Sort of. Currently the best way to reduce overpopulation is to reduce infant mortality. Once parents know that their chances are high of getting several kids who will live to adulthood, they fairly quickly tend to have less kids. I'm not sure how this argument extends out once you're talking about people who are going to live a long time.

Another big factor to consider is how these long-lived people fit into the economy. Do they work until they're 100? Is this anti-aging stuff really going to keep brains and bodies healthy enough for a 95 year-old to be an account, a truck driver, a software engineer, a waiter?

Excellent post. You should read this piece by Atul Gawande about treating people at the end of their lives:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/02/100802fa_fact_gawande

Two takeaways. First, hospice is the work of the angels. I have observed this with my mother-in-law's death from cancer, and almost everyone I've talked to seems to agree.
Second, your remark about Vietnamese having incense and pictures of ancestors is incredibly on-point, and that's what brought to mind Gawande's article. People need traditions and structure around dying to guide them through it, and that's largely missing in modern American life. My wife, who has seen a lot of death in her 35 years (mother, father, grandparents, close family friends, etc.) keeps a fair number of her ancestors close. WASP that I am, my family has none of these traditions and little to guide me when it comes to death. The Vietnamese have it right.

Sadly, I think I've come over time to agree with you (the sadness is that it feels more like cynicism than wisdom).

One thing to examine is that regulatory regimes have worked for various industries at various points in history. So while they seem to get captured with great regularity in the US, they do seem to exist and work to some degree in some industries in some countries. Somehow, for example, the requirement for the acoustic dead-man's switch that Norway and Brazil both enforce, and that the US MMS would have required had its employees not been doing coke and sleeping with oil reps, and the companies comply in Brazil and Norway. I happen to know a bit about Brazil, and it has both deadingly bureaucratic state and a great deal of cronyism and corruption, but somehow in this case regulate won out over don't-regulate - i.e., more or less the law asked for the right thing happened (unlike Amazon land use laws or its propped-up steel industry). So how did their regulatory body not get captured?

That seems to be a pretty key question for our time, since a balance between sustainability and prosperity requires an honest and unburdensome regulatory regime.

I know I'm late to this party, but I'd be interested in your reaction to the cap and dividend idea:

http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1602354&cid=31700124

I know this thread is old, but it's a pleasure to see thoughtful commenters on Slashdot. Have you heard of the cap and dividend idea? I think Maria Cantwell in particular is or was pushing it. It's more akin to Alaska's oil dividend in that it focuses on the originators of the carbon (mining and fossil fuel extraction companies) and directly redistributes the proceeds of carbon taxation to families. That eliminates some of the gaming associated with figuring out who of the many, many, many (many, many, many, ....) users of fossil fuels who do the actual emission can do what and how that will be monitored.

I admit there's probably a lot of ways the taxation rules can be set up to favor incumbents, but it just seems to me that by focusing on the source of the carbon that is ultimately emitted, there are far fewer entities to try to regulate and monitor. On the political side it seems like a winner because it sets up a battle with a limited number industries rather than anyone who uses energy - though in this case the industries in question are extremely powerful and connected across the political spectrum.

I'm just curious about your viewpoint because you seem to be interested in whether the system that's set up will work, more than the dogma around whether trying to set up such a system is inherently noble or inherently evil...

Absolutely agreed. If you want to promote it, you have to go find people you think MIGHT (not may, not are...) be interested and promote it to them.

I would add something else I noted just from the original post. You submitted anonymously, and didn't mention the name of your project, much less link to it's *Forge page. Very honorable in that you don't appear to be self-promoting. The reality, however, is that shameless self-promotion is both necessary and useful. Just the project name and a link would have netted you probably 10s of leads. Then as the parent said, go follow up and be friends with those people.

The question is largely irrelevant. The real problems with climate science are being highlighted by intelligent people, not by cretins.

I'll make the reasonable assumption that you are pretty intelligent, and evidently you are of skeptical disposition. Have you ever read any papers on climate science? How about earth science? If not, as would be the case for most intelligent non-climate-scientists (not just not just non-scientists), I can say without insulting your intelligence that you have no direct basis for determining what the general thrust of the literature is, much less what the camps are, who populates them and how strong the relative arguments are within those camps.

There are plenty of researchers out there, qualified, with careers, respected by their peers, who look at the IPCC stuff and say it is not working. These are researchers who know how to think about hard problems.

Unless you've read the literature, this statement, too is presumptive. What it really means is that one or more intermediaries has told you this, and you believe that intermediary more than you believe another intermediary who thinks that most climate scientists are in agreement. So in this case, this entire argument comes down to trust in intermediaries. You don't know who the camps are and who really subscribes to what camp.

I did a "terminal masters" in ocean physics, so I have some direct familiarity with the literature, though certainly not as deep as if I were practicing in this field. My experience is that the camps lean much more towards accepting general consensus about the nature of climate change (largely anthropogenic) and the magnitude of the expected effects than the perception you describe. From what I know directly and from the intermediaries I use when I don't know directly, just about everyone in the climate science community now believes that the arguments around concentrations of carbon and warming are solid. So when people say how much warming will happen in a hundred years, that considered very hard to dispute. Where people have more critiques is how we will get there, and the closer in you get the less agreement there is. However, it's also true that for most of the really wide open questions about climate change, people have been equally wrong guessing towards faster and slower warming. The rapid melting of the Greenland ice sheet is a great example of this - nobody from the global climate modelers (like a friend of mine who's doing his postdoc in this now) to the ice physicists understood until a few years back that when the ice sheets began to melt that the meltwater would lubricate the rock upon which the sheets are sitting and cause them to slide more quickly into the ocean. So there's an example where change was called slower. On the other hand, if I understand correctly, there has been a greater uptake of heat by the oceans that was initially expected, which will delay warming on a scale of years to decades, but could result in acceleration once the oceans warm up and provide less capacity to capture heat. So that's a delay in warming.

Just how many people do you know would go to a homeopath instead of a doctor? Sure there are some. But there are some green nuts too. Often they are one and the same. Funny that.

This statement is also full of presumption. Look at the sales of vitamins, herbal supplements and other non-FDA-approved quasi-drugs. Those sales speak to a large body of people who do feel comfortable taking remedies that are not scientifically tested. Again I challenge you to show me your basis for concluding that they're "green nuts" - sure sounds like your impression more than any data to me.

I don't think this a question of treating the public like imbeciles. There are a vast number of books out there for those that want to learn more about climate science. This is a question of trying to understand the state of a scientific discipline at a summary level, without investing the energy to really understand who thinks what and what their arguments are. And that is a recipe for confusion, even without the tremendous political pressure around the issue.

As a final note, I encourage you to dig into the literature and the real scientific debates directly. Some of the stuff can be pretty dense reading, even if you have some background in it. However, if you can google around for some concepts you can usually start to get the gist pretty quickly and even understand some of the critiques. I think what you'll see is debate of a whole different set of issues than are typically reported on in the press.

Without having read TFA, I'm inclined to believe that correlations exists for a simple reason. I'd posit that more of the CRA-regulated banks were local institutions with less access to securitization schemes who consequently maintained more prudent lending standards at the same time as being regulated by CRA.

The right wing talk show hosts obsession with CRA is a truly bizarre way to object to regulation, like choosing to make your last stand in a blind canyon. There's all sorts of poorly thought out regulatory schemes (the scheme in original article seems like a good example, to be honest), but CRA does not happen to be one of them. Hell, even the banks don't claim that CRA forced them to make crappy loans. If they're pointing the finger they say "Moody's told us it was OK", or maybe "it was the models and the quants" or "our risk manager has been fired" but they never say "boy I wouldn't have made all those bad loans if that nasty Barney Frank hadn't sent his shock troops up to the top of my big skyscrapers in NYC to force me to make loans to racial minorities." That kind of cracked-out nonsense gives any New Age hoo-ha a run for its money.