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Is there a market for long time scale shorts on EFTs? I know long term oil futures go for 7-8 years generally.

I wouldn't place bets except on the time scale of 20-40 years and even then I'm not sure it is worth it in terms of likely pay off and time taken to research.

Blech!

Your #4 is basically saying "I concede that it's actually real but am going to deny it for unrelated economic ideological reasons."

I mean you're pretty wholeheartedly embracing the term "denier" there.

"In a nutshell: Global warming either (1) isn't real (2) isn't caused by humans or (3) doesn't matter"

I know people who might serve you either #1 or #2 or #3 depending on the situation, their momentary mood or the course of discussion. Sometimes they even provide you a potpourri of all of the above at the same time.

It's like arguing with flat earthers.

There's also the possibility that it is a social engineering effort to get people to switch away from fossil fuels in a positive way ("I've switched to hydrogen cells to save the planet!" rather than "Goddamn fuel prices are so high I can't even drive to work anymore! And what the hell are the politicians doing about it?") in a timescale that allows a transition without impending widescale economic meltdown.

"Things have to change within 100 years" is not something that will get shareholders signing checks for R&D and wholesale changes to business practices unless there is considerable pressure from the overall consumer population.

That does assume that benevolence has a higher priority in the world than profit of course. I'm not sure.

It's sad that this is being up-voted as it is incredibly misleading and a conspiracy theory to boot:

>#1 mainly intended to achieve a long-standing but tactically-shifting goal of governments to control capital

No, global warming is not a government plan. It is an area of scientific consensus that has emerged from the work of thousands of individuals in many countries. Most mainstream solutions to dealing with global warming have absolutely nothing to do with controlling capital. In the US, we constantly bend over backwards to makes sure private enterprise controls lots of stuff (even the alternative energy technologies that are being heavily subsidized in R&D and production).

>you will likely find that even the most committed climate changists are not expending their own resources to short Florida coastal real estate on the weight of their beliefs.

This statement is at best tremendously disingenuous and at worst an amazing attempt at self-delusion. There is no good way to short houses. (Getting CDSs on mortgage backed securities is possible but there are no houses on the coast securities. Shorting those wouldn't even help, as mortgages will be paid off before the sea rises enough). Also, all the global warming sea rise predictions are on the order of decades and centuries. What highly knowledgeable scientist in there late 30s or 40s will make at bet that will be resolved when they are dead?

I'll bet you any amount of money that we will have a Korean president by 2150. Don't believe me? Unless you do, you'd better make a bet with me.

> No, global warming is not a government plan.

The proposed solutions to GW are. Politicians will play a significant part in distributing carbon credits. And you said it yourself:

> (even the alternative energy technologies that are being heavily subsidized in R&D and production).

Subsidized by whom? Private companies that only exist because of government money really aren't private.

I disagree with the OP that it's a scheme to control capital, I don't think it's a scheme of any kind. I just think politicians happen to absolutely love an issue with an absolute evil and a very difficult and expensive solution. No matter how much, the other guy will never be able to do enough.

My main beef with GW isn't the science. I think it's highly entertaining to follow stuff like ClimateGate, but my beef is with the politics. "Solutions" to GW invariably includes hugely expensive government programs.

"hugely expensive government programs"

That phrase is redundant.

Edit: grammar

Not entirely. It's a scale, that goes from "expensive" to "mind boggling expensive". There's just plain expensive (The V-22 Osprey program), and then there's really expensive (The total expenditure of the Social Security program, from inception to 2050).

I know... I was making fun of government contracting. I worked for various government contractors for around six years, so I feel like I'm morally obligated to make fun of the whole thing whenever I can.

The proposed solutions to GW are [government plans]

Supposing that AGW is real and a problem. It is then a global collective-action problem. What options are there to solve something of that scale that doesn't involve governments? I'm genuinely curious.

> No, global warming is not a government plan. It is an area of scientific consensus

Science and govt are inseparable now. Federal grants fund huge amounts of research. This distorts science to a degree not widely recognized.

A good example is nutrition. Start with the modern consensus of what constitutes a healthy diet and trace it back to the research that supports it. Gary Taubes did that in "Good Calories, Bad Calories". What he found was a load of shit. Shit that was supported and popularized by (well-meaning) federal entities. A handful of limited observation studies with ambiguous results were blown way out of proportion.

LOL?

Yes, virtually all basic research is federally funded. Does it distort science?

Nutrition is not at all easy to do as science because doing research with humans is not considered ethical by society. I think it's something we need to address, and it seems short sighted to me.

Your example is not at all convincing evidence for you rather sweeping thesis.

Yes, virtually all basic research is federally funded. Does it distort science?

It would be pretty extraordinary if it somehow didn't, wouldn't it?

I'd just be interested in knowing what sort of bias would it have. How would the government like new science to look? Would it be at all productive to fake experiments?

The government has its issues, but funding science is a great thing. Sure, I'd like for less money to be controlled by the pentagon. But I'd love to see even money spent on basic research.

I think you're missing the fact that this is a new libertarian talking point.

Laissez-faire approaches tend to result in the tragedy of the commons, where the commons is some environmental factor -- fish stocks, etc. -- and science has been consistently pointing out the problems caused as a result. Therefore, to defend itself, libertarianism must discredit science.

The solution is to associate science with government; since, by libertarian definition, anything a government does is wrong, it follows that science is wrong and, by the fallacy of begging the question, libertarianism is right.

This is perhaps the most salient observation in the entire thread.

Free-market libertarians have an ideological imperative to deny any causality between activity in the pursuit of profit and environmental catastrophes.

It's no surprise that a framework based almost entirely on individual property rights is unable to protect that which is impossible to own, to say nothing of the incorrectness of treating land as partitionable property when we know the ecosystem to be a globally-connected process.

By claiming to champion rationalism, their pretenses shine through; when the scientific method reveals the impracticality of their philosophy, they attack science itself.

You know, maybe we need a less-biased source of scientific funding — how about Exxon Mobil? I'm sure they'd have enough to pay for some real independent research. Oh, actually, it looks like they've been pretty busy already: http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=ExxonMobil_fundin...

Of course federal funding distorts science. How could it not? It's naive to think otherwise. Politics pervades all the other areas of government spending. Are you saying that scientists and their funders are somehow superior to everyone else? That they have a special gene that makes them bias-free?

I see the bias most clearly in the science and studies that are not being funded and the changes that are not being promoted. Why, for example, does Al Gore focus on climate change, which is based on contested predictions of how the climate will be in 50 years, and not on eliminating the farm subsidies which make food so artificially cheap that about a third of Americans, many of them "in poverty," are obese? Could it be that addressing climate change involves increasing government power while eliminating subsidies would reduce government power?

When was the last time government paid for a study that recommended that some department or agency of the government be eliminated?

Sal Khan has videos covering all the math taught in K-12. Why don't government-funded scientists study whether thousands of math teachers can be taken off government payrolls and replaced with Khan's videos?

It can't directly distort science because a) people are applying for grants to conduct research. They don't yet know what the results are going to be, unless you accuse the scientific community of massive fraud. And, b) because research grants, at least the ones I know of which are given out by NSF and NASA, are not awarded based on what the government thinks but on how the proposal is rated by an independent panel of peer-reviewing scientists.

You can of course imagine second-order effects whereby the selection of the members of the peer-review committee is skewed by the program officers, picking panels that they think will give money to the programs they want. But if they consistently picked committee members that are out of the scientific mainstream, I think you'd hear a howl from the scientific community. I've heard plenty of complaints about the awards from people who weren't funded, but that the panels were stacked by people with predetermined ideas of what results should be obtained is not one of them.

As to your K-12 example, do you know for a fact that there are (competent) researchers who have applied for grants to conduct that study and were rejected? If not, you have no case.

If you think the government orders what research be done, you are woefully uninformed of how the vast majority of research is conducted in the US. Aside from a small number of researchers working in government facilities, research grants are awarded based on proposals from independent researchers. If no one applies to conduct a study, it won't happen no matter how much "the government" wants it to. And as far as I know, there is no government-run research facilities in the field of education.

And finally, in case you haven't noticed, Al Gore has not been affiliated with the government for a decade...

> They don't yet know what the results are going to be

I think one of the points this article makes is that it is possible to look unconsciously for the results/proof you want. Science, especially this science, is rarely black/white. And if you are set on a specific shade of grey there is a natural positive bias towards that.

The argument is, I guess, that Federal funding is likely to favour scientists that support the shade of grey govt. wants to see. (again, a natural bias - though perhaps not so ethical...)

Not a conspiracy certainly; just a combination of slight bias and belief ending in a slightly off center result.

The problem with climate science is that to disagree with the GW theory right now means being branded a denier and a loon. So the bias shift is a emphasised.

You are right about the bias, of course, though I think there's a much stronger bias in favor of theories you've come up with yourself.

I think that in the context of climate science, if you make a statement that you disagree with "GW theory", you are making a statement that is very close to a blanket denial. Which specific facts of the theory do you disagree with, and what is your alternative? Are you disagreeing with the IPCC number for the climate sensitivity? Or are you disagreeing with the idea that anthropogenic global warming can be true? Those are very different, the first is well within the scientific mainstream, the second is not.

And clearly because all research takes place in the United States...

No wait, all research takes place in areas that have the exact same political spin....

Wait, that's not true either... Hmm

>Of course federal funding distorts science. How could it not? It's naive to think otherwise. Politics pervades all the other areas of government spending. Are you saying that scientists and their funders are somehow superior to everyone else? That they have a special gene that makes them bias-free?

This is pretty sad and pathetic. If you are so confident, please head over to the NSF and go through grant proposals. Let us know when you prove your case with evidence that is so obviously true to you.

>Why don't government-funded scientists study whether thousands of math teachers can be taken off government payrolls and replaced with Khan's videos?

People do study different methods of teaching. I'll think you'll find that videos are no substitute for human interaction though.

Your other commentary on various things is just rather confused, but not lacking in certainty. Congratulations on becoming a fountain of truth.

> No, global warming is not a government plan. It is an area of scientific consensus that has emerged from the work of thousands of individuals in many countries.

"global warming" may not be a govt plan, but the responses all involve greater govt control and the sum total has almost no predicted effect on global warming.

Since the predictions that show no effect come from the same models that are being used to predict global warming....

It's probably getting up-voted because of the first line:

"There's a pretty strong impulse to call somebody a "denier" in order to categorically denounce what he's saying, as well as everybody similarly skeptical."

This statement I'm in complete agreement with.

Probably right. However, the post outed his as an ideological opponent of government action (with a little fatalism thrown in). This would place him firmly in the denier camp according to the original article.

While you're right the GP has a strong smack of "conspiracy" to it I think it is equally naive to believe that GW is not a political arena as well.

I'd even go as far to say some of the science has been biased by politicians - or at the very least misused.

The hard truth is that there is no real consensus. Enough for us to start adapting and weight options certainly (and who can argue that a greener future is a bad idea!). But not enough for scientific certainty either way

We are still at the evidence gathering/observations stage and will likely be there for a while yet. :)

The main supporter of the global warming ... scam really, also charges thousands of dollars to crowds of people who want to give his talk to others. He is the manager of a hedge fund investing billions in "green" technology. He is one of the most powerful people in the world, even almost becoming president once. His talks are full of inaccuracies and in-congruent cause/effect relationships.

If he was serious about his cause, he'd be encouraging people to move away from coasts. Instead, he encourages them to invest in the products and companies he's already holding.