I remember a man telling how he tried to convince his college kids about AGW with stacks of data, graphs, papers, etc., but only after the weather turned cold and colder did they stop and begin to question. That’s the Achilles Heel of warmers….cooler temps and hence the doom gets worse and closer and closer to happening. I expect Hansen to totally explode and tell us we have only a few months or maybe weeks.

I’ll start believing when Gore moves to a 3 -Bdroom 1000sq.’ home, run with windmills and solar and rides a bicycle everywhere. /sarc

I’m still waiting to hear what the ideal temps are for the earth and all it’s different regions and parts and WHY? IF it’s getting TOO warm, surely there’s a baseline.

So, it is a way to make the market act as if we are running out of fossil fuels? AND we get to spend more than anyone else by sequestering CO2? Meanwhile, China and India continue to thrive as we die a slow death trying to make our dynamic economy perform on wind and solar power. At the same time we are printing money as fast as we can. Paper that is backed by nothing except China’s willingness to extend our credit. Unfortunately, China already cut us off because they are smart enough to know that we are on a fool’s errand, something that the scientists haven’t figured out yet. Too bad that by the time the physicists figure out what side of the bread has butter on it, China will own all the bread, butter AND our physicists. Good thinking Joel, you better learn to speak Mandarin, cause you will need it.

HELLOOOO, McFLY!!!!! WAKE UP!!!!

This is the real world, not one of your computer simulations. Sheeesh….

Your critical words are ‘put pressure on the market sooner than it would otherwise happen’. It is easily shown that ‘pressure’ in the form of taxes, mandates and subsidies are always corrupting. Why not let the market function?

And you betray an unfounded fear with ‘before we have done irreparable harm to our environment’. I presume you are talking of the effect of CO2 on climate, which is not proven and its apparent effect seems to be lessening with every passing day that the globe cools while CO2 levels rise. Why not let the science inform?

Time to re-evaluate your assumptions about the science of climate and to learn to trust the market.
=============================================

Bart Nielsen says:

Once your favored AGW mitigation schemes are in place there won’t be an internet for you to troll on…unless you’re one of the elites who will be exempt from reducing your “carbon footprint” to nothing.

“So, let me ask you: If it is really so dire, what is going to happen when we run out of fossil fuels and thus have to stop using them? Or do you believe that they are an infinite resource?”

So far we have used about one trillion barrels of oil. When you include shale, tar sands, etc. there are more than three trillion barrels of oil known to be in the ground, with more being discovered all the time. Meanwhile technology marches on and it is reasonable to assume that in our children’s or grandchildren’s lifetimes new methods of providing energy will emerge which will make oil obsolete as a fuel before it runs out. A perfect analogy for this is the end of the Stone Age. We did not leave the Stone Age because we ran out of stones.

Snipping carte blanche in 3.2.1…

I think I meant “were on the verge”…Must’ve been the allusion to Douglas Adams.

Joel Shore (19:57:57) :

And, of course, this is from the person who complains about ad hominem attacks and says that they are proof of the bankrupcy of the position that those who use them make!

SOP for the alarmists & Gorebots…

1) Fail to address any scientific arguments against their position.
2) Complain vigorously about the impugnment of their motives.
3) Fall back on “argument to authority”.
4) Impugn the motives of dissenting scientists.
5) Declare the issue to be “settled science”.

This would be funny, if it wasn’t for the fact that most western capitalist democracies weren’t on the cusp of bankrupting their economies “tilting at” carbon “windmills”.

If I didn’t know better, I would swear that the IPCC were a Douglas Adams creation.

Joel Shore (19:49:23) :

So, let me ask you: If it is really so dire, what is going to happen when we run out of fossil fuels and thus have to stop using them? Or do you believe that they are an infinite resource?

Fossil fuels (and almost all mineral resources) are “effectively” infinite. There are very few mineral resources that we will actually run out of.

Oil will one day, gradually, become economically uncompetitive with alternatives…Natural gas and coal will eventually go the same way too. As the free market pushes fossil fuels to economic extinction…The very same free market will switch to alternatives.

If the gov’t arbitrarily makes the most abundant and economical energy sources more expensive in a Quixotic quest to prod the free market to replace fossil fuels…They’ll just make the rich nations poor and the poor nations dead.