I think in theory global warming is tough bite to libertarianism, as simple analysis of game theory tells there almost zero incentive to reduce your 'polluting' in fear of law-suits. As long as you are marginally small 'polluter' compared to the whole amount of carbon accumulation your responsibility is insignificant. If you happen to be a big polluter, the most damage has already been done so on the margin polluting more is irrelevant. As all will think the same, the 'solution' of the game is inaction, which in this case could be 'game over'. As discussed already, there are many juridical problems to solve that are difficult for single legitimate court, not to mention the wild west court model of the libertarianism.
In practice this is very boring debate as I have ceased believing in AGW long time ago. It is not an issue of this thread but it would be interesting to debate science behind AGW too.
An excellent synopsis of the problem. Thank you. As for you not believing in anthropogenic global warming, I'm not sure why you think the evidence is thin.
It would be better to make a separate thread for AGW-theory criticism, but I'll sum few points, some refuting the AGW, other the doomsday scenarios:
- Basic knowledge of physics tells us that solubility of CO2 (and most other gases) to water is reduced significantly as a function of temperature (think of soft drinks). When global temperature rises, oceans will also rise in temperature but with lag, thus leading them to start releasing CO2 to the atmosphere. When climate cools oceans become CO2-sinks again. From this background it surprises me little that historically CO2 concentration happens to follow temperature with few century lag, not the other way around.
- Warming of the climate reduces not increases extreme weather patterns. Simple physics again: When the globe warms, poles warm up the most. This is due to the fact that in the equator the excess heat is goes to vaporizing which leads to cooling cloud cover. This leads to the reduced temperature-difference (=energy difference). If you think climate as heat engine, this reduces the heat to mechanical-energy conversion rate significantly. (Local temporary exceptions possible)
- Warming climate does not necessarily lead to reduced ice and thus rising sea levels. Warm climate > vaporization > more rainfall, that is also more snow > Ice-cover thickens. Glaciers have indeed increased during past few years.
- Melting ice, when floating, does not rise sea-levels. Simple Archimedes law in action: the ice has displaced amount of water exactly of its weight. How large portion do you think the water will replace when it melts? Same as it's weight, logical? It makes me facepalm every time somebody tries to induce panic mood by showing cracking ice-bergs. North Pole is by the way completely floating ice.
- Modern temperature records happen to start from the coldest moment for a very long time. It is only natural that temperature records have risen with the coincidental industrialization.
- The famous hockey-stick curve is blatant lie: it misses the medieval warm period and Maunder minimum. Also temperature was at par to now at 1930 (at least in northern europe). Climategate and other similar stories have revealed other consistent frauds in the climate-science community. There have been many 'fixes' to make the story more consistent. All the time it has been 'precise science'. If it isn't objective, then it isn't science and worth believing.
- Sun activity (sun spots) has far higher correlation with temperature than CO2. Some scientist have suggested we are heading to mini-ice-age as sun is heading to inactivity. Last time this happened was the already mentioned Maunder sunspot minimum which 'coincidentally' was very cold time. I agree it is very dubious claim that earths temperature would be related to the input of it's main source of energy...
- Most long time temperature measuring spots have been corrupted with growing nearby cities. Satellite data and uncorrupted spots show no significant trend. The corrupted data was used to calibrate the six IPCC climate-models which are the base of all doomsday scenarios.
- During Jurassic period CO2 concentration was whopping ~2000 ppm. Earth didn't transform into Venus. (surprise)
- The media saturation of climate-truth is just unrealistic. Agreed, if true it is damn important, but do you need all the time bombard people with emotion inducing crap that is not founded on any known science (not even the mainstream climate one). My propaganda-alarm has been in lot of use lately with climate-change and terrorism and swine-flu scare and who knows what will instant kill us next time. These things just happen (coincidentally?) to keep the populace under iron grip of fear. Fear and anger, two emotions that are the key to mass manipulation.
- "The only constant in the climate is change" -some smart dude whose name I don't remember.
If you really want to start discussing this, copy-paste the points with credentials and make another thread, or ask me to make one. I don't want to entirely off-topic this thread as I truly enjoy watching the silence indicating lack of proper counter-arguments by the libertarians.
Edit070812: I could swear I wrote this differently back then; here's one important correction to the second dot: The cooling cover of the clouds sets in effect maximum temperature for equatorial areas. This in turn means rising aggregate temperature causes lower temperature difference leading to the lower efficacy of the imaginative heat-machine. Extreme weather patterns should be reduced by this mechanism. I would like to change few other parts but I'm going to leave the post as it is. I don't want to tamper the original post.