanctions. It gets tricky, of course, in where you draw the line vis a vis "pollution". Almost all of us accept some degree of trade-off between pollution and industrialization (not all of us, though! what about them?). Where it crosses from acceptable to unacceptable changes from person to person. Cars--yes or no? How you determine that point equitably strikes me as insoluble, but maybe someone else knows better.

[letchhausen]

From http://www.venganza.org/, a site dedicated to the belief that if Intelligent Design is to be taught in schools then their particular version should be taught as well. It's a steamroller getting the support of scientists and others across the land. They also have an idea about global warming:

You may be interested to know that global warming, earthquakes, hurricanes, and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking numbers of Pirates since the 1800s. For your interest, I have included a graph of the approximate number of pirates versus the average global temperature over the last 200 years. As you can see, there is a statistically significant inverse relationship between pirates and global temperature.

[Lazaro Vega]

O-o-o-o, you go-go-got me...I'm dyin'....goodbye krewl world....flop....

I was thinking about that possibility later, but who can ever tell in the ether of the net? Touche sir Larry.

[LennyH]

Originally Posted by crawjo

One thing that I don't think gets discussed enough is that global warming is not a new phenomenon. There was significant global warming back in the early Middle Ages, for instance. The earth's climate has always been in flux, either warming up over time or cooling down over time. These changes have real consequences for people's lives, of course, but I don't think that we can expect to create a "stable" environment where the temperature is always the same.

Doesn't get discussed enough by whom? By people in general or scientists?

We're in a natural temperature up-swing right now, which certainly complicates things by making it harder to prove how much we might be impacting the natural cycle. But scientists are currently speaking out so much because they're becoming more and more confident that we're seeing evidence that temperatures are increasing at an unnatural rate.

[crawjo]

Originally Posted by LennyH

Doesn't get discussed enough by whom? By people in general or scientists?

By people in general, politicians and the mass media, who oversimplify the issue.

[Monte Smith]

Originally Posted by Juju

Monte, I've researched the Prius and other forms of alternative transportation pretty well--you should go for it.

Juju, thanks. But as I said, I won't be buying a Prius or any hybrid until there is a history of reliability behind them. That'll take some years. But I'll mark those years from Nov 2003, when the Prius won Motor Trend's Car of the Year award. (See my thread: Hybrid Car Wins 2004 Car of the Year Award). I don't have the money to spend on anything but a reliable vehicle and a used one, probably.

Can you fit two/three kids in a Prius?

[Gordon B]

Originally Posted by Brian Olewnick

Man, what powerful arguments. I'm duly chastised. What a fool I've been.

You only wish you were a genius like Mike Huben.

[GoodSpeak]

Global Warming dosen't exist.


Rush Limbaugh told me so.

[walto]

Originally Posted by letchhausen

From http://www.venganza.org/, a site dedicated to the belief that if Intelligent Design is to be taught in schools then their particular version should be taught as well. It's a steamroller getting the support of scientists and others across the land. They also have an idea about global warming:

You may be interested to know that global warming, earthquakes, hurricanes, and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking numbers of Pirates since the 1800s. For your interest, I have included a graph of the approximate number of pirates versus the average global temperature over the last 200 years. As you can see, there is a statistically significant inverse relationship between pirates and global temperature.

Ha. There used to be a wonderful correlation between annual property/casualty insurance results and the league that won the Super Bowl, but its taken a beating the last several years, I think.

Good thing I resisted my wife's threats regarding my failure to invest the kids' college funds based on that....

[Lazaro Vega]

http://www.climatemash.org/