You have an active imagination my friend.

If a carbon tax is implemented, where is it going to go? To developing nations, social programs, defense?

Kramer

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“It's time to admit that public education operates like a planned economy, a bureaucratic system in which everybody's role is spelled out in advance and there are few incentives for innovation and productivity. It's no surprise that our school system doesn't improve; it more resembles the communist economy than our own market economy."
Albert Shanker, former president of the American Federation of Teachers

Thanks for including your reason for selecting "other" because I was trying to figure out what would an "other" option include. Overpopulation never crossed my mind. Now my twisted mind is wondering how one would encourage people to have fewer children and encourage people to die sooner. It could get ugly, but I've heard that the more educated a person is the fewer children they have. And even though China has done something about their birth rate they, along with India, have amazingly high populations.

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There is a very strong direct correlation between high levels of CO2 in the atmosphere based on air bubbles collected in ice from periods and the oxygen isotopes that can tell temperature at the time. When carbon is high it is hotter and vice versa. A property of carbon that is not in dispute is that it absorbs heat. You can argue about how much it is involved in heating the earth and that it isn't the only factor but the fact that it does indeed lead towards a warmer climate and retain heat in the atmosphere is not a dispute in the field of climatology.

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"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

The problem with global warming is that its so overhyped. We have developing nations dumping toxic metals and chemicals in the landscape and the air, which end up in the fish, plants and animals, and eventually in your body. And then we worry about a neutral gas which is present in extremely low quantities.

There are so many places where the condition of humans and the enviroment has deteriorated because of toxins, and this is just not the case with global warming.

What portion does the cost of fuel play in each of these goods. Even when looking at traveling by plane I would expect that the maintenance and repairs make up a non trivial portion of the cost. The portion for food should be significantly less especially considering the ability for substitution in transportation methods. I would expect that fuel costs barely make up 20% of the cost of food.

Are you meaning to tell me that when considering the purchase of a new car you would not consider, at the very least, the current cost of fuel? If that is the case then you are the exception rather then the rule. People respond to incentives.

The purpose of such a tax would be to align incentives. From a self-interested standpoint the optimal policy would be to either spend the money on (other) worthwhile projects, reduce the deficit, reduce the income tax or some combination thereof.

The nature of all time series models is that they use what is considered incomplete information. The purpose of these models is to establish a stochastic trend. There are also too many variables that affect weather to determine a pure deterministic trend. A decent knowledge of the statistical methods used for time series analysis would suggest that this is both unavoidable and does not serve to be problematic when looking at the results in the appropriate context.

I don't follow the research on climate change closely enough to say this based on experience, but the way academics standards apply in most disciplines, the model is published and other researchers can put in other data to create a quick paper. It typically is painfully obvious when bad data is used. I think you claims of cherry picked and inaccurate data are greatly exaggerated.

Finally the purpose of models is to speculate. I don't understand what you mean by speculative data.

Other. The danger to the envrioment is not any of these things, but the disregard of private property rights. Private property rights can fix most of these problems.

1. Air Polution: When smokestacks were first built, they would pollute neighboring areas. For example, a woman would hang clothes out to dry, she would come back and they would be dirty from suit (or whatever comes from smokestacks.) She would sue the company, and the judge would usualy rule in her favor. However, at some point in our storied history, someone thought that we needed to be a world superpower. In order to do this, we needed to become a great industrial power and the property rights of ladies hanging clothes couldn't stand in the way of this. So, air polution increased. Now, anyone who is enviromentally concious and wants to inhibit the ammount of smoke comming from the smokestacks is at a disadvantage. It is more expensive to operate this way. Bring back property rights, and a great deal of air polution goes away.

2. Damage to Ozone layer. I think this might fit into the last category. As I understand it, the hole in the layer has not gotten much larger and it is over Antartica. I don't know much about this one.

3. Deforestation. There are two types of profit: short term and long term. While it would certainly be worth it to chop all the trees down in the sort run, it would destroy the long-term value of the land. On the free market, the owner of the forest would have an incentive to replant trees and not engate in clear cutting. If he did this, not only would he maintain the capital value of his land, but he would have an income for years to come. However, many forests are owned by the government. No one has any incentive to save the forest. The current user of the forest knows that if he doesn't get the trees, someone else will. Inheritance laws also play a role in this.

4. Extiction of species. I do not know if this is a bad thing per se. Havn't species always gone extinct? However, if private owner could own parks that are now owned by governments, they would have an incentive to maintain the species in the park. This would be a big money-getter.

5. Global Warming. Shoot Al Gore's plane down? I think this will end the global warming problem. I know that this doesn't exactly go along with the private property thing...

6. Water Pollutuion. Same as the air polution.

6.

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"Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the form of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question."
-Thomas Jefferson in his first inauguration address

I think you really need to take a closer look at what socialism actually is. In particular socialism and wealth redistribution are not equivalent particularly if you look at wealth and institutions in an appropriate way. Even if you don't there are property rights arrangements can drastically redistribute wealth and move the economy to a more capitalistic based framework.

Without an organization (doesnt have to be the governement) which makes and enforces regulation none of the enviromental problems will be dealt with.

If im going to swim and the sea is dirty, who am I going to sue? If I live next to a road and the fumes from all the dirty combustion engines make me sick, who am I going to sue?

This has nothing to do with property rights. Nobody owns the water or the air. What we need world-wide to make the world durable is:
- mandatory filtration systems for cars and factories
- big taxation on non-durable energy
- regulation on how to handle waste

Liberty1776 is pretty much an anarcho-capitalist which means everything is privately owned and no government exists. I'm not sure if he calls himself that but that is where all of his posts lead. Imagine a world in which everything including the air and water is owned privately. Of course I'm not sure why people would want to own the air and how you would measure that to show who owns what but I guess people might want to to change others for permission to own their air space. Imagine flying and having to pay for the rights to go through everybody's property to get from one half of the country to the other or across the planet. How the hell would you manage such a system and how would one prove if somebody went through his/her air space. Also all water would be privately owned which would mean any shipping or sailing would have to either have permission or probably even pay for the right to go through everybody's water property. Again it would all have to be monitored in order to know who went through and what to charge. This is the only way I could imagine his logic of private ownership being good applying to water and air. Otherwise it would have to be public which means a government enforcement of regulation which has actually done a good job at cleaning things up compared to a couple decades ago.

__________________
"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

I know about the views he holds and we have had a dicussion about it once. I disagree with him when he thinks that all we should enforce publicly are property rights and that private players will do the rest. I'm not against private ownership, but we should at least have regulation to make the private sector transparant and competitive (so the free market theory can do its work), regulation to keep the enviroment clean and regulation for safety.

Those are, in my view, undisputable necessities. Whatever regulation comes on top of that is debatable. Sometimes governement-enforced nation-wide standards for something like (electricity/railroad/banking/communications) infrastucture is desirable to increase a nation's economy efficiency or to increase competition in certain markets. Things like minimum wages and pension rights can help the people too.

Also, as you point out, governements have been effective at reducing pollution. Our water, air and food is much cleaner than it used to be. It doesnt make sense to take a completely different course.

What the ice core data also shows is that those changes of temperature happened hundreds of years BEFORE the CO2 changed. In other words, the CO2 levels appear to be dependent on the temperature levels.

Kramer

__________________
“It's time to admit that public education operates like a planned economy, a bureaucratic system in which everybody's role is spelled out in advance and there are few incentives for innovation and productivity. It's no surprise that our school system doesn't improve; it more resembles the communist economy than our own market economy."
Albert Shanker, former president of the American Federation of Teachers

The data I have looked at didn't show that. Where did you see that at? And if you can't find it that's alright. I do not bookmark everything I see and I hate it when people act like I'm wrong because I can't find something again. But if you do have it I'm willing to take a look.

__________________
"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Interesting to note, my vote didnt reflect the most serious problem facing the world, but focused on my neck of the woods and that is water pollution.
I live among the worlds most valuable fisheries. Proposed off shore oil and gas development in the fishing grounds and a very large scale open pit copper/gold mine is in development at the very headwaters of 2 major river drainages that support the largest and most valuable salmon fisheries in the world. These days it is difficult to be a fisherman.