Seriously, though, how would a libertarian society address global warming?

[JoelKatz]

Let's say that a warmer earth actually is good for the human race.  How will CO2 producers receive a subsidy equivalent to their positive benefit on society in a libertarian world?

Those calculations explicitly do not include two kinds of costs that make the result that there's no positive benefit. You can't use that argument to reach that conclusion.

One of them is the cost of everything being in the wrong place. Humans have built farms, dams, ski resorts, cities, and all kinds of other things based on the current weather. If the Earth warms up, all of these things will be reduced in effectiveness.

The other is the cost of everyone being in the wrong place. When the water and food moves, the people who are the beneficiaries of the the climate change and now have surpluses of food and water and not going to donate to the people who now have shortages. Food and water will be on the other side of a border and political unrest and likely even wars will break out. People will starve. Crops will die.

It's not the argument that a warmer climate is good for the human race is incorrect. It's just that it only refutes the argument that a colder climate is somehow inherently bad or that the current climate is inherently perfect. It's only perfect because we've built ourselves and our world taking it into account.

Any change in climate is spectacularly bad for the human race. And that's very unfortunate because the only thing almost everyone does agree on is that the climate is going to change.

[compro01]

Honest answer: Move north (or south), Canada, Russia, and Antarctica are pretty damn big.

And pretty damn useless for most purposes too, regardless of temperature.

the low and middle boreal forests are rather dense, so to get any farming done you'd need to fairly much clearcut that, which would require decidedly nontrivial amounts of time, money, and energy.

the high boreal thins out and would probably work for farming.

then you get into the permafrost, which will become a muddy mess when it thaws, and barren rock.  it doesn't matter how warm it gets, you ARE NOT going to be farming on either of those.

[herzmeister]

Maybe the question should rather be "how does the government address global warming". Well it does so for example by banning the age-old cultivation of a plant that could for the most part set us free from fossil fuels and plastic, chemicals and deforestation.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=56183.0

[MoonShadow]

Honest answer: Move north (or south), Canada, Russia, and Antarctica are pretty damn big.

And pretty damn useless for most purposes too, regardless of temperature.

the low and middle boreal forests are rather dense, so to get any farming done you'd need to fairly much clearcut that, which would require decidedly nontrivial amounts of time, money, and energy.

the high boreal thins out and would probably work for farming.

then you get into the permafrost, which will become a muddy mess when it thaws, and barren rock.  it doesn't matter how warm it gets, you ARE NOT going to be farming on either of those.

And my response is, so what?  A century is a long time to make such adjustments.  It's simply not a 'crisis' by any rational definition of the term.

[Rockford99]

everyone's light bulb purchase, type of car, etc.  There's two problems with this question
#1 I'm an electricity trader by profession and very little confidence in meteorological forecasts and am very skeptical of global warming.  We have had substantial climate in past before humans started burning fossil fuels.  There are 20 and 30 year ocean oscillation cycles that may or may not be causing the fluctuations.  On a much a much longer time frame, there a shifts in the earth's tilt and its orbit that cause major climatic changes.

#2 ... and this is my beef about any kind of group/communal joint action coercive arrangement.  Why is it that (not necessarily you) that most leftwing type of people want to solve a problem by taking the most intrusive, privacy destroying solution to solve a problem.  Now we have light bulb restrictions, toilet size restrictions and are promoting carbon trading schemes that are extremely difficult to measure, difficult to allocate but yet it seems that most of the Democratic party supports such as thing. 

If reducing carbon is your objective why don't you enact a BTU tax at a couple of the central locations that fuels flow through.  You could collect revenue but not have to collect dossiers and micromanage the lives of individual people.  Same for taxes - put a consumption tax at large businesses, but let everyone remain private and anonymous without having to self-report their personal dealings to the IRS every year?

It makes me wonder if the people advocating such schemes aren't more interested in spying on their fellow man (ME!) than saving the planet.  If the planet can be helped without busybody tactics then why are these tactics usually advocated?

In Super Freakonomics they suggested a system of tubes tied to weather balloons could be used to convey sulfur dioxide up to the trophosphere in the upper atmosphere where it would have a profound cooling effect - like volcanoes. It would be cheap to do and wouldn't require a police state.  Then again, mankind could keep on converting tar sands, etc. and people could live in privacy.  Why wouldn't a serious-minded lib attempt such a low-cost potential solution in the first place if they were TRULY CONCERNED ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING?

Just my hunch, but I suspect they get a much bigger kick out spying on people's money or shutting down industry than saving the planet.  Any feasible solution that doesn't let them stick their noses where it doesn't belong isn't much fun for them.  If you can have a less intrusive, anonymous arms-length tax why don't they ever get proposed?

[bittersweet]

One of them is the cost of everything being in the wrong place. Humans have built farms, dams, ski resorts, cities, and all kinds of other things based on the current weather. If the Earth warms up, all of these things will be reduced in effectiveness.

What about the cost of preventing any changes of climate.

Not that I believe humans are capable to control global climate. This is usual communist megalomania.
This is so silly because climate has been changing since the beginning of Earth.

[barbarousrelic]

Not that I believe humans are capable to control global climate. This is usual communist megalomania.
This is so silly because climate has been changing since the beginning of Earth.

Because the climate changes on its own, we can conclude that humans are incapable of also doing things that change the climate? That does not logically follow.

[JoelKatz]

What about the cost of preventing any changes of climate.

It's possible that we could reach the point in less than 100 years where we could engineer the global climate and hold it more or less where it is, at least as far as average temperatures go.

[FirstAscent]

What about the cost of preventing any changes of climate.

It's possible that we could reach the point in less than 100 years where we could engineer the global climate and hold it more or less where it is, at least as far as average temperatures go.

It's possible. It's also not worth assuming it's possible.

[TPTB_need_war]

Read all the 27 comments at the provided link. You can't just be lazy to read only what I commented here. I can't copy this entire linked page of comments into this thread.

There is no science of man-made global warming. Period. The comments at the linked thread are irrefutable.

Never in millions of years of cycles has temperature risen after CO2 does. Temperate always rises at least 600 years before C02 does. So C02 can't be the cause. Duh!

Al Gore lied. He didn't show his chart zoomed in.

Carrying on from the posts I made in the past refuting AGW:

5427
Blog/Uncategorized
Posted Apr 25, 2016 by Martin Armstrong

New-York-Under-Water

QUESTION: Mr. Armstrong; I have read your thesis on global warming and that this is only part of a natural cycle. I admit that you have persuaded me whereas the claims are false especially that New York City should have been under water by now according Al Gore. You mentioned that there was global warming which enabled the Vikings to reach America because the ice melted. My question is rather blunt. If we are headed now into a global cooling period, what is the historical evidence that society also declines?

Thank you in advance

PD

ANSWER: I have reported that the peat fires in Borneo and Sumatra have now exceeded all the emissions from the entire U.S. economy. This whole movement is simply to raise taxes on the bogus theory of global warming. We are not so powerful to alter the course of cyclical movement of the planet. Bouts of global cooling (ice ages) as well as warming periods predate the combustion engine and mankind. It is rather questionable analysis to claim we have altered the climate. We are capable of polluting things, true. But actually altering the climate is something beyond our power.

Volcanoes are a major issue in climate change. Yes, studies reveal that the Hawaiian Kilauea volcanoe eruption discharges between 8,000 and 30,000 metric tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere each day, which has been going on for more than 20 years. However, gas studies worldwide by volcanologists have calculated that global volcanic CO2 production on land and under the sea release a total of about 200 million tonnes of CO2 annually. But this is really in the absence of any real catastrophic eruptions.  Volcanoes emit also Sulfur dioxide  SO2 which automobiles emit very little. When Mount St. Helens erupted on May 18th, 1980, it produced 1.5 million metric tons of sulfur dioxide on that one day and about 2 million metric tons for the entire event far more than automobiles.

Moreover, volcanic production of CO2 is by far not really the issue in climate change. Instead of global warming from  CO2, it is the plume of ash in the sky which actually blocks the sun and reverses the climate from warm to cold like sitting under an umbrella at the beach. I have discussed Mount Tambora  which erupted  in 1815 and threw into the air so much ash that it snowed during the summer of 1816 in New York City. It became known as 18-hundred-and-froze-to-death. I have shown the correlation of that eruption to wheat prices.

I have also written about the Maunder Minimum (<--- returning again in 2030!) which sent the Earth into a cold period 300 years ago from the perspective of the cycle energy output from the Sun. I have also gone into the evolution of science which has been set in motion by the very discovery of a frozen woolly rhinoceros which altered science in many fields. I have explain how the temperature at the time of the American Revolution was at its lowest point in the cycle.

All of that said, the ice core samples have revealed that there were two major volcanic eruptions in 536 and 540 AD which sent Europe into an ice age and wiped out the Roman civilization. Flavius Odoacer (433–493) was a soldier who in 476 became the first King of Italy (476–493) after deposing Romulus Augustus, the last official Roman emperor in the West.

Odoacer was overthrown by Theodoric the Great (454-526), the Ostrogoth. He was followed by Athalaric (526-534), and a few others then finally Baduila (541-552). So while Rome officially ends in the West with Romulus Augustus in 476AD, the Ostrogoths fade out after 552 due to the climate changes. In the East, the change in climate appears to have also possibly been linked to the Plague of Justinian (541–542) which was a pandemic that afflicted the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire, especially its capital Constantinople, the Sassanid Empire, and port cities around the entire Mediterranean Sea. I have written about the political turmoil there in Byzantium which preceded the plague during the Nika Revolt of 532AD. I have also written about how empires die. It does seem that when temperatures decline, civil unrest rises and this increases the risk of revolutions.

When Thera erupted around 1645-1650BC, this created a climate change and marked the end of the Minoan civilization. They were conquered by the Mycenae who also captured Troy. As the weather turned cold, Greece goes into a Dark Age. The Greeks migrated and other places called them the “sea people” since they did not know where they came from as the invaded Northern Africa. Homer wrote about the period before the Dark Age known as the Heroic Period. Scholars thought this was fiction about Troy and Mycenae until Heinrich Schliemann (1822 – 1890) set out and discovered what Homer wrote about was history.

The historical evidence is rather extensive. It does appear that as we enter into a global cooling period, governments will fall, disease will increase, and the risk of Western Civilization declining sharply all become historically possible.

[BADecker]

Solar Slump: The Sun Has Been Blank For Two Weeks Straight

Now, there's a two-week straight lack of sunspots, the longest stretch since 2010.

Overview

The sun is currently blank with no visible sunspots and this is the 14th straight day with a blank look which is the longest such stretch since April 2010 according to spaceweather.com. Historically weak solar cycle 24 continues to transition away from its solar maximum phase and towards the next solar minimum. In April 2010 – the last time there was a two week stretch with no visible sunspots –  the sun was emerging from the last solar minimum which was historically long and deep.  There have already been 26 spotless days in 2017 (34% of the entire year) and this follows 32 spotless days last year which occurred primarily during the latter part of the year.

Read more at https://www.lewrockwell.com/2017/03/no_author/sun-slump/.

[BADecker]

Actually the Russia/Ukraine war is paving the way for a better earth. All that burning of fossil fuels in the military machines, is producing more and more CO2. The earth is becoming greener from it, because plants need CO2 to grow.

It's a shame all those guys (and gals?) have to die over there in that silly war. But the CO2 being produced will grow more plants so that those who want to live rather then kill themselves off will be able to.

Freeman Dyson: The whole Earth is greener as a result of increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere - https://expose-news.com/2023/12/28/freeman-dyson-the-whole-earth-is-greener-as-a-result-of-increased-carbon-dioxide-in-the-atmosphere/.