Fish, Visitors, and Guestbloggers

[bigscary]

bOingbOing has Charles Platt guestblogging this week. After a WalMart-fellating post earlier this week, he's decided to use the platform of bb to promote Climate Change Denialism.

That's not funny, just annoying.

What's funny is the near-perfect Cory/Xeni chain-combo (starting with this post) linking excellent Climate Change sources, empirical evidence, analysis, and more.

When I talk about Mr. Doctorow, it's often to disagree on IP issues, but I have to thank him for responding to the pests in his own yard.

Comments

[edgehopper.livejournal.com]

There's a great blog in the NYT, usually written by Olivia Judson, that just recently made the case that if you think of preserving the environment in terms of shares to be invested in by partners in industry, the bias of profit is in behaviors that are eco-friendly. The "costs of fixing" the problem will be repaid in long term dividends of the increased diversity and productivity of our ecosystems. The fixes aren't expensive, either, not all of them. Some, I grant you, would be a burden, but if that burden would sustain the planet more hospitably over time, that burden would be offset.

I'd like to see a link to pick holes in it, but it depends on what you mean by eco-friendly. Preserving forests and not dumping toxic waste? Yes, that's typically in industry's best interest. But when it comes to emitting CO2, it's not even close; you can't get around emitting CO2 as a matter of conservation.

Part of the problem with global warming alarmism is that even assuming the climate models are correct (and they're not; they've never predicted correctly the data we already have), the steps needed to conserve CO2 at the level necessary to reduce the effect within a "tolerable" range are astronomically high. But the alarmists never get to that step of the analysis. And at the national level, conservation is simply not a solution; the U.S. could, through drastic and economically disastrous regulation, reduce its CO2 emissions to 1980 levels and it would do next to nothing about climate change when China and India, with a third to a half of the world's population, are going through their industrial revolutions.

I'm an agnostic on whether AGW is real or not, but there is no political solution to the problem. Neither China nor India will accept forcing their populations to remain in relative poverty to heal the planet. The U.S. and Europe alone can't do enough to solve whatever problem may exist. So when this issue moves out of the realm of science and into the realm of politics, I oppose all meaningless and costly environmental regulations that provide no benefit to the Earth.

Some of the scientists' hearts are in the right place, and they may even be right on whether AGW exists. But making policy is about more than just science.