Wilma?

I wonder why the weather wants to weaken our will?

Maybe the planet is trying to tell us something?

It hates our life style. You play by its game and let it win if you try to understand it. The only solution is to fight it. All brave americans: Pollute it until it stop.

Ahh, the global warming agenda.

"Don´t push Paul when he is leaning out the window"

"Ah. Another person promoting the gravity agenda"

Great response. There is nothing like science, that pursuit of leftists.

Global warming is a broadly accepted trend.

What agenda can a fact have?

Well, you can realise that there is nothing that you can do to stop global warming, so any effort or money spent on stopping it is a waste.

Any effort at conservation reduces the prices of oil and coal, which causes some other person (in China, perhaps) to consume more. The only factor that determines how much oil is burnt worldwide is how much Opec decides to pump - conservation is just like squeesing a water baloon, it bulges out somewhere else.

We would be better served to spend the time and money moving (or making plans for moving) people from low lying areas and into the more northern areas.

Money spent trying to stop comet impacts is much better than money spent trying to avert global warming. Only a worldwide military dictatorship could stop global warming.

Ok, lets move North. So when does the invasion of
Canada begin? I'm free next week, if it helps.

Bullshit. Show me the proof that we can't slow or reverse global warming.

"causes some other person... to consume more"

Bullshit. Water conservation never once caused my next door neighbor to use more water. Demand is demand, and supply is supply. While prices are driven by the supply and demand tracks with prices, they aren't directly related. Conservation in the US simply means that opec will produce less fuel or our nation's reserves will be refilled. A chinese farmer in manchuria won't know the difference.

Your entire "let's be fucked" attitude is wearing thin.

Or if we as nations sat down and made a treaty that agreed how to limit the use of CO2 producing fuel until we have developed wind, solar and water energy good enough to replace oil. But that of course is just a pie in the sky because whenever would the countries sit down and do that?

No - conservation will lower prices, and lower prices will encourage demand. To use your water example - imagine that everyone upstream of Los Angeles started to conserve water. The good folks of LA, who don't fill their pools often because of rules and prices, when start to use the newly freed up water to swim in.

The fact that you don't think that it is true about water just indicates that water is plentiful in your area - unlike gas (and unlike water in the desert) people use as much water as they like where you live.

We all saw this spike in demand due to low prices when tons of people bought SUVs, and China spiked its demand also, in response to the low prices we had in the 1990s. The people now buying Prius cars are doing no good for the environment, although the car is probably worth the extra money because it fills the people with unwarrented hope and self satisfaction.

Opec is pumping at 100% capacity - they added the last 2 million barrels per day after Katrina. We have passed peak oil, and they want the price lower, so it is unlikely that they will ever go lower than 100% capacity again.

Really, conservation is even more distructive than that - by lowering prices it also discourages alternative fuel research. Really, we should all be using as much fuel as we can afford to.

It is the end result that matters, how much carbon is still left in the ground when we stop using it as fuel. High demand (and therefore high prices) now could cause us to shift off oil sooner.

And Anders - the Kyoto treaty is not being observed, even by the countries that signed it - without a global dictator it is doomed to fail.

If you can convince me that I am wrong, great, but otherwise I plan on buying a 12mpg BMW M5 and spewing carbon dioxide all over the place....

e#, you do know you are not arguing against man made pollution as the source to climate change but merely that the nature of the marked and IR won´t allow us to change any of that, right?

You are describing the free marked and realist IR position as set in stone. They are both normative theories in the field of social sciences. They are therefore very changeable and well in reach of our powers to change when the situation becomes nessesary.

The free marked is not a natural state in any way. It is man made and is held up by rules and regulations. Without the active support of governments it would actually fail to work so its not beyond our powers to change. We have build regimes and institutions like WTO and TWB to support those regimes. Its only a matter of political will to make the nessesary changes. Japan and Europe have that will. With US on board we would have the nessesary power to force the rest of the world to follow. Marked access would be the driving weapon in such a struggle.

WRT to the "realistic" IR approach you are taking it is IMO not applicable to this situation. The realistic approach of the cold war do not stand alone anymore for four reasons IMO: Well, the end of the cold war, the development of EU as an non realist driven international institution, the emerge of non-traditional global threats (mostly climatic, but also cosmic and natural-biological) and the formation of very important non state actors in the field of IR (terrorist organisations). For a realistic strategy to win over a liberal one in the scientific battlefield the relative gains of a certain strategy must be high enough to overshadow the absolute gains: How good is it that some little country can get a relative gain over other countries if it means that it threatens the whole world on its existence including the country that got the relative gain? Actually all it would take for the realistic approach to be an incorrect discribtion of the IR subfield of international enviromental coorporation is for the US to join in with EU and Japan who are already ready to do so. Then it would not matter if the rest of the world followed an relative or absolute gain approach because the outcome would be the same (to coorporate).

Really? I don't think they do. I certainly don't draw a bath every night to read.

e#, you are wrong on several counts here with oil in particular. Our national price of gasoline is not directly related to the international cost of gasoline due to several very important factors: 1) Subsidies 2) Reserve releases 3) Refinery location.

Our fuel costs less here if we conserve but it doesn't change the demand or consumption in other parts of the world because 1) local supply/demand creates local prices, meaning that Mr. Yang in Beijing is more affected by Mr. Lee next door than he is by Mr. Smith in Greenville, 2) the distribution of fuel by the oil producing countries is so tightly controlled that a change in demand in the US reduces their production of fuel, rather than shifting fuel to other nations.

When we hit peak oil, any remaining free market philosophies will be removed forcibly. It will not be in the interests of the oil producing nations to act on the principle that demand is demand is demand, and they will instead sell strategically...

1) We tax gas, rather than subsidise it.
2) Reserve releases are short-term, and infrequent

2nd part

1) That is true over the short term only, over the long term the oil supply shifts to other countries when demand drops.
2) Ditto

And in regards to the oil producing nations selling stratigically, that is up to them, but it will mean that they make less money than they could. We are already seeing this with Venezuela selling at below cost to Cuba - but that is just another squeese of the water balloon, it means that other oil is diverted to the US via supply/demand.

Anders - you are totally wrong, the free market is the natural state (at least once law enforcement reduces crime to a low enough level to let it start hapenning), and international free markets cannot be controlled by single governments. The European Union cannot even enforce Kyoto limits within its own borders.

I don't think that global warming is going to be an issue, because I believe that we are at peak oil right now. Sky rocketing gas prices over the next few years will convince us to move to alternative fuels. The only thing that I have seen that could really hurt this argument is if they develop a way to get gasoline from coal.

No its not. It must be actively supported by law, organizations and regimes to work.

Sure, but only minimal government services are required to start up free trade (mainly crime prevention). If you want to interfere with free trade, you require many extra government layers (tarrifs, customs, subsidies, etc) than if you just want to allow it to happen.

If you just dump a bunch of people on an island, trade will spring up very quickly. Big government will take a while.

Who will build the roads or sanitary system the people on your island need?

How will this be paid for?

How will this money be collected?

Sure - as you get more government infrastructure, the quality of trade improves - but trade starts up before any of this. Also, government intervention in trade will come way after road building and sewers - it is a very late, low-priority government "service".

Trade existed with the pioneers, who had no roads or sewers. Free trade is as natural as sex, grain tarrifs are not.

Anders was saying that trade is not natural - which is totally wrong, trade will exist as long as there are people. Government intervention in trade is much more "unnatural", as it comes in thousands of years later in societies development.

Global warming is a largely natural trend. Evidence from deep drilling into polar ice suggests that there are occasional "rapid" fluctuations in global climate.

Anyway, I'm pro-environment, but when you consider that one volcano eruptions belches more greenhouse gasses into the air than have been contributed by humans, aggregate, it's hard to buy the idea that conservation is going to help much.

Lastly, the reports I've read have been very clear in their assessment that higher temperatures are not responsible for more active storm seasons. Consider for a second that there are several other storm basins besides the North Atlantic, and none of them are showing greater activity.

What you call minimal governmental service are often the most precise and extensive parts of a countrys laws.

If you were right then what do we need GATT and WTO for. Lets make away with them and lets see how free trade then handle itself. As long as there has been international trade there has been regimes to regulate it. And as we have progressed towards international free trade those regimes has been more and more powerful and institutionalised, like in WTO. Free trade is international regulated trade.

Please notes that I am not arguing that other forms of trade are more natural than free trade. Just that they are all constructions. And international regulation of energy won´t be any less or more natural than the current system and won´t be any harder to handle if only the big three players agreed...

We humans are not limited to conservation as a tact. We know how to do much more than simply conserving resources, we also know that the primary reason to conserve resources is to allow them to last longer, not to reduce the effects of using them.

The argument that only the Atlantic basin is acting strangely is specious since we don't know how the oceans of the world should respond to higher average global temperatures. It may be a sign of global warming that there is such a large differentiation between the atlantic and pacific basins, or it could just be a normal cycle. The thing is we don't know. The only things we do know are that the global ocean temperatures are a lot higher than they have been in the past and we have had an active hurricane season that may or may not be related to the increased temperature, but appears by most models to be related.

Consider this: The last highly active seasons were not associated with an increased ocean temperature.

Actually, we do know. There is a 26 year cycle of heavy storms and then 26 years of light ones. The heavy cycle started in 1995. That is not to say that global warming is not contributing a little bit, but the cycle was there already.

Anders - we need the WTO to prevent governments from abusing trade via tarrifs and subsidies. The WTO is there to push us towards more free trade, rather than less.

Governments can do all kinds of nasty stuff with subsidies and tarrifs, for example China is trying to kill the US semiconductor makers by subsidising their own chip makers (so that they can take over the whole market, which has a high barrier to entry). Each barrier to trade is part of a global trade war that is hurting the world economy - the WTO is part of a trade disarmament plan.

The war started at the end of the 19th century - the world was in a fantastic free trade time, and the wealth of the industrialised nations was growing with leaps and bounds. Then the bone-headed British got the bright idea to stop trading with other countries outside of the British Empire - after all, who needed stuff that was not part of the Empire?

I have read some convincing arguments that say that this decision was a leading contributer to WWI (and therefore WWII). We are still in the process of standing down from that trade war, 130 years later.

So you are saying that after taking data for a full 150 years, we are able to state that we have cycles of 42 years? That is three "full cycles". I wouldn't trust that data with my life.

That is about the same quality of data that we have on the human causes of global warming, and you seem pretty keen on that...

Have I mentioned human causes of global warming once?

I don't think so.

Global warming is a fact. Its causes are under scientific study.

Bah.
It made Cat 4 with 150 mph winds less than two hours after your post.

and now it's a Cat 5 monster. It's simply amazing how fast hurricanes gain strength these days...

UNBELIEVABLE. Wilma now has 175 mph winds and a pressure of 892 mb, the second lowest pressure EVER RECORDED in the Atlantic basin (ties with 1935 Labor Day storm). Quite frankly, I've never seen a storm like this. Its pressure has fallen 92 mb in 24 hours. That is incredible, considering that pressure falls of 14-20 mb every 24 hours is considered rapid strengthening. Wilma is now encroaching on Gilbert's record of 888 mb, which is the lowest pressure ever recorded in the Atlantic basin, and Typhoon Tip's record of 872 mb,the lowest pressure ever recorded on Earth. Unfortunately, it is still in a favorable environment to strengthen.

tampa, florida. the west coast of the state. the side that never ever EVER gets hit by hurricanes because a 'cane has to take a freaky buttonhook back towards that side, and now TWO hurricanes have done/will do essentially that (wilma now, and one of the fearsome foursome last year, i forget which...)

besides new orleans, it's where i grew up. everyone i grew up with still lives in the area, or has their families there. aside from years 1-5, when i lived in minnesota. i doubt, however, a hurricane will ever hit there (though, if one does, will people finally believe the whole "global warming" thing is real?)

all i can do is sit and watch now.

By the way, I know the guy is banned now, but didn't NaplesX proudly declare after the whole Katrina debacle that he'd never, EVER expect the government to help him out of a natural catastrophe, despite, you know, choosing to live in Naples, Florida?

I'm just sayin'...

882 mb. Lowest ever recorded in the Atlantic.

All tracks still headed for South Florida:



Any storm track prediction outside of 2 days isn't all that reliable though, so if you're in the cone, anywhere in the cone, inside of 3 days, be prepared.

No it's not. Everyone knows that pastoral transhumance is the natural state. For pre-industrial people with cows.

Or rainforest hunting and gathering. For people without domesticated animals. Who live in rainforests.

Or neo-socialism. For Bolivian subsistance farmers who don't feel like selling their tubers to supermarkets.

Or feudalism. For medieval peasants in the Swiss Alps.

Or banging your head against a big door until there's skull in your brain for those of us with the imagination to see how, you know, we might just save the planet before we're all totally fucked.

I know that you were joking, but all those guys you listed would trade goods and services in some way - we are not loners, but tribal/social creatures, and as soon as you have more than one person you have trade.

And how do you propose to save the planet? Are you saying that I am wrong about local conservation having no effect on global petrochemical usage? If so, then prove it...

Global warming won't kill the planet, btw, it won't even kill all the humans.

You said 'free market'. This is a different thing to 'trade'.

You trade commodities to get the material things that will ensure your survival in hard times, to strengthen ties between families and clans for when times are hard, and to get yourself stuff to look nice. You don't trade for profit regardless of the consequences for the planet or for your society. That's what free market capitalism proudly and unapologetically does. No pre-agriculturalist culture does this because

a) it directly works against your survival prospects

and

b) it's inhuman; it's bad manners.

Capitalism's a recent invention. It's not 'what human beings do.' It's what we do now.


Yes it will. It really, truly will.

You realise that believing stuff without the facts behind you makes your environmental notions a religion, rather than rational thought...

And a free market is trade that is not constrained by a government, exactly what two yak herders do when they trade cheese for yams. If that transaction starts to hurt the world, then the only thing that you could do to stop it is have a severe whole-world police state, because those guys like yams all over the world (and there will always be somebody that wants the yams if you lower the prices by refusing to buy).

The whole idea that "free market/capitalism" is some kind of "natural state" and the attendant Smithian constructs such as the "invisible hand" and notions that "the market" somehow magically knows what's best and "allocates fairly" and that relying on greed as the underlying organizing principle for all human endeavor is self evidently correct is very much a religion. A cruel, inhumane religion that celebrates winning over every other possible stance, but a religion nonetheless.


What is "trade"? What is "constraint"? What is "governemnt"?


What is a "non-sequitur"?