According to Wikipedia, atmospheric levels of CO2 have ranged as high as 7000 ppm (during the Cambrian period), at which time the rate of plant growth was as high or higher than any other time in the history of life. Present levels are scarily close to the lowest ever found, 180 ppm during the last glaciation.'' So I think you have your facts wrong. There is also satellite data and associated research showing that today, the deserts are greening up more than any time in recent history, due entirely to increased CO2.

It seems to me that being only a factor of two greater than the 'iceball Earth' level, out of a range of almost a factor of 20, puts us at present in the bot tom of the range. The geometric mean of 7000 and 200 is about 1180, which seems to be a not-unreasonable number compared to the geological record. This may, of course, mean that Florida is a rather small island and Bangladesh will need to hire the Dutch to build dikes.

And yet in previous epochs, atmospheric CO2 has ranged as high as 7000 ppm - more than 16 times the 'worst case' of 400 ppm presently under discussion. In fact, except during ice ages, it's been higher than the present value almost all the time. But the oceans were not (AFAIK) more acidic - or at least they had lots of life in them, including a majority of shelled creatures. If so, then perhaps the acidity (if it is actually occurring) may be a transition phenomenon.

Now that the cult leader Rajendra Paucheri has been forced to resign after allegations of sexual misconduct in India, perhaps IPCC can become the scientific tool it was intended to be.

I've always thought that, if you believe 'everyone' should live a certain way, then you should live that way. If you are correct, eventually others will follow. By extension, if you believe that humans are evil and should all die off, then be my guest, start the trend.

... along with the timber industry, and 200,000 jobs, causing 28% unemployment at the peak.

I left out - recent studies (started after anomalous growth was noticed in satellite data) have shown that deserts around the world are showing increased greenness, as plants are responding to increased CO2 by growing.

I guess you've never heard about the intense growing season in Alaska, resulting in giant vegetables and other crops - 65 lb. cabbages feet in diameter. 24 hour sunlight has amazing effects on some plants. (Of course in some cases this natural phenomenon has been encouraged by selective breeding, etc. but that's beside the point.)

Also, increased CO2 has been shown to be a powerful plant growth stimulant.

present-day economists pretty much agree that the 1930s depression would have lasted about two-three years if the Fed had not used a tight money policy, while the government used Keynesian methods to try to artificially induce growth with inefficient make-work and dependency programs. Both were wrong - one removes the incentives for businesses (and agencies) to alter their behavior, and the other removes the incentives for individuals to change their behavior, while both incentivize their respective groups to become dependent on government handouts. Prior to government interventions the hundred years prior had a number of short, sharp recessions that resolved themselves within three years. It is only since we've had government interventions that these long, drawn-out painful decades have become common.

Reading your commen, I was inspired to do a bit of 'research' (aka googling). This from WIkipedia:

So this bears out the thesis that even the 400 ppm figure that everyone is so worried about is on the very low end of what Life is used to. As you point out, much lower than the present 300ppm and plants are essentially starving. It's already been shown that as CO2 has increased, various deserts are starting to 'green up' - the plants there were not suffering from lack of water but lack of CO2. If the viable range is, say, 200 ppm to 7000 ppm, then it's arguable to say that a reasonable mean would be either 3400 ppm (arithmetic mean) or about 1180 (geometric mean).

Hendrik Svensmark, one of the original members of IPCC, is just one of several original well-respected scientists who left IPCC in disgust a number of years ago after their results were doctored in the official report, eliminating all mention of any results that contradicted the official message - this is just bad science. IIRC some of the results were left in the largely-unread-by-politicians complete science publication. It's also plain from his own statements that Rajendra Pachauri who ran the IPCC from the beginning until recently not only has a religious belief in Global Warming regardless of any evidence, but is also somewhat of a sociopathic personality, who won't let anyone or anything stand in his way to get what he wants - the most recent scandal had to do with sexual misconduct in India, which finally has caused him to resign from IPCC. Perhaps now IPCC will be allowed to become a true scientific effort.

Per The Register, should be 'Olympic-size Swimming Pools' - or Bulgarian Funbags, but the number would be large.

Well put. I work for a company that provides a secure "Proof of Knowledge" support for web logins. (Proofs of knowledge include text passwords, picture passwords, Captcha, etc. - things that require personal knowledge or cognitive self-tests.) The security model for this SAAS is highly motivated by user privacy and security concerns. The actual proof - the password, or whatever - is encrypted into a hash in the browser, and stored as a doubly-encrypted hash in the server. The SAAS never knows the user's identity, only an encrypted code that identifies the user to the requesting website. So connecting the user, the website's user ID, and the proof requires hacking or compromise of all three pieces of the puzzle.

It is even possible (though we haven't rolled out this capability to production yet) for the actual challenge to be encoded by the user in such a way that it's impossible for anyone but the user to even know what the test to be performed is. I won't say how this is done, as the patent is pending.

No, I'm saying that it is possible to make a system that is, at least for most purposes, both secure and not dependent on geekly knowledge. Using the cell network as an example, while the encryption actually used and the security model is not great for most cell networks, from what I've read the Blackberry's model seems to be pretty good, and some version of the Blackberry is, AFAIK, still in use by the politician in the White House, who "couldn't live without his Blackberry" and is certainly by no means a geek or significantly knowledgeable about how to implement or maintain a secure channel. Of course, we don't know how much or what kind of work was necessary to vet and maintain the system in that case - but it's significant that governments including the government of India were at least talking about blocking all Blackberry traffic unless the company allowed them access to the keys, or put the servers inside the country.

There are also other systems that, _once set up_ for a company, for instance, seem to be pretty transparent and easy to use for the employees. I suspect that in those cases as well as the Blackberry, there is a significant effort for the support and IT people to set up and maintain such a system, but that's OK. I just don't think it's right to tell some poor slob with a bad excuse for a high school diploma to become an expert in how to maintain the security on their phones. It's worth noting that historically (back in the paper mill days) janitors needed to have the highest security clearances in government installations, for pretty obvious reasons.

See, there's the rub. Perhaps 10% of the geek community even _think_ they know how this stuff works, of which perhaps another 10% of that group have a reasonably up-to-date knowledge. Which would probably work out to 0.1% of the PC/phone/iThing/tablet-using public.

OTOH, we see people of all intellectual persuasions, most of whom haven't a clue how their cell phone works. But they are successfully using a device which has built-in encryption (which could probably be better, but that's aside the point) for their phone calls, without any significant setup other than buying the phone and providing certain details about themselves. So some level of trusted communications _can_ be provided without everyone becoming a geek, but (as you imply) it does require some kind of industry agreement - and government acceptance - to provide an uncompromised solution. And I think that is essentially impossible as long as we have even a few "bad guys" (for any definition of "bad guy") out there.

I also still have hope that the Republicans will return to their Main Street, egalitarian roots (the party started as the anti-slavery party). At present both parties are too strongly tied to Big Money, Big Labor, Big Legal, and Big Government. Almost all of the controversies between them are contrived PR to scare their "constituencies". As Boss Tweed said (see Tammany Hall), "I'm all for free elections, as long as I get to decide who's nominated."

In the last 100+ years, both parties have oscillated between positions on the size of government, fiscal policy, and almost everything else. I think the only real constant has been that the Democrats have promoted setting ethnic groups against each other since before the Civil War. And today the extremists seem to have taken over both parties, while the vast middle has abdicated from party politics.

Case in point: Democrat JFK originally ran on a small government, balancing the budget ticket against big (or at least bigger) government advocate Richard Nixon. He successfully pushed through reductions in both government expenditures and taxes. Revenue from decreased taxes did in fact increase sufficiently to balance the budget.