People don't plan for the future anymore. People don't fund blue sky science anymore. People aren't responsible for themselves anymore. People don't think for themselves anymore.

Because why bother when you can have government do all of that for you?

But not with their own money. You can with like-minded people step up and pay for all the social programs you want. Simultaneously, you would completely eliminate any "conservative" criticism because they wouldn't have a say in how things run.

That you could get civilization without all that eye-rolling.

I think it more likely that someone will engineer a sexually transmitted disease which induces infertility and is tailored to ethnic groups that they don't like.

If you have positive population growth, it isn't because your population is experiencing a negative rate of deaths.

And yet population growth still happens. As I noted, birth rate goes up too and there are plenty of examples of places over the past century that had low food supply yet still had high population growth rates. It's only when a society transitions to not enough food per person to keep everyone alive (which incidentally happens frequently during a war or famine so that it's not just a slight change in food per person), that we transition into higher death rates than birth rates.

My point here is that the dynamic between population growth and decline doesn't gradually nose over as food supply and wealth dwindles.

And I'm pointing out that you are merely wrong here. We have lots of evidence that wealth at all levels of modern human development correlates with lower population growth. Your generalization is wrong as well. Capitalism is not defined as things good for society, such as creation of wealth, and socialism as things bad for society, such as taking wealth away. They are merely somewhat different approaches to similar problems.

So call them "socialists" because of their actions then. It's a silly argument to make and again depends on a white hat/black hat view of capitalism and socialism which isn't true.

I personally heavily favor capitalism in a society, but I don't make the mistake of discounting socialism policies just because because they don't work at the huge doses that have been tried over the past couple hundred years.

Bingo. Environmentalism is not socialism. It is a third independent attribute. Another example of this is the antics of the former USSR which among other things nearly destroyed the Aral Sea.

No, population growth is about reproduction not sustainability. It's an ugly fact that poorer people have more children even in low food conditions.

Ok, I see your use here. I'll just point out that "opposite forces" quickly lose their meaning when there are more than two forces in play.

I disagree. Chinese socialists aren't on board with this and they're a huge part of the group. Socialists from oil-producing countries aren't on board either (eg, Venezuela).

But having said that , I do believe the shrillness of the arguments for global warming has a lot to do with losing the overall war for that.

Think about it. If we were somehow to hold affluence constant, the affluent population will have shrunk slightly, while the not so affluent population will grow exponentially. Even a small population of not so affluent will eventually consume more than a vast affluent population, unless you check their population growth somehow.

Were you trying to say something?

The developing world people would have reproduced anyway, and if they were less affluent, they would have reproduced more than they actually did!

It's not an opposite to capitalism. After all, we have plenty of societies that have combinations of both capitalism and socialism. And socialism can curb population growth in the same way as capitalism by making most people a bit more affluent.

This is a non sequitur. Screaming about global warming doesn't make people go away or reproduce less.

New checks on population growth came up. We no longer need mosquitos to keep us in our place, when developed world affluence works vastly better.

That doesn't explain all those bankruptcies during the dotcom bubble. Rather they built a vast pile of dark fiber (that is, unused backbone fiber cable) and then went bankrupt when the money ran out. Companies like Google have been using that stuff (particularly, the right of ways these days) ever since.

So what? If there's money for these sorts of games, then there's money for independent examination.

I'm aware of two sorts of evidence. First, there's the rhetoric used by the President, for example, "bitter clingers" speech and his statements about the Trayvon Martin shooting indicate he is at least in support of some sort of federal level gun control.

Second, there's the ATF Fast and Furious scandal. On the surface, it's supposedly a sting operation meant to uproot gun smuggling networks in the US in order to assist with the taming of the Cartel war in next door Mexico. In actuality, this sting delivered considerable material support to the Sinaloa Cartel, 2,000 guns guaranteed not to be intercepted plus whatever else the Cartel was able to smuggle out with those weapons (such as laundered money or more guns), a pretext (which turned out to be too flimsy when the scheme was revealed) for introducing additional regulations on gun purchases, and these guns turning up at over 200 murders in Mexico and the US and which are still turning up at crime scenes.

Not at all. Expert opinion is the most common basis for an argument from authority. Let's look at the three examples you gave, the Stern Review, the Garnaut Climate Change Reviews, and the IPCC's series of assessment reports. The first thing to observe is that the first two reports were funded by politicians with a particular agenda and who happened to need a particular outcome of those reports and for which the reports just happen to deliver on that agenda and need.

Former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair needed a pretext for supporting near future greenhouse gases emission controls. He sets aside public funds for the Stern Review, and (what a coincidence!) the Stern Review just so happens to support his needs of the moment. Same goes for the Garnaut Reviews which happen to fill the same role for former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.

IPCC has long been notorious for providing what pro-climate change propaganda is needed as it is needed. For example, we have the "hockey stick" estimate promulgated in the 2001 Third ASsessment Report, extreme weather in the next assessment, and heating of the oceans in the latest one. I wouldn't be surprised to see a sudden confidence by considerable narrowing of the temperature forcing of a doubling of carbon dioxide in the next assessment report.

Each of these reporting sources has consistently exaggerated its conclusions in favor of current carbon dioxide emission reduction. Earlier in this thread, I mentioned the consistent biases of the Stern Review. The Garnaut Reviews are even worse with a claim of only 0.1 to 0.2% of Australia's fossil fuel-dependent GDP lost each year to mitigation policies for AGW. That's ridiculous.

Meanwhile, the IPCC has long been notorious for exaggerating the impact of AGW while simultaneously downplaying the costs of greenhouse gases emissions reduction. For example, I was told by slashdotter Layzej that the IPCC's Third Assessment Report (TAR) predicted a 0.1 to 0.2 C increase in global mean temperature over the few decades after 2001 (using scenario "IS92a").

But when I actually looked at the "Summary for Policy Makers" I see claims of larger near future heating for the scenario in question (of 0.1 C to 0.3 C) with the high end of the initial range of increases presented instead as a median value of this new, unjustified range. I also saw that in this Summary the TAR had obsoleted the scenario in question and was using scenarios that presented more aggressive heating.

In other words, the fine print, which Layzej unearthed was buried deep in the report somewhere, while other, significantly worse and unjustified scenarios were presented for public consumption. Now, that those overly alarmist scenarios are failing, supporters are digging up the hidden, but somewhat more accurate predictions and claiming that the IPCC was right all along.

This sort of dishonesty and misuse of expert opinion is why I term the whole effort an argument from authority. But don't get me wrong I think there's a lot more fallacies at play here than just argument from authority.

My view on this is that "expert opinion" and "peer reviewed and published" doesn't outweigh being deliberately wrong.

So you're saying it's not strictly a negative externality. The moral content or intent of a policy is completely irrelevant to whether it creates an externality or not.

Of course not. It's incurred without choice by the employer, that's what makes it an externality.

Funny, doesn't look like that from my end. While I grant someone seems to have a problem understanding what an externality is, I find it more interesting that merely characterizing this massive synergy of fossil fuels, energy, and transportation with the entirety of an economy, as not an externality is sufficient to dismiss it.

This strikes me as comparable to the argument from authority fallacy you presented earlier, created by presenting "credible, peer-reviewed", but highly biased predictions as if they were the best possible guesses out there.

Sure, if we ignore contrary evidence, like what I've remarked on (such as ignoring the positive externalities of fossil fuel use, proper time value of money, or the oter systematic biases contributing to portraying radical carbon dioxide emission reduction as something with low costs and large benefits) then sure, we can reach agreement on this. It's just not worth my effort to do so. Nor would it be moral.