Your first option works, but this can't be legislated. If this is what you want, let the market do its thing.

The second is nonsense; the reason these are more expensive are because they are less efficient. Less efficient, more expensive energy translates directly into lower economic activity. Justifying this with far-out predictions of future doom that are supported by broken models and bad data doesn't fly. The damage will be immediate and inevitable.

The fact is that it is economically advantageous for us to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

No. All economic activity generates CO2; reducing CO2 will directly reduce economic activity. Taxing it would amount to not only the biggest tax in history, but the biggest tax possible - a tax on *everything*. There is no way to spin this as economically beneficial.

Do you think if Google fails that the search engine is just going to disappear? Or GMail? No, they'll be sold to the highest bidder to pay Google's debts, but they won't themselves be liquidated. Life will go on for the rest of us.

Relax, and stop screwing with the market already. If they make dumb business decisions, let them fail. There are mechanisms in place to deal with that.

The chances of utter catastrophe, while still really unknown and probably very small, are still enough that we should ask ourselves why the fuck we're playing russian roulette with the whole world, when all we have to do is Stop. Putting. So. Much. Carbon. Into. The. Atmosphere.

And where, pray tell, did all that carbon come from in the first place? The atmosphere. Carbon levels in the past were way higher than they are today, and the planet survived just fine.

You made the assertion that climate is chaotic. I asked you for evidence to support your assertion. Attacking the evidence that climate is not chaotic on multi-decade time scales is not the same thing as offering evidence that it is chaotic.

I am not a climate scientist, but I am a software engineer with experience modeling physical systems. Air flows, heat dissipation, and so on are all based on fluid dynamics, which are very chaotic systems that are extremely sensitive to minor variations. If they're not using the Navier-Stokes equations to model the climate, then what exactly are they modeling? The climate is nothing but a huge fluid dynamics system with a large number of diverse inputs. Due to the nature of fluid dynamics, a small error in the inputs leads to a large error in the results - especially when you're trying to simulate years into the future.

And actually, I just did a quick Google search... Navier-Stokes equations are featured very prominently in climate modeling. Fluid simulations based on Navier-Stokes equations are inherently chaotic.

Or is it just that you would prefer to believe that climate (as opposed to weather) is chaotic because you would rather not believe the predictions of climate models?

Why should I believe models that have never proven themselves trustworthy?

So if you want to argue that there can be no predictable trends over a multi-decade time interval, the uncertainty of next week's weather does not constitute evidence of any kind (and it is more than a little deceptive to present it as though it were).

Ok, I'll grant you this point. I will no longer use the example of predicting next week's weather when discussing climate models.

So based upon everything we know about the physics of climate

This is the key phrase. Given that these models have not demonstrated success in predicting the climate based on past data, I maintain that we don't know nearly as much about the physics of climate as we think we do (which would be in keeping with the historical development of new scientific fields - the initial assumptions and theories are almost invariably wrong).

If climate (as opposed to weather) were chaotic, then the curves should diverge from one another exponentially over time, yet this is not observed.

But again, you're simply talking about this particular model, not the actual physical climate.

Notable, climate models that simulate the physical processes that control the earth's energy balance do not exhibit chaotic behavior on multi-decade time scales.

Climate *models* do not exhibit chaotic behavior, or the climate itself does not? Citation please.

Would you argue that it is impossible for a casino to predict whether its dice games will make money if it cannot predict the outcome of the next role of the dice?

I already addressed that in another commenter's response. Games of chance are based on simple statistics - they become easier and easier to predict with a larger number of samples. The climate is a chaotic system - by nature, these become MORE difficult to predict as you go farther out. It's an entirely different thing.

I would not bet on whether it will be warmer or cooler a week from now, but I'd place a substantial sum of money on the bet that it will be warmer 6 months from now.

What about a year from now? You have no idea, and neither does anybody else. Predicting that summer will be warmer than winter is a no-brainer, seeing as how the Earth operates on a clear one-year cycle. But what matters here are the changes from cycle to cycle, not the changes within a single cycle. And our models are nowhere near complete enough to be able to predict those. Like I said, show me a model that can predict today's climate based on 1980's data. There isn't one - they all predict continued warming; meanwhile, the Earth has recently cooled while CO2 continued to rise. There is clearly far more in play than the simplistic models factor in.

My basic point is that the climate is way more complex and chaotic than the models, and you cannot successfully model a chaotic system by simplifying it. It just doesn't work - the tiny (and no-so-tiny) factors that your model ignores end up affecting major trends in the long run in unpredictable ways.

To expand a bit on your roulette analogy, the outcome of a given spin is irrelevant. But if you take a day's worth of spins, your statistical predictions will be fairly accurate. A week's worth of spins will be even easier to predict, and a year's worth of spins can be predicted to a high degree of precision. This is not a chaotic system, and has nothing to do with a true chaotic system such as the climate or the economy.

Weather and climate are two different things, and they occur on different timescales.

No, they are different timescales of the same physical phenomena. As with any complex, chaotic system, the farther out you try to predict an outcome, the more difficult and uncertain it gets.

To make an analogy, how is it possible for casinos to make profit, if nobody can predict where the ball in roulette will end up?

That's a bad analogy. The long-run statistics of roulette are simple to calculate, and the outcome of any given spin is irrelevant. My point is that if we can't predict how the natural environment will behave in very short timeframes, why do we expect to predict how it behaves in larger timeframes?

Again, please show me any climate model that can successfully take data from the 1980's and predict today's climate. None can. The only thing these models are useful for is explaining environmental behavior after the fact. They have no predictive value.

With greater computer power and development of more detailed models, physical climate models have progressively gotten better over the years in calculating the impact of CO2 and other "greenhouse gasses" on the radiative balance of the earth.

No, they haven't. The climate is so extraordinary complex that the models are terribly gross simplifications that ignore all sorts of complex interactions and variables. The models are *better* than they used to be, but they're still crap. You can't model something that you don't understand, and we don't have anything resembling a good understanding of our climate.

When these models can take data from the 1980's and predict today's climate, then we'll talk. Hell, we can't even predict next week's weather with any degree of certainty. It's time to stop pretending that we can predict a global climate catastrophe decades away.

It didn't take very long at all for me to grow dependent on the multitouch gestures in Firefox. Why in the world does WebKit not support the hardware on new Macbooks as well as Firefox? Three-finger swipe (back/forward and top/bottom of the page) and pinch-to-zoom are incredibly useful.

Yeah, but at least you can repair a cd with things like 'Dr CD and DVD Repair Device' unless the scratch is too deep.

Or toothpaste. Works wonders on scratched up CDs.

Regulation ensures that companies can't get away with these bad practices.

Just like the War on Drugs ensures that people can't do drugs.