This deserves some elaboration. Jobs is a good example of a failure of the system. That new liver has given him maybe another two years (and maybe he'd have lived much of that on his own liver, too). That's good for Jobs. But transplant organs are a limited resource. That same liver might have given someone with a better overal prognosis 20 years, or 40.

Exactly that has happend in all the developed European countries with national health care systems. Smoking is outlawed, as are strong spirits. Wine is available in small doses from iris scanning dispensers to avoid misuse. Everybody is assigned to a summer fitness camp, where they march in unison at the optimal 130 bpm heart rate, eating nothing but brocoli and olive oil until their BMI is 21.2. TVs are only allowed in exercise rooms and show mandatory aerobic programs 4 times a day. Everybody wears healthy and stylish uniforms, and central heating is controlled from the European central heating authority to ensure that the average temperature is 21 degrees centigrade in daytime and 17 degrees at night. And if your estimated treatment cost is higher than your remaining life income expectation, you are painlessly terminated as a drain on the community. Right.

There are several fallacies in your argument. First, your source does not say "go through a period", it says "one in 200 American women suffers from anorexia", i.e 0.5% is the current risk, not the lifetime riks of ever having an episode of anorexia. Of those, 20% will eventually die of complications of their eating disorder. That's 1.4 million people. How is that "not sognificant"?

Going with a statistical life expectancy of ~70 years, we are talking about 20000 death per year. Compare this to 32000 traffic victims and 14000 murder victims a year. Consider how much the US spends on road safety and the criminal justice system, and tell me that it's not worth to try to tackle this problem.

The fact that there are worse problems in not a reason to ignore this one. As a society with limited resources, cost/benefit expectation should be a guide to our actions.

Where does your liberty to put CO2 into my atmosphere come from? The naive libertarian solutions are not working for shared resources that are extremely hard to make into private property - like the oceans or the atmosphere. In fact, they already break generational fairness for simple things like real estate - shouldn't newborns all inherit an equal part of the planet? If not, why not?

The rational way to handle the use (and overuse) of shared resources is to internalize the externalities, i.e. to make users pay for all costs associated with their use, including costs that are extremely distributed. Cap-and-trade is one attempt at that - not a very good one, though. A simple carbon emission tax would be much better. It could even be made revenue-neutral by lowering other taxes or by distributing it to the people.

It does so now. Indeed, Gotland now has a vineyard. That said, wine is a lousy climate proxy either way Cultural and economic influences are a lot more important. In the middle ages it was mostly produced as a necessity for liturgical use during the last supper, and today its produced as a tourist attraction.

It wasn't a rebuttal, it was an independent letter published ~18 months ago. The probably reason why there is little science in the letter is because actual science, as opposed to pseudo-science, is complicated. It's a favorite tactic of anti-science debaters to throw out large numbers of wrong claims that take some time to properly refute. So when time or patience run out, the audience is left with the impression of doubt and open questions. And since you are always playing to different crowds, there is no need to take out refuted arguments - just re-run the whole show. Even a very much compacted version of the science, on the other hand, requires not a short editorial, but a 104 page report.

It looks like the data has been released here, but doing the reduction will be a pain in the ass.

If you look at your graph carefully, then most of the world seems to be low in CO2. But there is this small note saying "XCO2 in the figure has a 2-3% negative bias". 2-3% of 390 ppm is around 10 ppm. Add this to the values you see in the colour-coding, and things change.

Read again what I wrote. The JAXA report is fine. It shows the CO2 flux for 4 different seasons, with 3 of them showing the US as a net emitter and one showing it as a net absorber. The O'Sullivan blog takes this one graph out of context, either intentionally or through ineptness, and claims it represents the overal flux. It does not.

Actually, the claim is wrong and the article you link to is either incompetent or a lie. The author carefully (or carelessly) picked the net emission map from July 2009. Spring and summer is the main growing season for yearly plants, and for deciduous forests. That's why the plants in the Northern hemisphere pick up a lot of CO2 in the summer. Of course, they release most of it again in fall and winter, when leaves and other plant matter decompose. A meaningful comparison can be only made for a full seasonal cycle. The original report by JAXA shows emission estimate maps for all four seasons (scroll down to near the end, Figure 3), and it also shows the impact of seasonal patterns (Figure 2). Interestingly enough, 3 of the 4 maps show the US as net emitters, and 2 of the 4 show Europe as net emitters.

Of course, we also know that these seasonal fluxes are much larger than human emissions. But they balance out over time, while humans just keep adding CO2. If you check the Keeling Curve of CO2 measured in Hawai, you can see the seasonal effect as small, very regular wiggles in the overall increase. The difference between summer and winter does not balance out, since most land (and hence most seasonal growth) by far is in the Northern hemisphere. The size of the seasonal variation is about comparable to the secular increase of 5-10 years, depending on the point in time you pick. We are releasing CO2 now a lot faster than 1960.

I did this when I I was in Edinburgh. Indeed, great for a casual read. But my collection now mostly consists of irreplaceable ancient SciFi and fairly specialised science and history books. Nothing I want to get rid of. Some of the worst bad SciFi goes that way, but I don't have to much of that left...

I'd guess I have about 40 books on my "too read" pile, which I guess is around 5% of my library...

If you do not allow society to lay the cost of externalities onto the perpetrators, you invariably produce a tragedy of the commons. You can, in principle, use Ron Paul's approach and simply make people pay for polluting private property - i.e. if you produce CO2 that turns up in the air over my property, you are trespassing and need to pay damages. But that is technically implausible for shared resources like air, water, and the ecosystem as a whole. Thus, using taxes to approximate the externalities is a reasonable approach. Of course we can only approximate the cost, but that is no different than with any other financial planning, wether by government or in the private sector. Very very few projects end up exactly on budget. That's not a reason not to plan, nor is it a reason not to act.

Yes. Indeed, I'll even argue that there is no single linear ordering from better to worse. What's better, a 747 or an Ohio class submarine? A garden chair or a Harley Davidson? A C64 or a Sinclair spectrum? It depends on what you want or need to do (a C64 is a lousy computer, but a great door stop - no, I'm not biased, why?). A model that simplifies surface details but has better ocean mixing will make better global results than a model that takes more topographical features into account but uses a slab ocean model. On the other hand, the more topographical model is better able to predict local effects like rain shadows. Both in computing resources and in actual modelling, you have to make a trade-off, and you concentrate on the set of features you think are most important or most relevant for a particular set of questions.

Every model has to abstract from certain things - the only thing that is a perfect model of a system is an exact copy of the system, and we don't have a second Earth stashed away in the backyard. Different models made different simplifying assumptions (use different cell size for the simulation, incorporate different feedbacks, use simpler couplings between ocean and atmosphere, and so on). By using a range of different models, we get an idea of how much these simplifications affect the results. So we get a range of results, which hopefully bracket the behaviour of the real system. It's a bit like a shotgun - only a few pellets hit a bird, so why fire a full load?

Two planets meet in space. The first asks "How are you?" The second replies "Not too good, I caught a bad infection with humans". The first, comforting: "Don't worry, those never last long..."