"I'd say 10C is more the limit and I'm probably setting it a bit low."

Well, I'm reassured. Tell me, do you have any reason for believing that number, rather than the numbers being given by people who actually study the issue?

"Remember that most of the current and forecast warming is in the upper northern hemisphere which doesn't have a lot of biological diversity (both because of the arduous environment and because most of it used to be ice-covered ten thousand years ago). Also, your "mass extinctions" do not include humans or species we depend on."

So you don't care about mass extinctions, as long as it doesn't directly lead to human extinction? Wow. I'm constantly impressed by the selfishness of global warming deniers like you. Do you care about anything beyond your immediate personal comfort? Screw other people, screw other species, screw other generations, screw the people downwind and downriver from the coal plants, because I think light from CFLs looks a little weird.

You think climate is unpredictable? Well, take a look at the whole frakking ecosystem, where millions of species living in tense, fluctuating equilibrium with all the others, each with very specific habitat requirements. Do you really think we have a shot in hell at fixing it once it's broken? Do you really think we can choose where the dominos stop falling? Do you really prefer testing the limits of evolution's adaptability in order to avoid "crippling the economy" by ratcheting growth back by 8% over a couple of decades?

In short, are you completely, suicidally insane? Somehow I doubt that. And yet the path you're proposing sounds that way.

"So what is it? Is solar going to vastly reduce costs or not? If it does, then the whole argument about reducing carbon dioxide emissions can be tossed. Because it will happen anyway as solar replaces fossil fuel burning for more and more applications."

I believe it will happen eventually. There are only two questions in my mind:

1) Whether we'll be buying solar panels from China, or China will be buying solar panels from us. Judging by what's happened to American solar companies this last year, I fully expect the former.

2) Whether the transition will happen soon enough or completely enough to make a difference. There is a lot we could do to accelerate the trend, but frankly you typify the sort of attitudes that could delay it for crucial decades.

We're already well above the 350ppm "safe zone", and 2011 was the biggest year ever for CO2 emissions. The transition needs to happen a lot faster than the free market will support. Consider that the capital investments in coal are for the most part already paid off, and the oldest plants aren't even compliant with 1970's era air quality standards (they were grandfathered in under the misguided assumption that they'd be shut down soon).

It's also got an uphill battle because coal is more expensive than your power bill would indicate. By hundreds of billions of dollars.

Here's what the study included: "government coal subsidies, increased illness and mortality due to mining pollution, climate change from greenhouse gas emissions, particulates causing air pollution, loss of biodiversity, cost to taxpayers of environmental monitoring and cleanup, decreased property values, infrastructure damages from mudslides resulting from mountaintop removal, infrastructure damage from mine blasting, impacts of acid rain resulting from coal combustion byproducts, water pollution." All this must be paid for, but none of these costs are charged back to the electricity users.

Force coal companies to pay the full costs of their product, and solar would be cost-competitive right now.

We could also accelerate the changeover by increasing funding for research in alternative energies. For example, home solar would be much cheaper if we could get the price of the non-panel parts down (batteries, grid tie in, regulators, etc.). There's a DOE project working on that right now, but it doesn't have all the funding it needs. What's standing in the way of more funding? People like you who object to the government doing pretty much anything, and who claim despite mountains of evidence that solar and other alternative energies will never be cost-competitive. Oh, and using doomsday rhetoric about "crippling the economy" to justify the status quo doesn't help matters.

"There are plenty of ways we can reduce energy consumption, but so what? No one has demonstrated a need to do so. Energy cost is cheap which means right there, that there's no reason to waste a lot of effort conserving energy."

So, you don't want $4M a year? You keep structuring your arguments to imply that large reductions in CO2 would negatively impact national wealth. It would not. Especially in the first 25-50% or so, cutting emissions would save us money. There are literally trillions of dollars worth of energy efficiency projects that we could start right now, that would result in positive long-term growth, practically risk free.

The energy you don't use is far cheaper than the energy you get from your utility companies.

As I said before, fossil energy is artificially cheap right now. Take the subsidies we're now giving to fossil fuel companies (including the de facto subsidy of not charging them for the pollution that we don't regulate) and put it into energy efficiency projects, and it would create a small economic renaissance. Require all new buildings to attain something comparable to LEED Silver certification, and the small addition to the mortgage will be more than offset by long-term savings on their energy bills. Raise fuel economy standards for cars and trucks (as has just been done) and save consumers hundreds of billions a year, money that can go somewhere other than the gas tank.

Of course, you believe none of this. Since you believe in the free market, and you seem to believe that we have a free market, it's hard to imagine trillions worth of lucrative investments just being ignored by the markets.

From the first paragraph of the link: There is an old joke in which two economists are walking down the street when one of them spies a $20 bill lying on the ground. He says to his friend, “Hey, there’s a $20 bill on the ground!” To which the other economist replies, “That’s impossible. If there were a $20 bill on the ground, someone would have already picked it up.”

Markets aren't perfect, and even a small increase in energy costs could make these energy-saving opportunities much more stark. Which is why I don't think that the Republican "drill baby drill" plan makes any sense. It just means we're using a finite resource more quickly and less efficiently, to an ultimately smaller economic effect.

First, the IPCC is actually a very conservative document. The sea level predictions ignore the possibility of large-scale ice shedding from Greenland or Antarctica. The temperature predictions ignore a lot of uncertain-but-very-scary feedback mechanisms, like the potential for mass methane releases from the Antarctic. In short, it ignores a lot of potential trouble spots where the science isn't settled.

The IPCC does not predict "a couple of degrees," in the sense that 2.0C is the upper boundary. That's about a midline case. The upper predictions (which may themselves be inadequate to describe the situation) range from 4C to 6C, depending on the scenario. 2C is probably the very upper reaches of what the ecosystem can handle without large-scale extinctions, so yeah, "we're fucked" is a pretty apt turn of phrase.

>> "Humans are only responsible for a small fraction of the CO2 going into the atmosphere."

That's true. But we're responsible for basically all of the change in CO2 concentrations over the last hundred years. Before we started burning fossil fuels in earnest, the Carbon Cycle was essentially in equilibrium. Once we started pushing CO2 into the atmosphere, the equilibrium changed, and CO2 concentrations went higher. We now see the higher concentrations in the warming atmosphere and in the oceans, where it increases acidity and ruins fragile underwater ecosystems.

>> "America is only responsible for a fraction of that (on track for 1-10% by 2050)"

But currently closer to 25%. And where the hell do you get 1% from? I can't see 1% happening unless Dennis Kucinich wins the next ten presidential elections.

Never mind. No country can make a huge difference alone. But just about every other country in the world seems to be taking better responsibility for their emissions than we are. We keep using China as an excuse for ignoring our own responsibilities, even though they only emit about a quarter what we do on a per-capita basis.

>> "We also know that with current technology, alternative energy sources are something like 2-3x as expensive as what we're using and doubling energy costs would completely cripple our economy which is heavily dependent on mechanisation."

Talk about providing me with a target-rich environment.

First, we only spend about 8% of GDP purchasing energy. So if we did indeed double our energy costs, we would lose about 8% GDP. Leaving us essentially as well off as we were in 2005. You call that "crippling the economy?"

Second, your projections assume that alternative energy technology will remain at its current cost. That simply will not happen. The cost of photovoltaics has been dropping by 50% every six years pretty much since the things were invented. It's a veritable Moore's Law of solar power, and it hasn't shown any sign of slowing. So within ten years, it's very likely that the cheapest way to add new energy to the grid will be with solar power. Within twenty years? It's a certainty.*

Third and most important, we could be spending a lot less on energy without significantly impacting our quality of life. Right now, the cheapest form of energy isn't coal or natural gas: it's energy efficiency. There are so many ways to reduce our CO2 footprint at a profit that it is absurd to be talking about CO2 reductions "crippling the economy" until all that money we're flushing down the proverbial toilet is reclaimed. For example, the $20M they sunk into an energy retrofit of the Empire State Building is yielding up $4M/year in dividends.

* Barring fusion/vacuum energy/other energy source that doesn't exist yet.

How can you be so certain about the harms you're claiming? Especially when the proposed mechanisms for reducing emissions -- a.k.a. "Cap and Trade" -- are virtually guaranteed to get rid of the most wasteful, inefficient uses of fossil fuel first?

I recall one study that showed that we could get CO2 emissions down 50% at a substantial profit to the overall economy. These extra profits could be used to pay for the rest of the CO2 reductions, meaning that we would get a zero-carbon economy at no cost.

Sounds too good to be true, right? To illustrate, let's take one famous example: The Empire State Building recently underwent an energy retrofit, at a cost of $20M. The expected savings (from utility bills alone)? $4M/year. That's about a 20% return on investment. Now, in theory, you could then take that $4M/year and pump it into new CO2-lowering initiatives, possibly even on a large enough scale to make the entire building carbon-free.

That's what the study is talking about doing for the whole economy. Right now, energy efficiency is by far the cheapest untapped energy resource that we have.

When you go to look for your next job -- hey, it happens -- they're going to ask you "what did you do at your last company?" You want to be able to say, "I wrote this amazing piece of software, way above my paygrade, that made the whole office purr like a well-oiled kitten," not "I did what I was told, I got paid, I went home."

Similarly, if you stay in your current position, you want to be able to show off the wonderful things you've done for your office. Giving them the software means job security, because you can say, "Look at this. I am your god. And oh, by the way, nobody really knows how to maintain this sucker but me."* It's also a tangible reflection of your work ethic.

All this can open doors for you. Don't blow it by coming across as lazy, small-minded, or ungrateful to your employer.

There's an economic principle here called "sunk costs." You've already done most of the work on this project, and it sounds like this company is the only one that could really use it. If the software never gets used, then its whole value is the joy and enlightenment you got from writing it.

* I don't advise getting into a situation where nobody can take over your position. I've been there.

That's 80% of programming right there.

Having a gay friend doesn't make you not-homophobic. Having a black friend (or voting for a black politician) doesn't make you not-racist, especially when that black politician is espousing views and policies that would hurt the impoverished (which is disproportionately black).

Herman Cain is what Republicans thought Obama was for white liberals: racial absolution on the cheap. "I'm not racist! I voted for a black man! I didn't even have to change a single one of my misconceptions about the black underclass to do it!"

There's a reason that the African-American community isn't rallying around Cain. It's not -- as you imply -- because of some misguided, unthinking loyalty to Obama. It's because they know that the right wing policies that Cain (and pretty much every GOP candidate minus Roemer and Huntsman) would implement would be disastrous for the poor.

Santorum. Eeesh. Have you *googled* him?

"The Tea Party wasn't trying to camp for weeks on end, they have jobs to get back to after all."

You mean the "job" of cashing their Social Security checks? The studies showed pretty thoroughly that the Tea Party crowd was -- despite their claims about representing a broad demographic -- predominantly white, old, male Republicans.

Woohoo! We have a better civil rights track record than North Korea! U-S-A!!! U-S-A!!!

Sadly, it's just the way mathematics works. Under a winner-take-all system like ours, third parties mostly just damage their nearest ideological allies. Something's ending up on that sandwich, and we have to eat it whether we like it or not.

In a parliamentary system, third parties can be great.

I would point out that neither Bush nor Obama are responsible for bringing our soldiers home from Iraq. The Iraqi government set the withdrawl deadline over our government's objections, and both Bush and Obama pushed for extensions (which they didn't receive).

What's challenging for certain other people to understand is that, as your income goes up, the fraction of your income donated to charity goes way, way down. Here in Utah, most of our state legislators are real estate barons or other successful businessmen who constantly write laws for each other. Their stinginess towards the poor probably shows up in their private life as well as their victim-blaming legislation. Hell, one of the bastards runs a payday loan business that preys on those who are in desperate financial straits.

If you're arguing against government-run charity, you can't just wave your hands about how private charity will pick up the slack. You need to show how private charity will do at least as much to combat poverty as government programs like Social Security, Medicaid, housing assistance, food stamps, etc. Otherwise you're essentially arguing that it's better to increase human suffering than to edge away from an absolutely pure capitalist ideology.

And as you point out yourself, private charities aren't immune to corruption.

The point isn't about minimum wage. The point is that "household" income combines the incomes of multiple potential workers. Over the last few decades, hourly compensation has gone down for perhaps the bottom 80% of us, but we've sent more adults into the workforce to make up the disparity.

The picture remains: people are working harder for less, even as per capita productivity has risen dramatically. Who gets the excess? Mostly the 1%. Not because they're working harder than they did thirty years ago, but because the laws are now rigged so as to privilege their work at the expense of ours.

That explains it. I wondered why the milk in my fridge is disappearing so fast.

Not by a longshot. The vast majority of subprime loans were bought up by banks that didn't fall under the Community Reinvestment Act, and anyways the CRA was underenforced by the Bush administration. It's also important to recognize that CDOs, default swaps, and all the other weird new financial "tools" were entirely private sector inventions. Nobody was making the banks do them. Nobody was making them "securitize" mortgages so that they could print out reams of worthless mortgages, bundle them together, and turn them into AAA rated financial instruments which got sold to grandpappy's pension fund.

More along the same line of thinking: http://rortybomb.wordpress.com/2011/11/01/bloombergs-awful-comment-what-can-we-say-for-certain-regarding-the-gses/

Let the people at the top decide the pay structure for everybody. What could poss... oh never mind.