Why do you suddenly have access to cheap hydrocarbons? They existed 40 years ago, right?

At least you are making a valid argument. That is not typical...

Yes, you can argue your disbelief of "the rate at which intelligence increases to accelerate more than the rate at which stuff is decreasing". However, if you looks at technology (growing on an exponential curve) vs resources (actually still growing, but slower and somewhat linearly), that disbelief is difficult to justify. Even per capita, resource availability is still increasing, not decreasing. You may argue that will change at some point in the future, but your argument is not a-priori more convincing than mine - I have all of human history on my side, after all.

Never have humans seen resources per capita decrease without government intervention - and we have survived ice ages!

What is your evidence that resources per capita in the aggregate will decrease? Can you site a time that has ever happened? Are you allowing for substitution?

BTW, a simple proof that wealth is infinite given finite resources:

1) You have X amount of Y.
2) You can use X amount of Y to create something useful.
3) Any design can be improved given enough effort.
4) The word "improvement" means that more wealth has been generated, by definition.
5) Goto 3

The newest Intel chip uses about the same amount of sand as the one made 10 years ago. It's just arranged differently.

You are confusing money and wealth - very different things. Your funeral director has lots of money, but no wealth.

Your oil example is also misguided. Why would we run out of oil? We already know how to make oil from the air - if we needed oil (say for lubrication of our gadgets) and there were no natural sources, the chemical industry would supply it. We get oil from wells because that is way cheaper. If we run out of "cheap oil", then oil will stop being an important part of our economy naturally - no government intervention required. I can think of 20 different technologies that could conceivably replace oil at higher cost that pumping from the ground but at lower cost than creating the oil using chemistry. Again, no government intervention is required - when oil starts getting expensive, everyone will look at there little corner of the world and say "I think X will work as well, and is now cheaper." This happens every day.

Infinite wealth is also obvious. If you really believe that wealth is finite, then you believe that we have no more wealth than a cave man? We have no more wealth than a settler in the old west?

Please stop responding to me with ideology. If you are interested in thinking, we can discuss this. I have no interest in talking to an ideologue that has no interest in understanding my point of view.

See, this is the basic problem with liberals. They do not understand the basic foundations of any other viewpoint. It has been demonstrated in many studies - conservatives can pass a "Turing test" and pretend to be a believable liberal; Liberals cannot pass the same test pretending to be conservatives. (In my opinion, because once you understand the conservative argument it is difficult not to agree with it.)

In this case, you can have infinite wealth in a closed system similar to the details of Shannon limit. As SNR goes to infinity, bandwidth goes to infinity.

* A lump of gold in the ground is useless, and has zero (or at least very little) wealth value.
* A lump of golf in your hand is a little more useful, and has at least some wealth value
* A gold locket has more wealth value
* A gold based computer chip had much higher wealth value
* A gold base nanotechnology transmorgifier will have even higher wealth value

Wealth is not stuff. It is the intelligent arrangement and usage of stuff. Infinite wealth is possible from even tiny amounts of raw materials - it is just harder.

Um, guys, this is obvious. The causality in the "empirical data" goes the other way as well:

1) Gas prices go up
2) Oil companies start up previously uneconomical wells.
3) Profit!

So when gas prices go up due to global "stuff", US oil companies change their behavior to produce more oil, which ruins the "empirical data" test. That's why "empirical data" is not science!

That does not mean that government actions that cause US oil companies change their behavior to produce less oil does not cause higher prices ALL THINGS BEING EQUAL - because all things are not equal. US companies increasing their oil production normally has a moderating effect on global oil prices. That effect is not present in the face of government policies that decrease the net present value of oil production.

Yes, oil is a global commodity. But OPEC plays games which make the US moderating effects very important to the global economy.

Look guys, stop messin with my friends. Here's proof:

[root@earth-sim173-265 ~]# uptime
  12:17:09 up 2,210,805 days, 20:27, 7,029,298,112 users, load average: 0.90, 0.90, 0.95
[root@earth-sim173-265 ~]#

Now leave me alone, and get back to learning how to be humans/gods without killing each other and destroying the universe.

But in the face of a variable climate, surely the solution is the expand the optimum range for human civilizations - not decrease the liveable range in order to delay climate change?

That's what makes me think the AGW crowd is not "living in the real world." We can't keep the climate from changing! At this point, if AGW is right, it is too late to do anything and all those drastic measures being taken will not have any effect on the climate (which is what makes it sound like a religion, by the way). The only effect will be to transfer power to politicians and decrease society's technological base from where it could have been. Even if AGW is wrong, there better not be a scientist on Earth that believes the climate is going to be stable for the next 100,000 years.

So, my take is this: climate change is inevitable, AGW or otherwise. We should work as hard as possible to increase human technology so make the blows softer. The AGW crowd is working against that.

OK, maybe that is how it worked out for you wherever you are. But a good friend in college had no insurance, got brain cancer, got brain surgery, and went bankrupt.

But got the needed treatment. Your unspecified anecdote doesn't beat me specific experience. Have you personally been turned away?

My father was an MD, and I did the finances for a while. I know for a fact that patients that can't pay get treatment.

Everyone in the US gets "free" health care, in that no matter what your ability to pay, you will be treated.

The issue is that if you get treated and do have the ability to pay, but choose not to, then they sue you and take your assets. But that doesn't happen if you are 1) insured or 2) are poor. So really, most of the issue is hype - the poor have effectively free health coverage, and the not-poor pay for insurance. If you were a healthy 20-something and decided that insurance was a low priority and then get cancer, they treat you and then bankrupt you - because you were an idiot. But people get bankrupted for many things every day, and its not the end of the world.

Where I live there are buses that pick up homeless / projects residents, and then go from precinct to precinct voting.

People who used to have good jobs are moving out because they don't have jobs anymore.

I'm just amazed that people like you exist. "There aren't any jobs!" "Obviously, the solution is to make conditions worse for companies"

You want the jobs to come back? Get the government out of small businesses, and eliminate SarBox so the small business owners can dream. It costs you nothing!

Right, and this is why Europe's economy is just decimating the US economy?

Well, that technique gets really hard really fast - we know that the system is self-stabilizing. (For two reasons, first if it wasn't the temperature would vary a lot more, and second because black body radiation goes up with the 4th power of temperature - that is really hard to beat!) So the best technique is to use the best info people have come up with including all the variables, which is on the order of 1 degree of change.

If you were within 1 order of magnitude, I'd give it to you - but 3 if pretty far off.

The calculations are below in the thread. It is off by 3 orders of magnitude if you look at only atmospheric heating.