It means they're solving a harder problem.

Your links show predictions with large error bars. So no, they aren't very good at predicting.

Facts trump propaganda. Those links don't explain why there is a factor of three uncertainty in the long term temperature forcing of a doubling of the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere or why actual climate change is coming in at the bottom of their predictions.

The problem here is that there are obvious problems with monkeying around with the world's energy infrastructure. So this is a standard engineering approach to see if we can preserve that energy infrastructure without incurring huge risks. Right now, it does appear that doing nothing is a better choice than 80% reduction in CO2 emissions.

Urban environments were never the way things were. We can reduce their albedo to be lower than the natural terrain that preceded the cities. Similarly, there have always been some degree of natural coal fires. We can have less coal fires than were originally present.

I'll buy that. But I think it's worth noting here that all of our choices are geoengineering choices, including emission reduction and doing nothing. I find it a dubious argument to heavily favor one approach and then rule out a whole category of other strategies on the basis that we don't know enough to implement them. That should be a warning that we don't know enough to implement any of them.

Also there's some low-lying geoengineering fruit such as albedo changes in urban environments in hot locations which is a considerable part of the world, reforestation, and putting out large coal bed fires.

- there is absolutely 0 wrong with providing a company with a promise to buy scheduled services on the clock without interruptions and to pay for the service whether or not you can use 100% of its capacity that day.

If I want to start a shipping business I can talk to an import/export broker and work out a schedule, where regardless of my circumstances I will ship 1 container every 2 days with him on a clock and because of that certainty of payment he will give me a much better price than he could anybody else.

As to Rockefeller's 'secret deal to prevent shipping for others' - baloney. The so called 'secret deal' was no such thing, it was a discount that Rockefeller was getting that nobody else could get because they would not ship a supply of that much oil on the clock, whether they have it or not that time and pay for a prearranged amount of delivery as promised.

Rockefeller was absolutely right and the reason that oil never went below 7 cents was exactly because government destroyed his company and did not allow him to find new ways to increase demand by lowering prices even further. Nobody was finding any better way of doing business in that time, otherwise they would have won against Rockefeller and that is all there is to it.

Microsoft had a temporary monopoly for a very good reason: they provided the computing platform that nobody else could provide at the price and just because you can't accept that doesn't change that fact. Microsoft and others also pushed hard enough in the market that competitors actually had to innovate to become competitive in that market, which is how free and open source software came to existence.

As to me being 'religious' about free market - I cannot stand hypocrisy of the modern society that will vilify the individual and promote the collective and use the force of the collective to oppress the individual. If I am 'religious' about anything that would be the belief that individual freedom tramps every so called 'societal good' that you can come up with that is based on lies, oppression, destruction of the individual, theft from the individual, slavery of the individual by the collective.

Yes, I am saying precisely that, because free market is market free from government oppression, which means government cannot give a monopoly to a company and as long as a monopoly status is not given and not protected by a government the so called 'monopoly' is a temporary state of affairs that clients assign to a company if the company does exactly what the clients want.

A monopoly in a free market is not a problem at all because it doesn't become a monopoly by using force and oppression of government, so it may be a temporary monopoly (temporary as long as the company provides the best product at the best price) but no company stays a monopoly for too long. As an example I consider the break up of Standard Oil in 1911 to be a complete and utter travesty and destruction of individual freedoms. That company was started with one goal, to make money the best way Rockefeller knew how: by building a company that over time reduced prices and improved quality of service, both of which that company did.

The prices for oil product (kerosene at the time) went down from 60 or so cents in 1860s to just around 7 cents a gallon by late 1890s. All of this improved standard of living for people buying the product, the government wanted to steal the proceeds and let inefficient friends to enter the market where in the free market they could not compete on those prices at all.

Yes, a monopoly in a free market shows that the company is doing everything right.

Obviously, I don't see it that way. My ultimate point here is that we can do a lot to change what we perceive as innate value. Gold, for example, has long been a store of value, namely, that it has a perceived innate value and some physical properties that make it a nice thing for this purpose. Originally, it was because it looked pretty and was easy for bronze age people to make and handle. Now, it has a bunch of other industrial uses propping up its "innate" value.

And currencies can have value beyond their utility in everyday trade. For example, the US government and its subordinate governments accept only US dollars for tax payments and many other transactions.

While Bitcoin might not have a utility past its use as a currency, there is no reason we couldn't make a currency, using the Bitcoin model, which does. The key reason is that Bitcoin depends on computation to validate currency creation and transactions. Those computations are inherently useless outside of their derived value from Bitcoin transactions.

That needs not be the case. We could make a system where every unit of currency created and every transaction done happens to be done via a measurable unit of useful computation (say it tests a number of possible protein configurations or some other computationally intensive, readily parallelizable problem). Then in addition to the currency's value as medium of exchange, there would be add on value from those computations as well.

I have to agree with tmosley, there isn't much distinction to be made between "policies" and "tools of politics". What you're observing is that certain policies, which centralize power are popular with all members of the political oligarchy.

No, I think a better argument here is that these two parties have plenty of incentive to keep the status quo as is and to create and harden divisions of all sorts. For example, a single issue voter who always will vote for the pro-choice or the pro-life candidate is a safe voter. You can get away with quite a bit and you will always have that voter in your pocket because they will never vote for the other side (the well known "lesser of two evils" effect). The worst that will happen is that the voter won't vote at all.

But it's not quite a single party because of the voters who aren't so compromised. Voters who go for the person with the better deal create a bit of competition.

There's no such thing as innate value. Food doesn't have value, if there's no one to eat it. People don't have value, if they're just another mouth to feed, breeding more mouths to feed.

- wrong. 2 things are necessary for free markets to exist:

1. equal application of all laws to all individual regardless of their individual circumstances.

2. protection of ownership and operation of private property against the government intrusion, against the mob and the collective.

A feudal system does not treat all people the same under the law. Neither does any of of the current socialist / fascist systems. As an example the so called 'progressive' income tax increases tax rates on a smaller and smaller percentage of the population relative to their greater income. This is unequal application of the law, as it creates a gigantic divide between people who run businesses, own assets and the rest, who want to steal from those who run businesses and own assets.

- actually this is one of the worst forms of government, since it creates oppression that cannot be eliminated by taking down any one particular individual. A dictator can be shot, even a single party system (like what we had in the USSR) can be stopped, but a hydra that is 'democracy' cannot be simply shot or stopped because it pretends that it exists on the voluntary participation of the electorate, which is nonsense and it does not give power to any one particular governer, instead it provides power by proxy to the most connected individuals (companies) and it keeps a puppet in the spot light.

You can go ahead and shoot that puppet but not the puppeteer, and the puppeteer is intelligent enough to give you the impression that you are in control of the government.

Democracy is a horrendous system, where few in power (the puppeteers) use the mob to keep the power structure going by setting up the useful puppets that promise to keep the mob happy by stealing from the minority (employers, 1% or whatever) and handing the stolen goods to the majority (electorate).

Of-course the reality is that the mob gets crumbs, the money is stolen from everybody and the puppeteers have direct access to the actual reigns of power and to the fake money printing presses.

- wrong. Every time humanity actually did get to experience freedom (free economy means economy not centrally planned, economy built by people without government meddling with it) the people built the biggest economies, which later were crashed by the mob, which set up government to steal from the fruits of labour of people who built the economy.

As for 1000 years of feudalism - the feudalist system is a system of government that destroys freedom. Free market requires that people are free from regulations and from government, you can't be born into slavery and call that a free market.

- wrong, freedom is the exact opposite of coercion, which is what communism entails, given that no free person would stay in a communist system on his or her own volition unless they were ruling it somehow.

Inflation tends to nail both labor and capital. Resources and materials hold their value, but wages don't track inflation. And capital gains tax is a problem for capital.

Regulations aren't taxes because for the most part the state isn't getting revenue from the regulation. There are ways to turn such things into an effective tax such as US police departments generating funding via civil forfeiture laws, but it's not the default state of regulation.

I agree.