I don't have a kill file, but you certainly are in my "stupidity alert file".

We're almost certainly going to be a lot worse off if we ignore scientists talking about what will happen under certain circumstances.

Again, where did I say that we should "ignore" them? Climate scientists have made various predictions for how climate is going to change under various emission scenarios; that is their area of expertise. It's useful information that we should pay attention to. But choosing not to act on the recommendations of climate scientists isn't "ignoring" them, it is recognizing that climate scientists lack the expertise or authority to recommend policy.

It is rational to acknowledge the emission scenarios and predictions of climate scientists and completely reject any form of government action to try to reduce emissions. In fact, I think it is the only rational position.

Go look up the costs and risks in the IPCC report; it's all there.

that advocacy tends to be based on something other than political ideology ... And the actual people whose jobs it is to actually try to understand the risks on a technical level and also the economics on a macro level aren't siding with the skeptics.

Scientists are highly political creatures, and when they engage in political advocacy, they very frequently misuse their scientific credentials.

In the end, what this comes down to is whether we, as a society, should leave these kinds of decisions to government selected experts. You may be of the opinion that we should. But if you accuse people who disagree with you of being unscientific or corrupt, you have crossed a line.

And even the cold blood bean counters are starting to do that in earnest now.

Good. When I say that "we should take no action", what I mean is that government should take no action, because government programs are going to delay whatever needs to be done. The free market (insurance companies, developers, energy companies, etc.) will respond appropriately all by itself.

This is an interesting opinion. You present it as obvious, but it is the opposite of what most people who studied this seems to think.

Most people who have studied "this" (i.e. climate change) are not economists; therefore, they lack the background and the qualifications to make informed judgments about what actions we should take in response to climate change.

This is clearly not basic economics. Is is more about estimating future risks and estimating economic cost which seems difficult to me.

The IPCC has estimated the future effects and costs. Their estimates are biased, but even taking them at face value, it is still clear from an economic point of view that the right course of action is to do nothing.

Obviously we are also debating whether global warming exists or is caused by humans. To me - as a scientist - this is a deeply worrying sign of ignorance

No, that's not what we're debating. Climate scientists and activists use accusations of ignorance, ad hominems, and straw men as a debating strategy.

The term "climate scientists and their activist friends" also indicates a bit of paranoid thinking.

I think that is a reasonably neutral way to refer to these two groups. How do you think I should refer to these two related groups that hold friendly views of each other?

I wish we would actually debate how to best deal with global warming instead of whether it exists or what causes it.

That is exactly what we are debating. And the best way of dealing with it is to ignore it, because the costs of dealing with global warming down the road are tiny compared to the costs of limiting emissions right now, for any realistic IPCC scenario. The problem is that climate scientists and their activist friends are unwilling to accept basic economics and keep making proposals outside their domain of expertise.

Really? The choices I have (and yes, I do have a few) include a service that will not provide me with really high speed access, but will not block my traffic and gives me static IP addresses.

And how does that contradict what I said? "Competition may be limited in most markets (mostly due to government regulations), but you still have a choice whether you give money to telecoms or not."

You're making the assumption that tax dollars will be used to pay to provide service.

You bet I am. That's the only reason for making these services public.

Oh, and in case you've been living under a rock for the past 100 years or so, that's (municipal bonds with user fees to cover repayment, maintenance and upgrades) how large public works projects have been successfully done over and over again.

Oh, sure! That's why we totally don't have a municipal debt crisis!

Tell you what: your town can have municipal broadband if it shows it can actually handle its finances by having a budget surplus and no debt. How about it.

I don't recall those scientists screaming from the top of their lungs ... then we were going to irreversibly fuck this planet up

No, they generally just predicted the doom of humanity, or at least their own nation, to get politicians to act their way. Predicting the doom of the entire planet is less common, but I guess all things are getting bigger and more global, including scientific FUD.

The fact that some scientists have flexible morals shouldn't be made equivalent to the fact that corporations have entirely inflexible null morals.

Corporations don't have morals, they respond to what the people actually want, as expressed by what they are willing to pay money for. The people want cheap transportation, bright lights, lots of gadgets, and entertainment, and that's what corporations deliver. That's a whole lot better than putting people with "flexible morals" in charge, in particular putting them in charge of something as dangerous as directing corporations to do things.

I never debated those things, why did you bring them up? ;)

Of course you didn't "debate them"; you prefer to ignore them because they destroy your point that we'd be better off following the policies advocated by scientists. Given the fact that scientists have historically advocated policies that have destroyed entire nations, we should be very careful in following their advice. We should, of course, listen to what they have to say ("it's been getting warmer"), but not necessarily to their policies ("therefore, you must sharply limit carbon emissions").

I apologize, I was answering the hypothetical answer to the GPs question... You know, the one you didn't actually answer.

You didn't answer the question. You simply made an erroneous assertion.

Ya me too, I much prefer a climate that we're not evolved to survive in.

Well, I do prefer a climate that we're evolved in to survive. Which is why it would actually not be such a bad thing if the current ice age came to an end. We are currently in an ice age with rapid temperature fluctuations. That is not what mammals or primates evolved in. It's probably one of the most challenging climates in the history of the planet, short of snowball earth. I refer you to the cold temperatures and rapid temperature fluctuations that started about 7 million years ago and have been getting more and more extreme:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi...

Conveniently, there are temperature predictions from the worst case IPCC predictions (RPC8.5) in that graph, which show you that those would merely take us back to the climate of 7 million years ago, just about pre-ice-age.

We should be so lucky. In reality, RPC8.5 is not a reasonable prediction, and humans will stop burning fossil fuels due to market forces long before that. Unfortunately, we will probably not be able to end the current ice age.

Humanity sure flourished through the Dryas events, didn't they?

Well, no, it probably was not so pleasant for humanity. Since the Dryas events were periods when a period of rapid global warming was interrupted and a previous cold climate was restored, I'm not sure in what way you think that that's an argument for keeping the climate cold. Colder temperatures are generally not a good thing.

Humanity clearly did flourish during the period of rapid global warming and sea level rise that started 20000 years ago and ended about 2000 years ago.

Please tell me where in the US there are such "free markets" in Internet access? I'd like to move there.

I'm not aware where they don't exist. Competition may be limited in most markets (mostly due to government regulations), but you still have a choice whether you give money to telecoms or not. With municipal telecom services, your taxes will be used to pay for part of the service, whether you want to or not.

Every single one of them.

Sometimes the change accelerant is the Earth's sudden inability to sequester any more oxygen.
Sometimes it's a huge fucking comet hitting the planet.

I.e., in no way analogous to global warming models. Good, thanks for admitting that.

Sometimes it's an ignorant species puking several-hundred-million-year-old sequestered carbon into the atmosphere in the form of a gas that is opaque to infrared radiation.

Good. I hope we'll go on doing it, melt the polar ice caps, and restore the usual stable climate on this planet again, instead of going through the rapid and destructive climate cycles we have been experiencing for the past seven million years.

Whether or not it's getting warmer is a fact, not a debate.

I haven't debating that fact. Why do you bring it up? What is the relevance of that to policy?

Personally, when a large amount of scientists start screaming about there being serious consequences to something going on, I'd listen to them.

Scientists are qualified to tell us whether it is getting warmer. They are not qualified to tell us whether the consequences are "serious" or how we as a society should respond, something that involved not just narrow scientific conclusions, but economic, social, legal, moral, and political choices.

Since the dawn of modern post-industrial science, scientists have been screaming for political action while larged monied interests decried their research.

Scientists have also built atomic bombs, created poison gas and biological weapons, experimented on prisoners in concentration camps, justified racism, faked results to enrich themselves, and done lots of other horrible things. Uncritically listening to scientists is a bad idea, and I'm saying that as a scientist myself.

You mustn't of been listening very hard then, because the concern is that this "long standing natural occurrence" is being unnaturally accelerated and during other times when it "previously naturally occurred" at accelerated rates it resulted in mass extinction and damage to biodiversity.

Really? That's interesting. There have been five mass extinctions in Earth's history. Which of these "mass extinctions" are you referring to? How was it in any way similar to, or related to, climate models for the next few centuries?

So you want to keep performing scientific research, but not use that research to inform our actions? That's... genius.

I said "The issue with the global warming debate is the political demands to translate the science into specific actions,". Is that a general statement about scientific research? Is it a call not to have research in general "inform" actions? Of course, it's neither. You're deliberately misrepresenting my position and putting up a strawman. In different words, you're a dishonest jerk.

Oh yeah, that's a real problem with a lot of political systems; too many scientists making policy

Apparently, you're also an ignorant jerk if you have to ask that question. I suggest you read up a little on European history and try to understand the role that science and scientists played in the worst regimes of the 20th century.

I think a lot of people, even some actual scientists, do not understand the role of skepticism in Science. There's a difference between scientific skepticism and peanut gallery skepticism. Scientific skepticism is healthy.

Scientists can speculate and debate as much as they want whether it's getting warmer or colder. The issue with the global warming debate is the political demands to translate the science into specific actions, often by scientists who have no qualifications in economics or politics.