That argument doesn't apply to something like oil. The US economy is built on it, you can't "stop buying" oil. Even if you ignore that tens of thousands of products use plastic, what was the option in the 1980s for transportation? Ride bikes? Electric cars are not "not buying" oil either, they are filled with plastic to curb weight. If you're trying to say, we needed early government action to start to wean us off oil so that, eventually, we could stop buying oil, well, that's what the entire documentary is saying, the oil industry was lying to stop that process from starting.

A wikipedia link about techniques to guesstimate regional temperatures thousands of years ago doesnâ(TM)t remotely answer my questions, in fact it sort or proves my point, we donâ(TM)t have an analog for the rapid mean temp rises on the last 150 years in Earthâ(TM)s history.

Sure, I'll bite. You of course have a link, that demonstrates that within 100-150 years, 120k years ago, this happened. If by any chance what you have is a link that shows that 120k years ago there was a bump over a thousand years or more, you wouldn't be interested in reconsidering your opinion, I don't suppose.

Trying to wrap my head around how one can label truth as absurd. I think there is something about "popular interpretation". I don't care about popular interpretation. When there is a record high, in that location, the weather (not the climate) experienced more heat than normal. When there is a record low, the weather (not the climate) experienced more cold than normal. Climate change predicts wider variability in weather and more extreme weather events, which corroborates hotter than normal and colder than normal weather. The reason it's bad is that there are far more "warmer than normal" weather variations than colder than normal, and this will affect every aspect of life from habitable areas and farming up to the financial systems etc we've built upon the old normal reality.

This is the same person saying above they're predicting things will get better. Clearly they are only seeing things from their perspective, as even probably middle class Americans will be able to pay their way through some of the worst of it. The majority consensus is that life will get much worse for most humans on earth (granted, we don't know exactly when, predictions around 2050 seem popular), and we've already made the loss of bio-diversity argument. There is no doubt that the climate has changed on earth over time, the thing these folks seem to keep forgetting is the time aspect. We are drastically changing the climate within the span of a generation or two (or four). The natural systems we rely on may not be able to change quickly enough to keep up. If crops fail, due to too much rain or too little, or bee colonies dying, there will be a lot of death. Unfortunately, this person reads that line "fix it or die" and simply can't understand that it's not an absolute, it's not saying EVERYTHING will die. We recognize that life will continue no matter what happens. The issue is the quality of life. For me, I am willing to take rather drastic action in an effort that my kids and grandkids have some semblance of the clean-ish air and clean-ish water (etc.) I enjoyed and thrived with. Insert troll "stop wasting electricity typing a slashdot rant eco nerd".

North Dallas customer of Verizon FIOS until it was transitioned to Frontier, basically a happy customer throughout. Had a couple week issue with sporadic packet drops that eventually got resolved that was frustrating. Customer service is poor but not awful IMO, but I am really scratching my head over how they can be losing money. I pay $150 a month for nothing, basic TV package with HD channels (no sports) and 50M fiber internet. I was paying less but made the mistake of re-negotiating and found myself trapped in a new package essentially the same as the old package with a higher cost and no way to go back. I got over it. Big question for me is, what is the alternative, Spectrum? Hoping to stay on fiber.

Did you seriously just nerdrage the obvious in response to a little hyperbole. Now >> hunter gatherer.

Is that post from 2010? What year was it again? I was intrigued about what sets of posts someone found that appear to suggest that every place is warming twice as fast as every other place.. and it's 10 years old? What, nothing available from 1783?

You're disputing the facts? Or just whack-a-moling facts as alarmist? It's fine to say you'll be dead by the time it really causes an issue and you just don't care. That seems to be the direction most folks are taking. First they said the climate wasn't changing, then they said humans weren't causing it, now they're saying they don't care. You would care if you were your own grandchild.

This is a straw man argument. It's like saying Al Gore can't support reversing climate change because he has two houses, and Leonardo DiCaprio can't support reversing climate change because he flew in a private plane. No one wants to pay more than they have to. The point is to change society, using laws and regulation if necessary, to align to what we all know is best for everyone. I would assume that Benief would happily "put (some of) his money where his mouth is", but he understandably wants the framework put in place first so that everyone contributes at some level. In America's current screw your neighbor (or your children) for a buck climate that seems highly unlikely.

It's lazy to say that the world and humanity will not end (literally no one is suggesting the world will end, and the worst predictions do not predict humanity will end). It's also lazy to say that reasonable analysis is labelled as far right. The quote you posted can't be debated.

Taken to their logical conclusion, increasing population, increasing CO2 output, increasing pollution, and environmental change suggest that sometime soon things are going to reach a tipping point in the broadest sense, financial, socioeconomic, environmental. This is reasonable analysis that also can not be debated and should not be labelled left or right. Saying "I believe a future technology we have no hint of now is going to emerge soon enough to be able to have enough of an impact on this problem to materially affect the current trajectory" is the ultimate laziness. Renewables/nextgen nuclear seem at best to be able to take a bite out of current output not take a bite out of atmospheric CO2. And keep in mind we need that tech now, not in 50 years. Citation welcome, but please don't cite something lame.

But for me it really comes down to the hard fact that we are borrowing against the future for our present. The morality of what we're doing is incontrovertibly bad. I would not want to be my own grandchild, I would be freakin pissed at how selfish and lazy my grandparent had been. Granted humanity has always done this, but our ability to consume and pollute has grown exponentially.

I did. The only mention in there of regulation or legislation was a whole section on big guys suing little guys as a delaying tactic and legislation that tries to stifle competition promulgated by the big players' lobbyists. Again not denying regulation. But I'd love to see some sort of evidence that gov't regulatory costs (not costs involved with combatting frivolous lawsuits or combatting anti-competitive legislation) are really a significant part of a ISPs start-up costs as you suggest. No one would debate that legal services are expensive but that's not an apples-to-apples comparison and surely you have something more concrete. And as another poster has already said, we need to balance out regulatory costs vs the cost of negotiating with property owners individually in a world without the allegedly costly regulation.

So here's an article on it. It doesn't seem to be regulation that's the issue, it seems to be the sheer expense of building out the infrastructure for your customers. https://arstechnica.com/inform...

My recollection is that there used to be hundreds of little ISPs that served the Internet up over dial-up phone lines. Over time of course the state of the art became DSL, coax cable and fiber. The broadband infrastructure is and was always owned by a variety of big companies. But the bottom line is that for one reason or the other all the small ISPs have been bought up by the big players, the Bells have been remerged into AT&T due to deregulation, and there has been considerable consolidation in the cable space, leaving most consumers without a lot of choice. AT&T in the summary essentially parrots this. No one is doubting that there is regulation, but I would need to see something more than your post to draw any conclusions about whether lots of regulation keeps little guys from starting ISP businesses or if it's really just the big companies being anti-competitive. Certainly there used to be lots of little ISPs but perhaps the landscape has shifted to much more regulation in the last 15 years? By all means, back up your post with some substance.

It "used" to be deniers saying there was no warming, but that didn't seem to work, so then they're saying it's natural causes.

It "used" to be deniers saying it's natural causes, but that didn't seem to work, so now they're saying it's humans causing warming but it's not going to get that bad.

Both sides are guilty of getting things wrong (failures are built in to the scientific method) and overstating the effect (either too much or too little). The media inevitably injects emotion to get eyeballs. You have to read between the lines.

The thoughtful have always realized that humans are causing warming, have been for most of the last 150 years, and will continue for the next 50 or so, when hopefully technology and social pressure will finally tip the needle. The warming is locked in for longer. There will be economic downsides and upsides, and some people will suffer and some will profit.

I come at it from the prospective of, we each need to have a conversation with our grandchildren in 50 years, where the trends for CO2 and warming continue, and can we say we did as much as we could to give them the same kind of world we thrived in. Arguments that "the environment could be better!" miss the point, we know we have a great environment now. It's selfish and myopic to assume that the environment in 50 years (assuming warming trends continue) will be better due to technology or what have you.