Socialized Health Care in the USA

[Jester]

On a broad level, I have to ask: when have dangers ever been perfectly known? What risk has there ever been that can be predicted with absolute precision decades in advance? The whole idea of insuring against risk is to reduce our vulnerability to the possible-but-unknown. We don't wait to insure against illness until we are ill; should we really wait until we know with precision exactly how CO2 emissions are going to change our climate, when we can see that there is at least a potentially devastating threat there?

OK, but I'm not sure that 'chaotic' means what you think it does.

Lorentz, Smale, Feigenbaum? Bifurcations, self-similarity, attractors? Yeah, looks like about what I've always thought it was. Any reason you think otherwise? I'm certainly no mathematician, but I think I get the gist of it.

Yes. But at what cost? And how much do we budget for some kind of safety system to protect us from asteroid impact (how much would the dinosaurs have paid?)? What about coverage for an extensive bout of volcanism? How about stockpiling drugs against the mutation of Ebola into an airborne form? A cereal crop virus which destroys our crop base?

If the dinosaurs wouldn't have paid pretty much every "dime" they had, then they obviously didn't think much about their descendants, given that there are no more dinosaurs. Are we as stupid or shortsighted?*

To paraphrase Agent K: "There's always an alien battle cruiser, or a Corellian death ray, or an intergalactic plague intended to wipe out life on this miserable little planet. The only way these people can get on with their happy lives is that they do not get taxed to death to prevent it!"

Amusing as that movie was, there aren't actually any Corellian death rays, or alien battlecruisers, or intergalactic plagues. We have not, up until this last half-century or so, had to live with the looming threat of ending our species' time on earth by our action or inaction. We do not have a Men in Black who have expertise on how to stop us from destroying ourselves, or being destroyed. We have to come up with that now, and we seem to be doing a pretty shoddy job of it so far, although one can always hope to do better.

In this case, we could be speaking of a cost that is more than money. We're speaking of a cost in terms of loss of standard of living for *everyone*. Lowered for the industrial nations to mild discomfort. Lowered, in some places below that which sustains life. And lowered hopes and expectations for those coming out of poverty. To pay that full price, for a danger that is imperfectly known and is based on models that are, at best, primitive, is foolish or worse.

The places that are operating on subsistence are also not the places producing the carbon dioxide. Hopes and expectations are all well and good, but if "fulfilling" those hopes and expectations involves a substantial risk of a climate catastrophe, then I can't see how this is helping. Improving the GDP of India, only to sink 100 million of its inhabitants' homes under water, seems to be a poor trade-off.

As I've said before, there are environmental concerns that do not depend on "then a miracle occurs" models.

Ha ha, but if I'm understanding your critique of the models correctly, the issue is that they are too linear, too simple, and do not account for the enormous range and variety of feedbacks inherent in the real climate. If you are correct, there is no "miracle" needed to make climate models function on their own terms, but there might be plenty of "monkey wrenches" in the real world that are not yet accounted for, and perhaps can never truly be accounted for.

Not that we should blind ourselves to the wide variety of environmental concerns by focusing exclusively on CO2. But, then, I haven't heard anyone advocate that, either in this thread or elsewhere.

-Jester

*or maybe we'll sprout wings and fly like they did. I've heard Mars could be nice, given a thousand years and a few quintillion dollars' investment.