patrick.net

Peter P says

The Netherlands is underwater, yet it is still thriving. Florida will be fine.

Says the guy whose avatar is a fish.

But hey, put your money where your mouth is. I'll take a free market solution. If climate change is so unimportant, you should easily be able to afford a $100 trillion insurance policy on Florida that will pay out all Floridians if you are wrong. The premiums should be damn cheap if the probability of you being wrong is so damn low. Pay for such an insurance policy and I'll gladly shut up about climate change. Until then, you don't get to risk the cities I live in and work in.

Peter P says

Other countries may be worse off and they will want us to pay for their problems. They have more to worry than us.

It is true that the poor countries will bear the brunt of climate change. A moral person would find that unacceptable, especially since the only argument in favor of pollution is letting the ultra rich be a bit richer. The economic prosperity hasn't trickled down to the other 99% of the masses.

However, even if you didn't give a damn about your fellow human, you should be against climate change because it directly harms our economy. Allowing people to pollute the Earth doesn't increase wealth. It destroys wealth. It also picks winners and losers and distorts the free market causing resources to be misallocated.

Dan8267 says

If climate change is so unimportant, you should easily be able to afford a $100 trillion insurance policy on Florida that will pay out all Floridians if you are wrong.

Sure. If they let me.

I can also do a total nuclear war insurance and an alien invasion insurance.

Dan8267 says

Allowing people to pollute the Earth doesn't increase wealth. It destroys wealth.

The Petrodollar is very important for the US. If everybody can use decentralized energy sources, we will have to start paying A LOT more for stuff.

Besides, humans are not polluters, they are pollutants. I will be more willing to support curbing emission when they do something about overpopulation.

Peter P says

Sure. If they let me.

https://www.lloyds.com/

You can insure anything if you can pay the premium determined by the risk. It's the free market's estimate of the probability of sea-level rise destroying Florida. You got anything against free markets? If not, take out the policy. I guarantee you the risk of you being wrong will entail at least a $1 trillion / year premium. And whatever that premium is, that's what the free market says the rational cost of climate change regarding Florida alone is.

Is that what you renamed Global Warming bs story to?

FortWayne says

Is that what you renamed Global Warming bs story to?

Honey, we already went over this debunked lie many, many times. Why do conservatives keep repeating debunked lies? Are they really that dumb?

Dan8267 says

This is another lie told by people with purely bad intentions. Global warming was not renamed to climate change because the Earth isn't warming. Anyone who even attempts to suggest that the term was renamed for deceptive reasons is a lying scumbag.

A new term was adopted for a simple, clear, and noble reason. Global warming is only one of the properties of climate change. Rising sea levels is another. Mass extinction is another effect. Floods and droughts are another. All these things are related, but dumb ass conservatives couldn't understand why warmer weather is a bad things. After all, if they aren't physically uncomfortable, what possible danger could there be. Oh wait, super-fucking-tornadoes. Because conservatives are too stupid to make the connection between rising temperature and various other effects, the broader term climate change was adopted. And the term climate change includes global warming. There is no deception by using the broader term.

There is, however, great deception in suggesting the term was changed to cover up lies. Anyone makes such a suggestion is a shill.

So, Fort Wayne, are you going to repeat this debunked lie again? Don't run away like a coward. Address this right now.

Wasn't me who started the Global Warming hoax. That was your team Dan, and you know your team is Fubar.

Dan8267 says

Then shut up already. As demonstrated in the videos in the original post, the best call to action that Johnny C. Public can do is to foster the political will to implement climate change mitigation policies like a carbon tax or cap and trade.

Posting on Patnet is your idea of DOING something!? BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!

NuttBoxer says

Posting on Patnet is your idea of DOING something!? BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!

If you think that PatNet is a waste of time, don't let the door hit your ass one the way out.

It is empirically demonstrated that the Internet can be use to disseminate ideas, and that such ideas can be refined and popularized as they spread through the Internet. Memes prove this every day, but an idea does not have to achieve meme status to be adopted and well-known. It is precisely through the Internet that the common man has a chance to influence national policies by originating or promoting good ideas or refining them. Only a fool does not realize this.

You want to save the planet, Dan? Then invent a cold fusion process that works, then give it to the Chinese who are the world's biggest polluters, twice as much as the USA! Their air quality controls are basically nothing, and the world needs them to change now. Of course, they will only change if it benefits them economically. Otherwise they will just don their particulate filters and pretend they can see through their pea soup industrial fog.
How else would you effect change in such a notoriously pragmatic yet sovereign nation which is affecting the world with its gross pollution?

Quigley says

Then invent a cold fusion process that works

So it's all or nothing. Unless someone comes up with a magic bullet that solves all problems with zero effort, we should make no effort to move in the right direction. Can we apply that philosophy to terrorism? If there is no magic bullet that stops 100% of terrorism, we should abandon all anti-terrorism efforts? Thank god you don't make policy. You'd get us all killed.

False dichotomies are among the weakest forms of debate.

Dan8267 says

So it's all or nothing.

That is the scale of the problem! Right now, dozens of formerly third world countries are industrializing and wanting to drive cars! The world population keeps rising! Where is all that extra energy going to come from? Nuclear is out as it's too risky. Solar might work, someday, but isn't space efficient. Wind is cool but requires huge investment and copious space like solar. Tidal energy is also possible but like solar and wind it needs lots of space and lots of investment. None of that stuff is available in the uprising third world, so you need a cheap abundant source of energy or you're sunk!

Politics can't solve this! It never could!

Science is the only hope. I would have thought that you'd appreciate this but perhaps you're only paying lip service to your god of choice.

Quigley says

Science is the only hope

The technology already exists to greatly mitigate climate change. I have full confidence in science. However, science without political will does not result in wise policies. I don't understand why that truth is so hard to grasp.

NuttBoxer says

And yes this is ad hominem, but so is your thread title, so mark at your peril.

Patrick's ad hominem rule only applies to direct attacks towards PatNetters, not the general population. That's why every other thread is an ad hominem attack on liberals.

P.S. Your threat only makes you look powerless.

Quigley says

The world population keeps rising!

Uncontrolled population growth fucks things up no matter what your economic policies are. It's best to leave population growth to the free market and let people have a harder time having multiple kids rather than to subsidize population growth with cheap energy at the expense of the future. Why do you hate the free market so much?

EMBRACE THE END TIMES

ARMAGEDDON IS NEAR

99% of SCIENTISTS SAY SO

Not an AH.

FortWayne says

Wasn't me who started the Global Warming hoax. That was your team Dan, and you know your team is Fubar.

So you're not going to address the thorough debunking of your previous lie then? You are conceding then that it is a lie.

As for your next lie, the scientific evidence for both climate change and global warming, one aspect of climate change, is overwhelming. There are literally thousands of independent lines of evidence from ice core samples to tree rings to fossilized remains of sea life to thermo-imaging of the oceans to statistical rise in hurricanes and tornadoes that all say the exact same thing: climate change is happening right now and at a fast pass due to fossil fuel burning.

If even one of these lines of evidence contradicted the others, it would be front page news. The fact is that there is zero contradictory evidence, and the plenitude of evidence proving man-made climate change is simply too great, too consistent, and too global to be wrong.

Furthermore, scientists from around the world have incredible incentive to prove other scientists wrong, yet they all agree on the evidence and the picture it paints. The only ones who "disagree" are fake scientists paid for by fossil fuel burners to publish propaganda. All such propaganda has been debunked, and the bribes exposed in detail. There isn't a single detraction that has withstood even the slightest scrutiny.

Quite frankly, only a complete idiot would fall for such propaganda.

Then you better make me a custom Black bad guy hat with silly propeller on top.