Ok, so I posted this video as a link on my Facebook and this conversation ensued:
AGH: I can't make myself sit through anybody trying to debunk climate change. First of all: there's nothing to debunk. Global warming is an unconditionally real phenomenon. Any debate about that is no different than the 'debate' that Creationists try to insist on the public.
Let me be blunt: our options are: make drastic changes which will be good for the planet anyway, or make no or minor changes and find out the hard way that Suzuki and Gore are right. Which they are anyway.
Ex: Science is never settled. And of course you can't rebut that which you haven't studied. The base data is open to interpretation and now evidence has surfaced that it has been tainted and is unreliable.
You can spout absolutes, or accept what the evidence says. The evidence is now leaning towards the alarmist camp being just that.
Oh, and the climate is always changing. The Romans built vinyards in England, and Greenland was Green when the Vikings landed there.
AGH: But d'you know what, Ex? At the end of the day I don't really care if Global Warming isn't 'settled.'
All the the kinds of energy dependency changes required to combat it are good on their own (warming or not, oil is running out and causing a lot of strife in the process), and I maintain that I do not want to find out if the nay-sayers are wrong, because if they are, we're ALREADY SCREWED!
On those grounds, I deposit myself comfortably toward the alarmist camp because if my opposition is right, then counter-GW changes will still do right by the world, and if they're wrong, and we go down their route we're doomed.
Also I have it from a Member of Parliament, Dr. Suzuki and Mr. Gore that the Friends of Science are a highly suspected front of US oil companies and for god's sake this paper is from ALBERTA. You don't see anything fishy about that?
Ex: I see an ad hominom fallacy. I'd usually say follow the money but we are dealing with evidence here. Can the evidence be throroughly disproven? or not?
And what are the goals of Members of Parliament, Dr.Suzuki and Mr,Gore? Less private control of the means of production and more state intervention in the free market. So really the interests are fudged in either camp, the evidence is what we must go by.
The stuff that was leaked on the internet this past week show a lot of fudging with the numbers and refusal to publish anything that goes against the alarmist camp. Hardly good science.
AGH: Even if I didn't maintain that the evidence is over-bloody-whelming I still say it doesn't matter because we're in better shape if we do counter global warming and it doesn't exist than if we don't and it does. It's like Pascal's Wager only with actual consequences.
Don't obfuscate it with all this 'means of production' and 'free market' business. Markets are irrelevant, this is WAY more fundamental than any political or economic constructs: if our very planetary ecology turns against us we can produce all the stuff we please, we're still in deep trouble.
Anyway it's the free market that got us into this mess and is keeping us here. Its destruction ... apparently I'm so bleary I can't finish a thought. Ignore that last bit, I was about to go into a rant about capitalism but decided I'm too tired but forgot to delete those last 1.5 sentences.
Ex: AGH, if we enact all the top-down controls on the economy and political autonomy that are being proposed for global warming and it turns out to be false, then I would propose we'd be worse off than we are now, that is, if you value a free market and political autonomy, and don't wish to be a serf.
Markets are not irrelevant. Climate change can't be solved by waving a gun in everyone's face, the same way any social problems can't be solved by sticking a gun in anyone's face. If climate change is manmade then there is nothing we can do about it, unless you want to cause a population dieoff needlessly and before due course.
AGH, I will ignore the last part about a free market, especially because I don't see any free markets existing to complain about. The governments have always taken control of the free markets in the world that allow them to exist and wage wars.
AGH: How do you define political autonomy? Because if you mean all countries dissolving together in some way, I would love it if that happened. Planetary goverment and all that. National borders breed patriotism and jingoism and icky things like that.
As far as free markets: I'd much rather have a fair and unfree market than a free one that massively enriches some people and lets others starve (the current version, for example). Clearly we differ in that I think that, done correctly, government is a GOOD thing. I'd much rather have more of it than more free market. Like the constitution says: Peace Order and Good Government. The Americans put in Life Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. Look where that got them, and where Harper's desire to imitate them is getting us...
As far as gun-waving. Well, if people would rather stick by their polluting ways than safeguard the health of the planet upon which their lives are built and dependent....shoot 'em.
Ex: Political autonomy, I agree, is the dissolvement of nation-states, of states altogether. That is the ability to go about without people coercing me to pay for programs that I don't agree with and taking part of my wages.
You obviously don't understand what a free market is, this is where we diverge. What you are calling capitalism and free market (enriching some people and letting others starve) is corporatism, sometimes referred to as fascism, and is facilitated by state control of the economy. I encourage you to learn about the Austrian school of economics, and to compare it to Keynesian economics. Then to read some works of Rothbart and Von Mises, particularly "Human Action." What you are decrying is socialism, not capitalism. Capitalism ended around the turn of the last century. In the 19th century, you had deflation and the reduction of poverty. In the 20th you had increasing poverty and inflation after governments took control of the money supplies and got off the gold standard, allowing them to print as much money as they pleased to finance wars, expand their influence into the lives of the citizenry, etc.
The American government does not follow the American constitution, surely you understand that? Article X states that whatever powers are not delegated to the state through the constitution are reserved to the states or to the people respectively. That puts about 90% of the governments activites into unlawful categories.
Also "Peace Order and Good Government" can justify a hell of a lot of scary proposals. Think about it, where does the limits to these things end? Who defines what constitutes these things? It's an open ended invitation to the totalitarian feudalistic hell Canada has been for quite some time, I'd say since the French landed and started slaughtering the Natives who lived here.
I can't believe you actually said. If people disagree with me, shoot them. Do you support the use of violence against me if I disagree with your philosophies? Really, if so, I believe that's the end of our relationship.