I doubt I can find 3 links to criticisms you haven’t already heard, so I don’t really see any point in going there.

I guess the bottom line is that you are going to defend every statement that Gore and the propaganda machine has made. That’s fine; as I’ve also pointed out before, your present career depends on the hype, so I guess I shouldn’t expect anything different. I sometimes forget you’re at work right now. Feel free to say you’ve won, if it makes your holiday more merry.

Ronald,

I never said all government is ‘bad’. I just said, quite succinctly I think, what government is.

And you seem to be unclear on the basic tenets of libertarianism. The cornerstones are the sanctity of individual rights and the principle that says initiating force is always wrong. A government could be run that way, even if we haven’t seen one yet – but it would certainly look a lot different from what we have today.

The point about your government fixes is simply that they ignore individual rights and initiate force against people, by treating the ‘taxpayers’ as cattle to be milked for the ‘common good’. It’s not only morally wrong, but it’s bad business.

But you guys stick to your beliefs and keep on keeping on with the propaganda and maybe the next big climate bill that’s coming will be more to your liking, and who knows? Maybe it won’t have any bad consequences for the economy after all, just as you say.

It’s like what Lee Harvey Oswald had to do. His politics of Marxism didn’t work out for him so well. He wasn’t getting anywhere with anything else he tried to do. So he had to do the only thing left to him which was to be a pest. If someone is a pest, that is the thing a person can be 100 percent of.

How someone can be as wrong as you in your posts and still keep driving on and not stopping to contemplate is not someone who wants to understand the world and think things out, but someone who, as the True Believer, has to fight on that much harder.

You don’t know the science of climatology. You should (re)study it and the dangers. And not from those who also don’t understand climatology, but from those that do.

The bill that Pres. Bush signed was not about global warming, but about ‘america is addicted to oil’ and ‘oil independence.’

That you believe all government is bad when there are so many clear examples of that not being true.

But what makes our country so great is that even if you don’t know what makes our country so great it still mostly protects your right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness with tax payers money.

I challenge you to give 3 weblinks to specific “disinformation and lies” you keep referring to. And please don’t cite instances I (or Realclimate) have already debunked. If you can’t or won’t, then I’m not going to let you keep slandering the entire scientific community.

I have a 10-month old, but am getting enough sleep, thank you.

Wow. You’re right. Joe has engaged you on such issues as endangered polar bears, tweaked data, and alarmist statements. And in each case, he dispatched your criticisms convincingly, thoroughly, and diplomatically. I, being less kind, would say he’s shredded your objections and protestations with skill and precision, exposing them as little more than iconoclastic bombasts.

And yet, here you go again, raising them as if they weren’t thoroughly discredited. Well, thank you for proving that my previous observation about the reality based community was spot on. I was feeling bad about it, becuse Joe has been chiding me for my somewhat strident tone. But I see now, it hasn’t made a dent.

Let’s look at some facts.

Regulations have made our security markets transparent, fair, and successful. Doubt that? Then put your money in Argentina or Zaire, I understand you can get better than a 250% return there at the moment.

And if you look at the leading economic sectors — computers and information systems, pharmaceuticals, energy, aerospace, agriculture, bio-tech, defense, etc. etc. etc. government R&D and fiscal policies have been instrumental in their success, and they have been highly regulated.

Think the free market provides all good things by pure serendipity?

Well, then take a look at what happened in CA when they deregulated the energy industry — the free market delivered blackouts and skyrocketting price increases simultaneously. On the other hand, the big bad Gub’mint regulated an energy system that for 100 years brought us the cheapest, most reliable energy in the world. Hmmm. Or look what’s happened when restrictions for advertising were lifted from the pharmaceutical industry — they now spend more on advertsing than R&D and what they spend in R&D is largely devotd to knock off drugs for SSRI’s ED and other big sllers. Real breakthroughs are coming from NIH (that would be big Gibmint).

And you’re reading this because DARPA — a government agency — invented the Internet — and yes, Al Gore was instrumental in getting it established.

The fact is, conservatism and modern libertarianism are fueled by two powerful myths, which upon examination, have no basis in fact: 1) The Myth of the Magic Markets and their abiltiy to deliver all good things by pure serendipity, and 2) the Myth of the Bumbling Bureaucrats, their utter incompetence, and the belief that regualtion is bad.

Need another example? The current meltdown in liquidity is a function of two failures to regulate 1) The Fed failed to regulate the mortgage markets; and 2) the SEC failed the regulate hedge funds and one failure of the market 1) the market held that the securitization of sub-primes and secondary mortgages spread risks in a way that assured no one was over-exposed. Wrong.

One of the curious phenomena conservatives and libertarians engage in each year is throwing a half a trillion dollars or more at the Defense Department — the only sector of our economy entirely run by government — after spending the entire year telling us government is useless and can’t do anything right. Huh?

And yes, we’ve often regulated stupidly, but that doesn’t mean that it’s stupid to regulate.

As Sterns notes, climate change is the biggest market failure of all time. Waiting for the magic market to solve it without serious, sustained government regulation and R&D is tantamount to waiting for the tooth fairy.

Regulations and government programs are not an impediment to economic growth, they are pre-requisites for it. More recently, they’ve become necessary to maintaining civilization as we know it.

Come on, Joe, we have already argued about and hashed out many of the statements made by Al Gore and others – from sinking Pacific islands, to so-called endangered polar bears, dishonestly tweaked data, and misleading statements. Do we have to argue them all again? And I don’t think anybody seriously disputes that Al Gore and many of the glowarming bloggers have gotten way off the science sometimes with ’sky-is-falling’ rhetoric. Heck, Gore won an Oscar and a Nobel for his propaganda campaign! [Crossword question: "influencing public opinion"] And his film and speeches are peppered with misleading statements and outright lies. And he’s setting the tone for the movement.

Please identify the specific “disinformation and lies” you keep referring too. You keep repeating the phrase as if everyone knows what you are talking about, but in fact no one does (because it doesn’t exist).

Let’s be serious, Joe. Are you defending every statement of Gore’s and the propaganda machine?

Look, I’m not necessarily lumping you in with those ‘glowarming bloggers’ I referred to above. You are one of the better sorts. You are less alarmist than some, and have real expertise in green technologies. I just don’t understand why you condone and sometimes repeat the disinformation, and why you aren’t more for private sector efforts when you can see as clearly as anybody else that government fixes don’t work.