that it is a nice idea that cannot be realized with current levels of technology

Technology? It cannot be realized because of human nature. We're going to need a transformative upgrade to that before any -ism that requires everyone to "play nice" can be realized in practice.

Just delete the humans and you're all set.

I think you're drastically overstating it. If Russia were to unload its $100B in reserves, it could depress the value of the USD by perhaps a couple percent for a couple of days, but it would do way more damage to itself. The global foreign exchange market is measured $5.3-*trillion* *per day*(!) and there are lots of aggressive players desperately trying to profit from arbitraging a few hundredths of a penny. If they figured out that Russia was dumping $100B at a deep discount for purely political reasons, the buyers would go into a huge feeding frenzy, mitigating the decline on the USD. Immediately after Russia finished unloading, the USD would jump right back up to its true value. The main result would be that Russia would have donated billions or tens of billions of dollars of value to speculators for a very temporary impact on the value of the USD. I wouldn't even call this a Pyrrhic victory; it'd be an unmitigated loss for Russia. China could do the same thing and have a bigger impact with its $1.3T, but also a bigger loss to itself.

Since the collapse of civilization will happen in a few decades, there is absolutely no reason to give a second thought to Anthropogenic Global Warming Caused Specifically And Exclusively By Anthropogenic Carbon Emissions And Curable By Donating Trillions Of Dollars To Genocidal Dictators For Some Reason (AGWCSAEBACEACBDTODTGDFSR). I'll bet these ultra-leftist alarmists didn't think about the implications of anybody taking their work seriously!

Because he may be in possession of millions of bitcoins? I'm sure some unscrupulous people would like to unlawfully acquire them.

You mean the bank crashes where the monetary authorities stepped in and no depositors lost even a single penny? That one?

said the Windows 8.1 update will come with improvements for non-touch devices

What a fantastic strategy -- to put a few afterthoughts into 99% of their market...

It'll be hackers and the Chinese military that brick these American smartphones before the NSA does.

(Casselton, North Dakota anyone?)

Lac-Megantic, Quebec anyone? One thing about pipelines is that they don't tend to go through the centers of every small town along their route.

And what happens to the insurance companies if they get it all wrong using the runaway greenhouse model? (Answer: record profits!)

and placing trust in an experiment or model's results only as far as

Experiments and models are very different things. Experiments test how well your model matches the actual universe. Models test how well your model matches your model.

I'd say that we should be tazing texters, physically beating serial talkers, and reserving the instant death penalty for people who answer their cell phones.

How can I vote for you?

In one week will we be reading about how country X is sending an icebreaker to free the three stuck icebreakers?

It'll be Canada to show you amateurs how it's done.

A math teacher would lose his job if he taught kids that 2+2=5.

No, he wouldn't; he'd be protected by his union.

AGW is also a theory

At this stage, it's only an hypothesis.

AGW is a complex thing - there will be no one conclusive experiment that confirms or blows the whole thing.

AGW has exactly one experiment (computer models are not experiments; they are just expressions of their models), and its results will only be known in retrospect a couple hundred years from now. But even then, they will need to untangle dozens of extraneous factors from the results before drawing any conclusions.