US Politics Mega-thread - Page 1053

On May 15 2014 07:38 Nyxisto wrote:

No you're making a fool of yourself by saying retarded stuff, that's not our problem

OVER the past 15 years air temperatures at the Earth’s surface have been flat while greenhouse-gas emissions have continued to soar. The world added roughly 100 billion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010. That is about a quarter of all the CO₂ put there by humanity since 1750. And yet, as James Hansen, the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, observes, “the five-year mean global temperature has been flat for a decade.”

Temperatures fluctuate over short periods, but this lack of new warming is a surprise. Ed Hawkins, of the University of Reading, in Britain, points out that surface temperatures since 2005 are already at the low end of the range of projections derived from 20 climate models (see chart 1). If they remain flat, they will fall outside the models’ range within a few years.

On May 15 2014 07:30 Nyxisto wrote:


Yes, that's how you predict the future. Or do you have data from the future? What kind of moronic argument is that?

@Wolstan: What exactly we should do can be debated. That climate change is very real, heavily influenced by humans, and will significantly affect humans in the future is a fact and not up for discussion.

On May 15 2014 07:48 JonnyBNoHo wrote:

Climate models predict the future. That's what they do, and they don't do it very well.




Source

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) — The Arkansas Supreme Court has rejected the state attorney general's request for a stay of a judge's ruling that overturned Arkansas' constitutional ban on gay marriage.

The high court on Wednesday turned down the request from Attorney General Dustin McDaniel that would have halted the issuance of same-sex marriage licenses.

A federal judge has just ruled that NOM, the National Organization For Marriage, does not have standing and therefore cannot defend Oregon‘s ban on same-sex marriage.

Judge Michael McShane is in the process of ruling on the actual ban, but literally 48 hours before the trial began — having had literally months to intervene — NOM president Brian Brown announced its chairman would attempt to defend the law in federal court.

Currently, the Oregon attorney general and governor have declined to defend the law, leaving no party to do so.

On May 15 2014 08:54 IgnE wrote:
Jonny wants to get something practical done on climate change, but first let's just junk the CAFE standards so we can get some more gas-guzzling cars on the road to revamp the economy.

On May 15 2014 07:51 Wolfstan wrote:


So that hockey stick prediction based on computer models doesn't hold up well 15 years after it was released?

On May 15 2014 09:13 JonnyBNoHo wrote:

Higher gas prices should offset that. But no, let's keep supporting bad policies because "liberals! yeah!".

On May 15 2014 09:19 Danglars wrote:
It's that the latest and greatest models failed to predict a temperature stall for the past decade or so. If we have such an understanding of the impact of atmospheric CO2 and all the rest, why wasn't this expected? If global warming can take a decade off and astound scientists, how can we then put faith in their predictions 20 or 30 years off?

One writeup of the discrepancy. When predictions go wrong (but don't worry, we'll get it right next times, it lends weight to moderates and those beyond. On the policy side, the fever pitch of Do-Something-Now should be mediated by the global nature and India/China plopping down a coal plant every week. It's worth a pause before sending industries and livelihoods down the tubes.

By 1986, the Reagan administration had gutted the research and development budgets for renewable energy at the then-fledgling U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) and eliminated tax breaks for the deployment of wind turbines and solar technologies—recommitting the nation to reliance on cheap but polluting fossil fuels, often from foreign suppliers. "The Department of Energy has a multibillion-dollar budget, in excess of $10 billion," Reagan said during an election debate with Carter, justifying his opposition to the latter's energy policies. "It hasn't produced a quart of oil or a lump of coal or anything else in the line of energy."

And in 1986 the Reagan administration quietly dismantled the White House solar panel installation while resurfacing the roof. "Hey! That system is working. Why don't you keep it?" recalls mechanical engineer Fred Morse, now of Abengoa Solar, who helped install the original solar panels as director of the solar energy program during the Carter years and then watched as they were dismantled during his tenure in the same job under Reagan. "Hey! This whole [renewable] R&D program is working, why don't you keep it?"

A top Reagan official “felt that the equipment was just a joke,” the panel-installer Szego recalled to The Washington Post, “and he had it taken down.”

On May 15 2014 09:19 Danglars wrote:
It's that the latest and greatest models failed to predict a temperature stall for the past decade or so. If we have such an understanding of the impact of atmospheric CO2 and all the rest, why wasn't this expected? If global warming can take a decade off and astound scientists, how can we then put faith in their predictions 20 or 30 years off?

One writeup of the discrepancy. When predictions go wrong (but don't worry, we'll get it right next times, it lends weight to moderates and those beyond. On the policy side, the fever pitch of Do-Something-Now should be mediated by the global nature and India/China plopping down a coal plant every week. It's worth a pause before sending industries and livelihoods down the tubes.

On May 15 2014 10:05 Nyxisto wrote:


Oh great, why should we listen to the IPCC if we can have Dailymail. The temperatures we're seeing are still in range of the lower boundaries that the models you label "false" predicted. It makes no sense to talking to people like you or Jonny, you'll never get it. Fortunately the majority of people seem to have understood that and we'll probably not see people winning elections with that kind of attitude in the US.

On May 15 2014 09:44 IgnE wrote:


Cars are a bad policy. They kill 34,000 people a year, and injure countless more in this country, while being one of the largest sources of pollution, including carbon emissions. If we spent more money putting in mass transit systems and cut down on the number of cars we would be a lot better off.

But to turn to your point, your solution is to charge people more for driving farther, hoping to disincentivize travel?

Rather than lower all emissions you are going to hope that people just drive less?

What you want is a regressive tax on our nation's commuters.

Gas prices have gone up by 300 or 400% in the last 20 years. How much less do we drive now?

Better yet, why don't you just keep the CAFE standards and raise the gas tax?

Please don't talk about how you want to work on "practical solutions" to climate change when you are opposed to such simple standards as gas mileage regulations on cars.

On May 15 2014 10:19 GreenHorizons wrote:


Well... I wouldn't say we are there yet. But the younger, more educated, and less white you are, the more likely you are to not be Republican and/or believe the Earth is ~9,000 years old.

So outside of that graph I posted (which me and Jonny are hoping was a sampling issue and not the start of a trend), it looks like the people who think like Jonny or Danglers and more pointedly, the people to their right on these types of issues are dying faster than they can be replaced.

Of 1,006 adults polled for Readers Digest Magazine, 43% reported reading others' thoughts or having theirs read. source

On May 15 2014 10:29 JonnyBNoHo wrote:

I'm not sure what this has to do with CAFE standards or a gas tax. I'm fine with more mass transit in some areas, but its not a universal solution. Commuter trains often compete with rail freight which makes high speed trains problematic. Mass transit also doesn't work well in rural areas.


Umm, if cars are 'bad policy' why would this be bad? But to clarify, higher prices would encourage people either to drive less or pay up for better fuel efficiency. It's the same dynamic that is expected to happen with a carbon tax.


I'm not sure what you are arguing here. CAFE standards are fuel efficiency standards, not emissions standards.


Commuters are polluters and put wear and tear on the roads. They should be the ones taxed. CAFE standards are regressive as well as they raise the price of cars.



^ that much


Why do both? That sounds needlessly inefficient.


Why would that be a good idea? Because you like roads (I thought you didn't?) and don't like finance?


Maybe you could make some arguments as to why CAFE standards are good policy. Why do you think they represent a positive trade off and what information do you have in support?

On May 15 2014 10:38 JonnyBNoHo wrote:

I don't think you can read too much into polls like that. They don't tell you how much people believe in a particular thing. You can believe in a religion at a personal level and still understand science at an intellectual / professional level.

For example about half of people in the UK believe in psychic powers. How much should I read into that? Probably not too much. Something to think about.

On May 15 2014 10:38 JonnyBNoHo wrote:

I don't think you can read too much into polls like that. They don't tell you how much people believe in a particular thing. You can believe in a religion at a personal level and still understand science at an intellectual / professional level.

For example about half of people in the UK believe in psychic powers. How much should I read into that? Probably not too much. Something to think about.

On May 15 2014 10:45 IgnE wrote:


Your dissecting of and taking discrete parts of my post out of context seems to speak to your lack of a coherent argument. You haven't put forth a reason yet why you think the CAFE standards are "bad policy" and yet you want me to put forth an argument other than the obvious, prima facie argument that greater gas mileage means less fuel consumption means lower total emissions.

Your graph seems to indicate that a price increase of 300-400% leads to a minor drop (<10%) in total miles logged over a time period where telecommuting and other technological efficiencies have reduced daily commutes. So where is the evidence that a higher gas tax would reduce total fuel consumption? Or that it would be on par with the comparative reduction expected from more efficient cars? You say that commuters are the polluters, and that's exactly why I am for increased gas mileage, rather than only raising the tax. Someone who has an hour commute every morning is not going to not come into work today because the gas prices have been raised. He is going to come into work still if the only cars on the lot get 50+ mpg.

It's a good idea to tax financial trading because the states and localities that have been seeing the worst problems with funding rely mostly on sales taxes, which are regressive, and declining, since the very rich do not spend the same proportion of their increased wealth on consumer goods, and aggregate demand from the squeezed middle and lower classes is stagnant or declining. Taxing financial trades and transactions is a progressive tax because most intangible assets like stocks are owned by the richest in society. Distributing such tax revenues to states and/or using them for federal infrastructure would help overcome the shortfall in relatively small budgets.