Wrong. Take our most basic food we consume, water. Standard practice is to load it with a poison, chlorine, to kill the bacteria like E Coli in it for the benefit of not getting sick from the water.

Which is a totally valid complaint. The courts and legal system disagree and belief that patents should be allowed in this case though.

The point I was drawing was that Percy didn't accidentally start planting the patented seeds, he deliberately and intentionally set out to get his hands on the patented seed instead of his own that he'd been growing before. It was NOT, as has been falsely portrayed, a suit against some poor guy that tried to replant his own seed that got contaminated against his wishes.

I can second you anecdotes with my own. Having grown up on farms I've had the exact same experience. I went off to university when Monsanto was just rolling out round-up ready Canola. I got pretty worked up over their patent policies and was eager to reminisce with all the guys back home who where farming. Turns out universally they were all more than happy to buy Monsanto's seeds as it just made them far more money than other approach. More over, as pointed up thread, the only ones Monstanto was suing were guys trying to use Monsanto's seed for free, and the guys willing to buy the seed had no sympathy.

There's a well referenced wiki article on his case. His farm is only a province over from my families so the original story as I heard arrived first via coffee shops, then local papers, before making it's way to national media as the court case got under way.

Round-up(glyphosate) though is one of the least toxic herbicides out there. Numerous studies have all concluded that it poses no risk to human health. It's far less toxic than Chlorine, and we purposely load that into our drinking water. The Chlorine in our drinking water is strictly speaking being used as a pesticide to kill off unwanted bacteria like E. Coli, and you don't see anybody crying out for us to stop that horrible practice of an evil chemical that is harming us all.

We are in total agreement on that.

You've never farmed I take it? Round up is one of the least expensive, and also very safest to humans. You can drink it and be alright. If you make it a habit you likely increase your cancer risk. As a herbicide, it impacts plants, not animals. More over, if you spray it shortly before or after a rain there's a good chance even the plants won't be impacted to much because it breaks down so fast in water. Even without water after a day or two even plants aren't harmed by it anymore, that's how sage it is. Better still though, having your crop immune to it means that you only have to spray 1 chemical to wipe out all weeds, because round-up is a very effective general purpose herbicide wiping out most any plant it hits while it's active. That means instead of spraying expensive combinations of different herbicides to get weeds but not your own crop, round-up ready lets you use one chemical, and effectively too.

I believe you've been misled. If you can cite and example that'd be great. The one that got me up in arms was back when Percy Schmeiser lost in court against Monsanto for exactly this. His case was famous at the time, until I brought it up with my family that actually are farming. He's basically the only case I'm aware of where the claim of cross pollination led to a lawsuit by Monsanto. The truth though, is that Percy collected his own seed from his crop normally. Then, his neighbour planted round-up ready Canola beside his own field. Contrary to the story that you and I are told by the GMO fear mongers, his field was NOT accidentally contaminated. Percy actually went along the edge of his field that was shared with his neighbour, and sprayed the entire strip with round up, killing everything he planted but keeping enough of seeds that made it to the edge of his field from his neighbour's. Percy then collected the surviving plants to plant as seed. He deliberately and purposely set out to acquire the GMO seed and went to extreme lengths to do so.

That's what the textbook says. The distinction between feedbacks and forcings is a largely arbitrary adoption to ease calculation and prediction of an extremely complex physical system. It's the same reason that water vapour and clouds are treated as entirely independent variables as well. In an ideal world with unlimited CPU power, we'd just simulate water vapour molecules and their energy would dictate their state and clouds would form naturally. We lack the CPU power so we've broken them apart to something we attempt to simulate. The problem is they ALL interact in a complicated way and verifying predictions on something with that many dials is hard. It makes plasma physics models look trivial, simplistic and basically fool proof. In practice, how many plasma physicists have great confidence in a generalized simulation of a brand new, never before tried plasma configuration? Until they can build a parallel real world machine and match variables, they have very little confidence. Without fail, they constantly need to revise the models after comparing to real world models. That is in a plasma, where we KNOW, with great certainty, the rules of interaction between all the particles in the box.

What does that have to do with the overall contribution of water vapour to the greenhouse effect? Well, it means that we shouldn't downplay or dismiss that water vapour, at any given moment, is responsible for trapping 60%+ of the radiation that is captured by the greenhouse effect. Simply classifying it as an integer feedback also includes a laundry list of assumptions about it's behaviour that we have no reason to believe is true. The most glaring of which being cloud formation and the inherent complexity of predicting it.

When we agree that our simulations of water vapour feedback(complete with clouds) has a lot of uncertainty I think that's important. Sure, in models it's a feedback and when we run a model, we can get good results with that feedback dial really small. That hardly seems to me a compelling argument that we've definitively shown it is bounded by that. If you try and model a plasma, and you can get it all working really well modelling only your electrons, you've done great work. You can not claim though that adding an equal number of ions is now easily predictable and you know the bounds of how it will alter your plasma. That's a bad joke, but a lot climate advocates too far away from the modelling layer seem to try and tell it straight faced as proven fact :(.

There is a difference between long lived and persistent. CO2 that enters the atmosphere will stay there much longer, sure. Water vapor will only stay a couple of days, sure. Despite water vapor leaving the atmosphere so quickly though, it's also entering the atmosphere as quickly as it leaves. It's impact and effect on absorption of radiation thus persistently accounts for 60% of all GHG absorption and CO2 less than half that according to the American Geological society.

The people changing the climate now is every living soul on this rock. More importantly, the distinction is that the activity currently dumping CO2 into the atmosphere is in absolutely no way being done with the intention or purpose of engineering the climate. Flying planes, driving cars, raising cattle, planting crops, breathing in oxygen are all just activities people are doing in order to survive. The fact they dump CO2 into the atmosphere is secondary. The step of consciously acting to alter climate, with maximum affect as best as we understand how to for the express purpose of altering the climate is distinctly different.

The area of South Korea is 100,210 km squared.
The area of New York is 141,300 km squared.

The population of South Korea is 51,302,044.
The population of New York is 19,651,127.

So forget comparisons between America and South Korea. Even the state of New York is spread over a large part of the globe, and with half as many people as South Korea. Why is South Korean internet less expensive? Because per mile of fiber, and per cell tower, and every other piece of infrastructure South Korea has more customers to divide the costs over. And that's just compared to New York. Montana and Texas are just right out there on cost per person.

Citation needed, by all appearances EDF was still turning a profit in 2013. It looks like some of their foreign holdings outside of Europe are problematic for them, but that just goes to show their core business of selling nuclear power to Europeans is profitable enough to offset losses from other investments. Hardly a condemnation of the economics of nuclear power.

As for 'free market solutions' I hadn't realized that when we discussed emissions reductions that a solution must be rejected because it is or is not capitalist enough in nature.