However - the Maldives have 320,000+ inhabitants, who are about to be, quite literally, out to sea. ... Imagine the chaos, hate and anger involved, if the US suddenly had to move all of Hawaii's population onto the continental US (1.3 million).

Please, get some perspective. The entire population of Oceania, excluding Australia, Papua New Guinea, and New Zealand (which are far too big to go under), is about 3.2 million people. The number of new immigrants to the US alone per year is 1 million. The US has 40 million foreign born residents, Russia 12 million, Germany 10 million, France 6.5 million, Canada 6 million, and so on. An extra 3.2 million people migrating over the span of a few decades isn't even going to be noticeable. And they are doing it already because most people actually don't like living on isolated rocks in the middle of nowhere with no way of earning hard currency, which is why many of these nations already have negative population growth. In addition, as a simple look at the globe shows you, global warming is going to create far more land arable in Canada, Alaska and Siberia than is lost on a few tiny islands in the Pacific and through additional desertification around the equator.

This is the lower bound.

This is what the IPCC report says:

Limited and early analytical results from integrated analyses of the global costs and benefits of mitigation indicate that these are broadly comparable in magnitude, but do not as yet permit an unambiguous determination of an emissions pathway or stabilisation level where benefits exceed costs.

http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/syr/en/mains5-7.html

So, they are not "lower bounds", the costs and benefits of mitigation are "broadly comparable in magnitude".

In different words: stop lying.

Most of these "climate warfare" projects require massive engineering efforts that are, shall we say, very susceptible to cheap, more traditional military intervention.

No "prisoner's dilemma" involved for the politicians: voters in the US and Europe would be tearing their politicians apart over the costs of global warming mitigation. Just look at all the belly-aching over the current recession.

The underlying problem is too hard to solve with current technology. According to Hansen et al, we need to get the CO2 levels down to 350ppm if we want to be safe. This means, not only must we immediately stop adding CO2 to the atmosphere, we also need to remove some of it.

Hansen is someone who spreads FUD to gain notoriety. Read the IPCC instead. It contains a lot of scary imagery too, but ultimately, you can find a simple cost/benefit analysis, which sums it up:

http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/syr/en/mains5-7.html

For increases in global average temperature of less than 1 to 3ÂC above 1980-1999 levels, some impacts are projected to produce market benefits in some places and sectors while, at the same time, imposing costs in other places and sectors. Global mean losses could be 1 to 5% of GDP for 4ÂC of warming, but regional losses could be substantially higher.

Limited and early analytical results from integrated analyses of the global costs and benefits of mitigation indicate that these are broadly comparable in magnitude, but do not as yet permit an unambiguous determination of an emissions pathway or stabilisation level where benefits exceed costs.

The idea that we should dump vast quantities of iron into the ocean in order to mitigate a potential problem that amounts to little more a slight reduction in global GDP is ludicrous. Algal blooms and tinkering with iron content of the ocean is far more dangerous than rising CO2 levels, Hansen's cataclysmic fantasies notwithstanding.

It is a risk management issue. We know there is a risk of global warming. We know it can potentially bring massive (earth altering amounts) losses if unmitigated.

According to the IPCC report, the losses are not "massive", they amount to a few percent of global GDP, comparable to how much it would cost to mitigation. The losses for the US and Europe are even smaller.

Global warming is something we can live with: it causes changes, will impose some costs, but it is not a civilization killer. (Global cooling, on the other hand, is a huge problem. The US and Europe would be in deep trouble if climate went back to the way it was a few thousand years ago.) And carbon emissions will abate over the next couple of decades anyway, as solar and other technologies become more attractive and cheaper.

The question is do we wait uninsured, or do we consider an insurance policy of some sort.

I'm pretty sure dumping massive quantities of iron into the ocean and causing algal blooms is not "insurance", it is pollution.

Some of this kind of makeup might help...

http://digitalsynopsis.com/inspiration/japanese-artist-uses-acrylic-paint-to-create-fascinating-body-art/

Face recognition software doesn't work like a barcode. Like a medical test, it has some error rate. So, even if people managed to get it down to an error rate of 1%, that means that a search will pull up 10000 people if you're living in a city of 1 million and you restrict the search to the city. Attempts by police to deploy face-based monitoring at airports and other public sites have been spectacular failures.

That's probably both parties represent the majority of normal, relatively sane people who don't want to see their country destroyed by "libertarian" self-serving billionaires who want unlimited freedom for themselves to make money.

Yeah, "normal" people like you prefer hundreds of billions of dollars to be given to bankers and failing industries, and to be wasted on wars, just like both Bush and Obama did. And then, to top it all off, you love making even more debt giving great retirement and medical benefits to old people who never bothered to save for themselves. And the people who are going to end up paying for all that is the middle class.

So you were opposed to tracking down and having to kill Osama bin Laden when he didn't meekly surrender?

I'm opposed to the process by which it happened, and I'm opposed to the president trying to use it for political gain.

Whatever the rights and wrongs, I bet you wouldn't have been saying that four years ago.

I was strongly against both Bush and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I think they were a waste of money.

I mean, heck, I'm not a fan of Catholicism, but I'm not rude or arrogant enough to expect to be able to visit French cathedrals wearing beach shorts without getting an old lady jabbing a sharp, painful and accusing finger into my hide, and even if I did, I'd take it as an indication that *I* was the one doing something wrong.

Actually, she's probably just coming on to you. Less than 5% of French go to mass, and only 25% believe in God.

More than 60% of the US and world music market go to UMG, SonyBMG and EMI. Who owns them? UMG is French, Sony BMG is Japanese (it used to be Japanese and German), and EMI is British. Yes, Hollywood and the US music industries pushes restrictive copyright legislation. So do European publishers, directors, writers, and artists, as well as European governments who like to make their media happy. And the legal situation surrounding copyright and fair use is restrictive in Europe already, and has always been.

The DMCA wasn't something invented out of thin air by the US, it was the implementation of a WIPO agreement. Europe implemented the WIPO agreement with a number of directives, including Directive 2001/29/EC, which in some ways is more restrictive than the DMCA. But Europeans don't follow EU politics much; to them, it looks like the US implements some draconian law and then Europe is made to follow, when in fact, the real reason is that both EU and US special interests perform policy laundering at WIPO, and the US just happens to be a bit quicker implementing it.

If you're a geek interested in keeping fair use alive, the "blame the US" approach isn't going to work because the US isn't the primary source of the problem. The problem is media companies. European media companies have much tighter control over European public opinion and politicians, and they love to present these issues as "evil American companies like Google want to steal European culture and impoverish European artists" and at the same time "the evil American government is forcing our poor politicians to implement all these draconian laws that we don't really want to implement but are bullied into". Stop letting yourself be manipulated and get the facts. These laws are going to keep coming until the politics in countries like France, Germany, the UK, and Japan change radically.

This wasn't a court, it was a grand jury. They are secret to protect the innocent from having their names tainted. The process may sometimes be abused for the purpose of hassling people, but calling it a "secret court proceeding" is still wrong. Civilian court proceedings are public and handled by judges and juries.

While I'm generally sympathetic to the view of money as "shares" in something, your particular analysis still fails. First, wealthy as Zuckerberg is, even if his money represented a share in a fixed pot, his share is still so small that it doesn't affect you in any practical way. Rich people haven't driven up the price of important scarce resources like land or resources. In fact, in all the areas in which rising prices are a problem in our society (primarily, medicine and education), the rising prices are due to artificial scarcities created by special interests. Furthermore, Zuckerberg's wealth is not part of a fixed pot; our economy is growing, which means that effectively that new stuff people want to pay money for is being created all the time.

As for the Eurozone, your analysis also doesn't work. While one may muse about the deeper meaning of the money owed in the European crisis, in the end, the losses of European banks aren't about some abstract system, they are real in the same way as if you or I lose $1000. Bizarre as moving those little numbers and pieces of paper around may seem, in the end, the numbers still have reality because that's what we still agree on. If we ever were to lose trust in those numbers, we have a name for that: inflation or hyperinflation.

No, you are not Zuckerberg's slave. You are slave to reality, however: you used to have to hunt for food, worry about starving, and hope that your social group didn't arbitrarily kick you out. Money has greatly reduced those constraints to the point where you enjoy a lot more individual liberties than people used to. The system may seem arbitrary, capricious, and oppressive, but it is still a lot less so than what it replaced. And until someone comes up with a better system, that's what we're going to stick with.

Wouldn't it much more fun for the Chinese if they hid the flags and claimed the moon landings had all been faked?