exchemist

I don't think it is floundering particularly. As @iNow observes, risk pooling is the basis of a number of collective systems in societies. National Insurance was the original basis of the UK's welfare state, cast in its present form by Attlee's government, which was of a distinctly socialist persuasion. (It's hard to think now that even road transport was nationalised by that government.). I think there's a productive discussion to be had about the way socialist ideas can be, or have been, adapted over the years, bearing in mind some of the excesses of corporate capitalism that we have seen in the last decade or two.

OK, maybe I've got it: are you referring to the Early Twentieth Century Warming (ETCW)? Is that what you are concerned about? There's a paper here on it: https://wires.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/wcc.522. This seems to attribute 40-50% of the change to human-induced effects and the rest to a succession of other climatic events. But indeed it looks as if this is still not fully understood and that research on it continues. From what I have been able to find so far, the CO2 concentration in 1950 seems to have been 311ppm, versus 300 in 1900 and 285 in 1850. I think I read somewhere that early CO2 increases may have been offset by cooling due to aerosols and soot in the early industrial revolution. So there seems to have been a slow increase going on throughout the c.19th and into the very early c.20th, but possibly with no apparent effect. What I'm unclear about at the moment is whether the greenhouse effect is expected to be linear in CO2 concentration or not.

Yes that's fair. And in fact I think that sometimes happens, in cases where a risk was not reasonably foreseeable by the company that made the product.

It seems fair though that the polluter should pay to clean up his own mess, does it not? I'd be averse to a system whereby private enterprise can pollute with impunity and the taxpayer has to pay for the clean-up. One wants the incentive not to pollute to be with the enterprises that may be contemplating polluting activities. If they know they may be held liable, they will do their due diligence on pollution hazards before they start their operations. That is more or less how it works today, imperfect thought it is.

Nobody claims the difference in temperature between the dates you mention did not happen. Nor does anyone claim that particular difference in temperature was 100% attributable to a man-made greenhouse effect.

True. (Our use of fossil fuel and consequent dependence on it today is the perfect example of that.) But that's why we need mechanisms that learn from experience and apply corrective action. Markets generally won't do that, or not until so much damage has been done that sales are lost from angry consumers. One needs regulation, by an expert non-profit body, supported by the political system so that citizens can see why it is needed - and that it is not just dedicated to depriving people of "freedom".

But this is ad-hoc cherry-picking, rather than a scientific approach to what the data points indicate. Earlier in the thread @Ken Fabian posted a curve showing the effect of LOESS (or LOWESS) smoothing on the data. I looked that up and found this description: https://www.statisticshowto.com/lowess-smoothing/ That, surely, is the statistically correct way to go about looking for underlying trends. It makes sense to include a good data set from before the suspected influence starts to manifest itself, in order to see whether there is any kind of baseline, from which the trend starts to depart.

I don't think I would treat pollution, and other environmental negative impacts, as an externality. It's sort of interesting in that both state-run and market-run systems produce pollution disasters. In both cases the problem really comes down to lack of public knowledge and public accountability. I suppose, at the end of the day, what we all want from an economic system is one that innovates and thus creates wealth, for us all to share in some measure, but is accountable to us as consumers and as citizens. The political debates are all about how best to do that.

If I were to post Newton's laws of motion and then sign off with "Food for thought", I'd expect a bit of criticism. Yes I agree with your points, but it is all conventional stuff. I am suggesting it would be more interesting to think about the economic challenges of today than go over old debates, long since decided.

Hardly. These observations have been standard stuff for most of my lifetime (I'm 68). That's why you find the better run economies in Europe tend to practice a form of mixed economy, sometimes referred to as social democracy. In short, people have learnt what to take from the ideals of socialism and blend those with regulated market economic mechanisms to get the necessary feedback from consumer to producer. What has become equally clear over the last couple of decades is that inadequately regulated market mechanisms can also fail to deliver for citizens. The water and railway companies in Britain are examples, as is the health system in the USA. What we are also now seeing, with the new transnational IT entities such as Amazon, or Zuckerberg's empire, is that it is becoming a struggle to prevent the development of international monopolies which hand an unacceptable degree of control to producers, while disempowering consumers, just as much as any state-planned enterprise in the old USSR. It seems to me issues like these are the real food for thought nowadays.

Don't be a jerk. That is not what I said at all. What is irritating and unacceptable is for you to ask a raft of questions that are stupid , AND then insist that "we" investigate them, as if they are in some way profound or unanswered as yet. The questions you have started asking, in profusion, halfway through this thread, suggest a complete lack of understanding of physics, totally inconsistent with the level at which you started the thread. You are screwing around with us.

I don’t understand your point. Obviously there is a lot of year to year variation due to other factors, as the spiky nature of the graph indicates. So equally obviously, looking at the difference between a trough in one year and a peak 35 years later is going to tell you nothing about any long term trend. All it tells you is there other factors that can obscure the trend in the short term. But we know that just from looking at the graph. So why would anyone do that?

Now you are throwing out even more nonsensical questions. If you read any article on the Big Bang theory it will explain that the early universe was denser, i.e. more matter in a more confined space, than today. So what's all this about whether it can hold the same number of atoms? You don't need "energy" to "cross space". Space does not inhibit particles from passing through it. You are suddenly writing as though you have no grasp of any physics at all. It's absurd of you to reel off a list of dumb questions and airily state that we should "investigate all this". Ballocks! All we should do is get you to sit down and learn some damned physics.

Sure. But given that moving ships off RFO is a hard thing to do, I was arguing that high S fuel was actually better than low S, from a climate change viewpoint. Ships eventually need a non carbon fuel but that involves a dramatic shift to something like ammonia, on which the engine builders are doing a lot of work these days, I understand. Meanwhile they burn low S RFO, or distillate MDF, which gives us the worst of all possible worlds, it seems to me. But I retired from all that 10 years ago so I may be out of date.

I remember this from my time in Shell. The sulphur in residual fuel oil burnt as bunker fuel used to be as high as 3-4%. A lot of SO2 was ejected with the exhaust, which oxidised to sulphate aerosol, which has an atmospheric cooling effect - through scattering, I think. The move to cut down pollution has reduced the S content in marine bunkers significantly. (It actually caused some unforeseen problems with cylinder lubrication in low speed engines, which was a headache for people like me, but that's another story.) I remember arguing with engine builders that high S was actually a help to combat climate change, but they said the politics of it would never allow them to make that case in public. How interesting (and not in a good way) that this is now a measurable effect.

This now reads like a "Gish gallop". You seem to have run up the Jolly Roger and to be throwing as many wrong ideas out at once as you can, perhaps with the object of defeating attempts to correct you. What's all this about galaxies disintegrating? Who says matter was "created out of nowhere"? Have you read the evidence for the expansion of the universe? How would you account for that evidence if there were no expansion? As for why do we, the human race, exist when cosmological conditions are, er, favourable for us to exist, that is a bit of a silly question, surely? At the moment you remind me more of a seagull than a parrot. Do you want to slow down, take things one at a time and have a discussion we can all learn from? Or are you anxious to move on quickly to some crank agenda of your own, hence all this rubbish in your latest post?

No of course not. "Presumably" is a term I use to indicate something is what I think, while acknowledging I am far from expert on cosmology, so I advance my remarks tentatively. It's not my model or my speciality. You have to be careful, I think, with "the average effective speed of light." I thought you already understood the light travels towards Earth at c throughout, but the distance over which that light has to travel is increasing as it goes, as @Genady had already said. I'm wondering if it may be useful in this discussion to distinguish between comoving distance and proper distance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comoving_and_proper_distances I have the feeling this may be where the confusion is occurring. But as I say I am not a cosmologist. There are others here better qualified to steer you through what the theory actually says.

Because of the stretching while it was en route, presumably.

OK, so you seem to be seeing this the same way as in @Genady's explanation then, viz. travels at c, but through a space that is itself expanding, so the distance stretches during its travel.

I’m just a chemist, but isn’t there a problem with your notion of the “effective speed” of light? Surely the speed of light is independent of the relative speeds of emitter and receiver, is it not? So for rapidly receding objects (relative to us) what happens is the speed of light still reaches us at c, but it is just red shifted. In which case your escalator analogy would appear to be misplaced.

Quite. Also often the case with “People’s” and “Democratic”, as in People’s Republic of China or German Democratic Republic.

Seems strange behaviour for a person sign up to a club - and then immediately start complaining about the rules they've just agreed to.

Perhaps it should rather read: "Admit a right one.".........

Not at all. But a club is free to make rules of discourse for its members to abide by. That has no impact on anyone’s rights of free speech.

In scientific theories, all “truth” is provisional. Science deals in predictive models, not absolute truth.