You wrote:

I was merely responding to that. What is "global scale" referring to then? Also, since I'm at it, I don't see any evidence of any increase in catastrophes. To the contrary, I see evidence of substantial declines in catastrophes and body counts when those catastrophes occur. A modern emergency/disaster response works wonders in reducing the occurrence and severity of catastrophes.

We can do better than that "best" just by paying attention to what the climate actually does over the next few decades.

But that was never in good shape. You aren't going to pack thousands of people per square km in the countryside.

Do you actually have an example of a global catastrophe? Zero is not an increase over zero.

Completely irrelevant here since both the damage was insignificant on a global scale and quickly repaired (extremely rapid adaptation on a time scale faster than climate change operates on). I'm worried about things that quickly kill 300 million people. Nuclear war can do that. Sea level rise can't.

There are two things to note here. First, not every such building will come with a precrashed plane parked in it, flaming jet fuel splashed all over the place. Or have fire insulation on their steel girders scraped off. The heat input and initial damage will be different. Second, they aren't all designed like the WTC towers were. That generally is a bad thing since the WTC towers were relatively well designed.

Wood is actually rather resilient though I am surprised to see it used on such a scale and in such a climate. I'd be worried that termites could be the big hidden killer when the Big One comes. Of course, there probably isn't much that's going to help in the really large earthquakes (like a magnitude 9 one), after the tsunami and lahars sweep through.

The real threat seems to be large nuclear war or some similar military-grade existential threat (weaponized diseases, for example). As long as we don't try to kill each other with such weapons, then it seems to me that the climate related stuff isn't that serious a danger. In other words, if the environmental impact is bad enough that it triggers a large scale nuclear war, then yes, it's really bad else it's just another thing we can adapt to.

And if the models are right, that's just fine. Reality, however, doesn't have this tendency to assume that the models are right.

Like an ozone hole that we already know is present? Or radiative models that turn out to be incorrect.

You should look at the role of public welfare in a system like the Roman empire. It was used from fairly early on as a bribe to the public by a variety of elites (including the occasional "landed few") to buy and hold power.

I think Mercury is more than sufficient. We're just capturing the energy output of a star, you don't need a lot of mass for that.

Let us recall that the Dyson sphere idea started life as a swarm of satellites around a star, not as a solid shell. I think I can fathom solar panels, satellites, and orbiting the Sun. That's the basics of a Dyson sphere (well, that and a relativistic traffic control problem which can involve at least as many satellites as there are people currently on Earth).

Indeed. Though it would probably involve self-replicating machines tearing apart Mercury.

Why that's definitive proof of something or another!

Out of curiosity, does the phrase "50 cent army" mean anything to you?

If they've got half their galaxy colonized and they're "close" say within a few tens of millions of light-years to us, then they might already be colonizing our galaxy. My view is a few tens of millions of light years is not that much bigger a jump than a few tens of thousands of light years. For example, even if they didn't have a clue how to break down and store whatever components they use for their AU-scale system, they could always send a small star cluster over at a significant fraction of the speed of light.

For them or for us?

And once again, you continue to use a pet definition of "authority" which does not mean "authority" and a definition of "science" which doesn't mean "science". Any argument which relies on changing the meaning of core conceptions is inherently not scientific or all that relevant in any other useful context.

I think that's what I find really ridiculous about the climate change debate. This insistence on using a long list of fallacies and projecting all sorts of silly psychological issues on people who disagree (for example, this is my "face-saving" refutation by your decree) rather than basic rational rhetoric and argument. Just point to the evidence. Don't waste my time with unscientific arguments.