All I'm saying is that most of the 'studies' I've seen floating around the press smell fishy to me

The problem is that you rely on the news media for your information, and what you're going to get is information cherry-picked for its entertainment value, not for its scientific content.

Climate science is just as rigorous a discipline as any other, and the scientists working in the field are just as serious about their work as scientists working in genetics or neuroscience or anything else.

The problem is that the stakes are extremely high and in general the theory and data are converging on a very unpleasant prognosis for the future of our world. People really, really, REALLY don't like the prognosis. And it's understandable. If astronomers saw a swarm of Everest-sized asteroids heading our way that had a good chance of clobbering us in 50 to 100 years, people would react negatively to that too.

I suspect this reaction by the fearful and ignorant members of the public is a consequence of the fact that in the vast majority of the realm of human experience, our perceptions strongly shape reality. What we believe really can end up shaping what we see. Economics is a good example, with it's many self-fulfilling prophecies. But in the case of asteroids or climate change, it matters not one iota what people think or how they feel. What's going to happen is going to happen, and we'd better understand it if we want to stand a chance of coping with it.

Climate change does have the advantage of being theoretically quite simple - simple enough for just about anybody to understand if they're willing to open their eyes just a little bit. Radiative forcing is a simple stock-and-flow box model. If you can understand why the bathtub overflows when you leave the faucet running, even though the drain is open at the same time, then you should be able to understand that anthropogenic climate change is inevitable.

It really is frustrating how intensely climate science is doubted and denied. Economics - a far softer science with a (so far) vastly greater impact on human society - gets a staggering amount of leeway by comparison. And when it's practitioners (who outnumber climate scientists 100 to 1) get things catastrophically wrong, as in the case of the recent Wall Street collapse, there is surprisingly little criticism of the theoretical underpinnings, nevermind little details like bad data.

The science of climate change, by contrast, is on very solid theoretical footing; but sometimes every science has to deal with bad data, as in this case. The notion that this somehow discredits the theoretical basis of radiative forcing and the greenhouse effect is sheer lunacy. Simple stock-and-flow box models are enough to understand that anthropogenic climate change is inevitable. If you can understand how a bathtub overfills when you leave the faucet running, you should be able to understand that climate change is real and unavoidable.

The reactions of laymen and the ignorant masses who follow Limbaugh et al can only be explained as propaganda-induced hysteria, to which only the profoundly ignorant and/or fearful are vulnerable. The reactions are similar to those of the North Atlantic fishermen who vehemently asserted that since they'd been fishing the Georges Bank for 250 years it was 'obvious' it could never be depleted. Changes in fish populations, if there were any, were 'natural'. They ignored scientists and continued to produce record catches - right up until the entire fishery collapsed a few years ago.

Any one who is genuinely interested in learning about how and why complex systems change catastrophically should read "Limits to Growth" - the classic by the MIT team headed by Donella Meadows.

Hydroponics works well only for some types of plants. Plants with roots that have evolved to extract oxygen don't do well when submersed in water all the time, even if the water is hyper-oxygenated. Vegetables we're familiar with grow well hyroponically, as do some grasses like rice, but other grasses (wheat, maize, etc) present problems. Fruit trees (apples, oranges, etc) are also not so easy to grow with hydroponics.

Note also that the chart of higher yields on wikipedia's page are extrapolated estimates from 1975. Hydroponics is not a viable solution for all agricultural products, only for some, and that reality is clearly evident in the market - which has had more than 30 years since the wikipedia source to test the promise of those higher yields.

There seems to be a cognitive disconnect in scale when folks view proposals like these. Hydroponics and aeroponics work at the scale of gardening, not industrial agriculture. So of course you're not going to get massive monocrop yields out of a building like this. But then, that's not the point of a garden.

After all, the amount of light the building can receive is limited to the area of its footprint plus the area of the shadow it sweeps out multiplied by the duration of time that light falls on that area, adjusting for rates of luminal energy influx (so those long shadows at the end of the day aren't worth much...). Compared to even a modest size farm, that area is going to be small. Compared to industrial farming where crops are planted on tens of thousands of acres, well, projects like this are a drop in the bucket by comparison.

Think of it as community gardening, and then the scale of your thinking will match up correctly to reality.

Your arguments and those of the parent poster are both entirely dependent on the types of plants being grown. You can grow some vegetables and flowers with hydroponics, and you can grow certain grasses with a thin veneer of soil. But if you want to grow corn, potatoes, apples or coconuts you're obviously going to need a significant layer of soil.

"Simply running a PC generates between 40g and 80g per hour"

I call total BS on this too. My PC is rated for a peak power draw of 400 watts. At idle the wattage is under 50 and with casual usage it's probably not doing more than 100. It'd be a stretch to boil five kettles of water in an hour with 100 watts.

You may be misunderstanding the meaning of profit. In a strict sense (and this is going to be confusing if you're not an economist), it is the proportion of an economic surplus that is disbursed as rent to those with property rights.

Government can't really 'profit' in this strict sense because individuals cannot claim property rights over government capital, and therefore cannot be enriched by the economic surplus (the 'rent') those assets generate - at least in modern democracies. This does not mean there is no corruption. Sure, in the US and elsewhere plenty of government funds get allocated to purposes that are designed to enrich a handful of particular stakeholders, but it is incorrect to conflate the inefficiencies associated with particular instances of corruption and the overall model of redistributive governance. It's the same in big corporations - they lose a bit of money from employee corruption and stealing too, but that doesn't render the corporation's business model useless.

'piecemeal insurance is not viable in a world in which insurers can cherry-pick the most risk-free customers'

Piecemeal insurance is not viable under any circumstances. It's the profit part of the equation that borks everything: when your money depends on not paying out benefits, you're going to do whatever you can get away with to not pay out benefits. Private, for-profit health insurance makes even less sense than private, for-profit fire departments, police forces and armies.

The real test will be whether the total energy efficiency exceeds that of creating hydrogen fuel via electrolysis as the MIT team that's been all over the news for the last year says they can now do cheaply and efficiently. Biofuel is of course just a form of solar power. The conversion efficiency is not likely to be more than about 14% based on how photosynthesis works, if I recall my numbers correctly. PV cells already do much better than that, so the real value is of course in the storage. If MIT's electrolysis tech can use the 40%+ efficiency of the latest PV cells or thermal solar power or whatever else to generate hydrogen for a total efficiency that significantly exceeds the 14% of biological photosynthesis, then biofuels are likely DOA. But the gap would have to be significant to compensate for the difficulties and costs associated with hydrogen fuel.

Personally, I think it's unlikely hydrogen will cover all these hurdles in the near term. So, my money is still on algal biodiesel.