jerry5

Reducing the amount of CO2 is - strictly speaking - not the immediate goal of carbon trading, the goal is to keep the annual emissions below a certain threshold, and that part is what carbon trading clearly is designed to do. Carbon trading is also called cap-and-trade and the 'cap' part refers to the limitation in emissions. Since, due to the artificially enforced limitations, emissions become just another scarce commodity like wheat or oil, the same trade mechanisms can be applied to it.

It is exactly clear what climate change denialists are denying: They are denying that humans should do something about reducing greenhouse gas emissions. There are a number of different ways to 'implement' that denial, such as denying that climate change is happening in the first place or denying that humans are causing it, but it always leads to the same conclusion, and therefore - I am suspecting - always has the same motivation: Intellectual laziness, not wanting to rethink one's own lifestyle.

Some people do deny climate change. You will find plenty on the Internet. I for one found one in today's local newspaper, circulation ca. 1 million. The linked article stopped just short of explicitly denying climate change by calling climate change a "myth" and instead calls the consensus on climate change a myth. That people are skeptical is indeed down to us humans, and especially so to scientists like me who only come to a verdict after performing a lot of observations and pondering. In climate change politics however "climate change skeptic" is a euphemism for denialist.

Probably a a good time to remember that nickb = pg (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=152361), which also explains the spate of climate change denialism which swamps this otherwise largely sane site (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=242215).

Someone please explain to me how your personal reddit, hosted or not, is different from any other forum software such as, say, phpBB2, just as an example. Maybe other forums aren't quite as focused on the voting aspect (though it does exist). Some people see that as an advantage, though. I guess the whole point of having your own social news a.k.a. forum site is so you can dictate what can be posted and what not, to keep the quality and focus on a special subject of your interest.

SingAlong, I think both commenters are right. To put it in more explicit terms: You can't sell the algorithm, you can only sell its output. I.e. Google has an algorithm to determine the relevance of a web page to a search result, but what they are selling you is the output, i.e. the relevance for a given combination of search term and page. In order to do that, you will have to host the software that implements the algorithm on a server yourself and your customers will have to feed the input to it and pay for the output in a subscription-like model or similar. Email me at jerry5@p2pbroking.net if you are interested in an exchange of ideas.

Why is it that climate change denialism shows up on Hacker News a lot as of late ... this isn't the first article of this type that I'm seeing here.