Gore is for the cap and trade politically. It seems much more achievable because it isn't an outright tax. Alternately, you could just tax corporations based on how much carbon they put out. And tax imports based on that same thing. As the carbon footprint decreases, taxes would lower. You could even cut other corporate taxes, or give credits based on new inventions that helped other companies reduce their carbon. If the treaties were comprehensive enough, we could make some real inroads very quickly. Today's conservatives are so psycho about taxes they will deny science so they don't have to pay.

Gosh, durrr, it's hard to model because it's mind-numbingly complex. Though the models are still evolving, they work only to find one thing: what is the average global temp, and what is the trend likely to be? If you could produce a model that said what the temperature will be like in Atlanta in December of 2012 from a model based on previous readings that tries to predict what future readings will be, and which factors in what the influence of the ice sheets and the Amazon and the evaporative capacity of the ocean is, etc., you'd be a very wealthy human being. No, what you want is the Farmer's Almanac. Predicting weather for one particular point on the globe in a year's time is quite possibly the most difficult mathematical problem ever developed. Predicting what the general trends will be in average temperature globally for the next x years is also complicated, but much less so.

It's at least consistent with climate change induced by higher average global temperature. A weather system that is hotter is a higher-energy system. Therefore storms of all kinds, goes the theory, will frequently be more powerful than in the past. And snowstorms are primarily caused by evaporation from the ocean. A warmer ocean produces more humidity. Ergo, more rain and snowstorms. In general. Now, that's not proven. It's just that there's nothing in the theory that contradicts it.

Don't you know you have to be a bomb-throwing hippie so you can be ridiculed? That's the way the GOP always portrays the transition to a state where we have ample energy, much of which does not makes various sheikhs into billionaires.

He and Newt Gingrich changed the laws to allow the public use of the Internet. You can look it up, but I'm thinking you don't care. And he didn't say "create."

Oh, but it's so much more entertaining (and politically useful) to roast a few scientists on the grill, and elevate illiterates to higher political office.

I actually knew a guy growing up who developed an ulcer in his early 30s. He had to stop drinking, drink milk and eat bland foods, etc. None of it did the slightest thing to alleviate his pain or stop the progress of the ulcer. Eventually, he had a hemorrhage and died. Actually died, at 34. Now, I'm not willing (or qualified) to say ulcers were caused by h.pylori, or anything else. But the fact is, since they started treating ulcers with antibiotics based on that theory, I don't think anyone is dying anymore. So maybe e.pylori or k.pylori or some bacterium yet unknown causes it. But it's not stress, which had a lot of anecdotal evidence supporting it, or spicy foods, or anything like that. It's something that goes away, allowing the wound to actually heal and the patient to be cured, when treated with broad spectrum antibiotics. Previous theories did not anticipate that at all. Of course, a theory is a story. It can't be anything else. You have to prove the theory by testing it. See, it's a good metaphor for global warming theory. There is, of course, a ton of evidence for it being real, and a huge preponderance of evidence that man's activity is at the very least exacerbating what might partially be a natural process. If we wait for the definitive proof of the theory, it will definitely be too late to do anything about it when somebody writes a proof on a blackboard and says, "See? It's completely, absolutely true, and we can tell you what the weather will be in New York around 86th Street on the 15th of July, 2089! It will be mild, around 84 degrees, and under exactly 11 feet of water!"

Don't forget, there are a number of people, "grass roots" types, who have become totally enthralled with politics by smear and propaganda. Thus, if Al Gore has been making money, he must be evil, propagandizing theories he doesn't believe so he can sell carbon offsets; although those who accuse him of that are normally those who proclaim that everything must be made into a commercial business in order to have value. I didn't hear them objecting to Cheney's ties to Halliburton and the extremely favorable contracts that they got in Iraq. Then there are those who may know a thing or two about science, but only a thing or two. They seem to believe that if you a) flood the offices of the British warming scientists with requests for information, then it proves a conspiracy if when, later, b) someone steals the e-mails and finds some resentful e-mails, and that proves that the theory is wrong; who think that if you can show that one fact is questionable, the whole theory has crashed; who look at a graph that goes up steadily except for one brief period in one year, and then forever trumpet, "But the temperatures are not rising!" They don't seem to care that this requires knowing collaboration between huge, worldwide organizations and the absolute corruption of one respected scientific body after another. They are not Creationists or truly crazy religionists, they are just doing politics. In fact, what they're saying shows a profound disrespect for science, because they are putting politics over science. In a society that depends on technology for the preservation of our civilization, this is extremely dangerous, and proof that we don't have a "conservative" movement at all in America, but a rabidly reactionary one. When Glenn Beck, who is the most popular voice of "conservatives" today, says that "progressives" are the problem, and then proceeds to speak of progressives as a cancer, that's just a tiny bit like calling Jews "rats," and "vermin." William Buckley, who did not give liberals an easy ride, would be disgusted with the movement conservatives today, as he was with McCarthy, and the John Birch Society, and other effluences of mindless hatred of everything modern, or, in his last days, of the neocons who took us to war in Iraq.

I think if we looked through our businesses, I believe you would find a lot of workers mistreated.

The older age of economic maturity -- of full-time employment -- is not a cultural factor, but economic. The industrialized countries of the world all exhibit the same history: they took rural people and brought them into the cities by giving them jobs in factories. The living conditions at first were deplorable. Child labor was only part of it. (On the other hand, the life of being stuck as a peasant was worse.) When the capitalists had been around long enough to amass a fortune, then reforms began which stopped those practices and brought salaries up. The truly exploitative tactics were no longer required nor tolerated in an advanced industrial society. The defeat of the USSR empowered the world's capitalists to expand the pool of labor, searching for the poorest, to repeat the success they had in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and it empowered the Chinese communist party to adopt a strategy which would have gotten them shot by Mao. Their impoverished peasantry embraced jobs in factories. They have built up a large fortune. Now it's getting to be time that they launch their own reforms.

Our agricultural lobby always worked very hard to exempt farms from the child labor laws. Seems if they were mostly Mexican, they couldn't vote!

You know, not everything in the world is economics. To think that is to be thinking remarkably like a... oh, what would you call it? "Totalitarian"? Is it good for children to learn about the world of work by having a job that gives them a little money? Probably. Is it good for children, or anyone else, to have to work 60 or 70-hour weeks just to stay alive? I'd say not.

You mean "communist." They called themselves "socialist" as a way of softening their image.

I bring your attention to the many years and many attempts that were necessary to abolish child labor in the U.S. of A. Laws that did so were ruled unconstitutional by the same kind of ideologists that we have on the court today. And it was fought tooth and nail by that era's Glenn Becks. As far as I know, no single state, no single law ever was passed against kids working for the summer, or having paper routes -- there's a disappearing job -- or any of the "learning" jobs that obviously do kids some good. So that's an obvious straw man. The target of child labor laws was those who used their factories to maximize profits by working children for long periods of time doing boring and monotonous, often dangerous work, when they could be in school, learning a trade or learning how to run a factory. China is perfectly capable of dealing with these problems. They should let their currency float, which would lower their exports and increase their imports. They're simply not that poor anymore. They can certainly afford to pay their factory workers a decent salary.

I'll bet the same people so eager to condemn Apple for actually trying to live up to its responsibilities on a voluntary basis would also decry a government regulation that attempted to regulate this on a less-than voluntary way. And anybody want to bet that the low-cost manufacturers would be the worse offenders? The race to the bottom, indeed. The truth is, Apple does all right in any neutral ranking. Could be better, but they've made a lot of progress. http://www.rankabrand.com/