I just typed out a little over half of a massive reply when I started closing out some windows I'd been pulling up elevation maps on and hit the RAFO window too, yeah, nice.

I'm just gonna skip a bunch of the material then and get some key points.

A lot of our differences here, besides your general mega-distrust of companies is over scale and degree. You seem to think I don't believe in socialism and want some laissez faire anarcho-capitalist world. No, I'm just fine with socialism on some things, the road in front of my house was built with tax dollars, that's socialism, that thing is patrolled by police, more socialism, and hung with electric wire, etc, etc, etc.

Scale, the figure I hear from scientists about estimated sea level rise is 1 meter over the next century. I have doubts about that figure, but the whole point is that even if its true it simply isn't a big threat. If I said, 'fine, let's build a big fricking wall around our entire shoreline twenty feet above the new anticipated tidal peak' I'm not regarding this as some huge task to tackle. It's f'ing child's play. God Joel, at 1 meter a century that means you only need to truck in about 40 cu.yd. of filler per acre per year, and that's nothing, the vast majority of the world's land surface is more than 150 meters above sea level, note that 150 > 1, note that most of that land under 150 is not at sea level either. You can reference places like Bangladesh, which would lose 15% of its land area, but it's and oddball, centuries of monsoons have smashed it very flat, thats what erosion does, water comes in and sweeps land away with it, you stick a big wall in the way and less water comes in and way less gets dragged out to sea, you think a sea wall and rock apron along the entire US coast is much different then building or maintain a freeway running along it? Cheaper really, highways take most of their damage from freight weight and most of their upkeep comes from the need to keep them absurdly flat. Theres a few thousand miles of shoreline to this country, there are 4 million miles of roads, no I don't consider it a serious problem, particularly over a hundred years to do construction, those 4 million miles of roads have all been built or repeatedly rebuilt in the last century, we build over ten thousand miles of brand new road every year, more miles than our shoreline, every year. If we need to go all psycho on it because the whole blasted ice caps melt, yeah, we really can rip down chunks of mountain to use as fill material for coastal areas. No, this really isn't some mega-engineering feat of sci-fi proportions, seriously at $10 a cubic yard for fill, doing 10,000 miles of shoreline a whole yard (roughly a meter yeah) and a whole mile deep is about 200 billion dollars, over a century, 2 billion dollars a year, not a whole lot of money, and we have a lot more shoreline than most countries do per capita. Seriously, we're pretty good at building retaining walls ya know. All that land loss they talk about isn't 'disappears under the sea' it erosion effects from tide and wave, newer sea walls use vinyl and plastics and have virtually no upkeep, and before 'oil' comes into the plastics equation one of the big pieces of real science news, besides this whole 'arsenic bacteria' crap for the month was the successful development of an economical means of making plastic feedstock from biofuels.

You asked at one point why if we're so good with turning desert into arable land why we don't do it. We do, its still fairly expensive if you have to desalinate the water, the desert places that do it, with thousand sof miles now of center-pivot irrigation, do it using fossil water, new developments though now allow us to desalinate far from coast by using solar power to pump in sea water and using passive solar via big white dishes to heat that water up to desalinate it. What you'll see with that, in just the next decade or two, is massive desert farms springing up with big bordering green circles with the filler space full of solar and passive solar, giving the juice to supply the water and desalinate it, while at the same time we already have economically viable ways to irrigate with salt water along coast without electricity. One method, which turns a profit, is to greenhouse a small segment of land and pump seawater into it (growing crops inside) and using the excess water desalinated in this fashion to irrigate a large piece of land nearby. So when you comment about doming in the planet, no, we hardly need to go that far, a desert can be irrigated via seawater and evaporation desalination by basically building greenhouses in a density of a fairly plush suburb, like a few 30x90 greenhouse per acre, outside you use dry farming methods, inside your producing on that 3x2700 sq.ft. an amount of produce rivaling a normal acre of farming. These are all new techniques developed in the last decade or two, made viable now economically because their profit exceeds their upkeep, they are 'sustainable'.

I think the doom and gloom mentality that infects from the nastier elements of the greens - and no I don't accuse you of being a Luddite but you should probably keep in mind that I do consider myself an environmentalist too - makes people forget to look at the real numbers

A couple good links: Irrigate the Gobi and Seawater Greenhouses

So, just to clarify, global warming is a potential disaster because while most places will get more rain some places may see a decrease, no land will be lost except where it's just a big pain in the ass to fix it, unless people are okay with that pain in the ass, the cost to most places of halting any loss are way less than their road upkeep, those places which get less rain or who just want to get some land can pump water in for desalinization for stupid low cost and use passive solar to desalinate it, picking an optimum combo for the area of open land irrigated by water in enclosed greenhouses, which of course use virtually no water themselves. Areas with lower than optimal rainfall can simply greenhouse part of their land, and increase effective rainfall since the domes chunks don't need the rain which drains onto the undomed parts... yes I have no damn problem greenhousing in huge tracts of land, an acre of plastic runs a couple thousand bucks, can be made for only slightly higher using biofuels now, and inside those areas you grow your more labor intense crops like tomatoes and save the low labor tractor harvested stuff for the other chunks. Okay, so you've got some place that gets 15 in of rainfall a year and you want 20 in for the crops, you turn a quarter of it into greenhouse rows, grow your fruits and other hand picked crops in there and use the rest for hay or grain or whatever else grows decently on 20 in. Or you boost it even further by pumping in some seawater, which hell you can grow fish in the cistern of, and add more water to your mix. Technically these are not only not carbon neutral but carbon reclaiming methods.

Now is it economical right this moment - not exactly, we can do it, but world food demand is still less then available current farming techniques produce. We may end up with better methods, and surely cheaper, but right there I have given you a system which totally relieves all expected climate issues in terms of land loss and agriculture doable in the current science. Scale, scale, scale... greenhouse construction costs tend to run over $2 a sq.ft. that's about $100,000 an acre, and they obviously yield stupid huge calories per acre compared to normal farming, labor costs in this sort of setup being pointless to consider when it is more logical to ask how much labor is needed to support 1 person, needless to say agricultural labor in a greenhouse needed to produce 1 man-year of food is way in hell smaller than 1-man year of labor. Most eco-fear-mongers would be entirely happy to skew out 10% of the world's GDP to 'save us' I could take that same 10% and dome at $2/sq.ft. a pop some 2.5 trillion sq.ft of land, which would then after be entirely profitable enough to sustain itself that way, putting that into a more manageable figure, that's 100,000 sq miles a year, er, Arizona. Now, I wouldn't do it that way, but you get my point? Even if I accept all these various worst case scenarios for AGW I can stick out industrial options that at worst are 'low-yield investments' or small losses. Why in God's Name would I want to supress growth when that can't be done anyway - China and India won't agree - and we all suffer to enact an undoable plan when we can turn that growth into more growth? Planet simply too warm? Fine, tint the green house green and paint unused crap white. PLants don't use green light, so that whole chunk of the spectrum can be bounced right back out into space pretty efficiently in places where it's dumb ass arid anyway, tinting plastic or glass green ain't exactly a big price increase, you don't need oil for the plastic, you can at a slightly higher cost grow biofuel for feedstock in those seawater greenhouses that are power their everything on one form or another of solar. All without whatever stupid huge advances in science their will be in the next century, which I doubt will even make any of this an issue.

I don't deny there will be problems to tackle but I just don't get this millenarian pessimism - you mentioned Ethiopia - it doesn't have water issues, it feeds the Nile, it only uses about 2% of its water for irrigation and electricity, and in the last decade, while still absurdly poor, its been seeing serious growth, it just needs to get politically stable so businesses will be willing to loan them money to buy irrigation pumps and build dams, I want to see more Western support in loans and aid but strictly speaking it isn't ultimately necessary, business gladly invest in developing countries, they see huge returns doing it... if the place doesn't turn into a bloodbath of warring factions or develop some 'nationalize everything' attitude, it's a self-feeding cycle either way but it's not an accident that poor countries are politically unstable, yes that poverty feeds instability but mostly that instability is the cause for the poverty, nobody wants to stick long-term investment capital in a place that has a coup every other month. The places that had capitalist friendly stable governments tend not to be too poor, and you can point out some pro-west dictatorships that are 'exceptions' but even those, when compared to parallels that weren't pro-west, tend to be a lot higher on the GDP/per-capita, in spite of usually robbing their own people blind. I don't think any of these countries, if they can get themselves converted to a good stable democracy with capitalism and a little socialism to keep big scale projects going and give people crash-nets not nanny-states, will be unable to take care of themselves, just need western start up capital, most of which can be supplied by investors not state loans, but those can be done. Hence, given various over-the-top and as of yet unproven doom and gloom outcomes I'm skeptical about, even when I'm working with those as truth and assume somehow our industrialists, engineers and scientists will all go brain dead over the next century, I just see no reason for all this horrible pessimism. Explain why I should start shivering in terror and accepting the not-so-small fringe eco-factions commie or anarchist non-solutions to problems.

Now all of this wide of the real point, your political alignment has you convinced that the right wing is in some kind of horrible denial about the impending doom of this world, but they're not, basically they get told by people like me not to worry over it because the problems are not yet clearly defined and because the can be dealt with without going all hammer and sickle and replacing their SUV with a bicycle. You need to drill into your head that they're not absorbing moonbeams while trying figure out while their feet are wet and they can see pyramids. You don't know them, the conservative talk show hosts regularly bring on scientists and engineers who say variations of things like I do, they won't be convinced until we are convinced and if you seriously think I'm in some state of denial or on the corporate take then you really need to consider if maybe you're in that nutters fringe after all. Do I honestly sound like someone who has abandoned science and reason? That I do not consider these problems with a reasonably objective mind or lack facts? I've deliberately giving you solutions I personally generated, no talking points, undoubtedly inferior to what real specialists might produce, but every last datum taken from reliable research, greenhouse construction costs taken directly from multiple companies and the USDA itself, material costs taken the same way, an emphasis on those techs because I personally know them. You talk about lost land, but you have no data, and good luck finding it, because there's a bizarre disconnect on things like that, you hear some vague 'could lose 25% of coastal land' and that same statement somehow manages not to define what is coastal land or how many actually square miles will be submerged, or why they must be submerged when they can be saved for a fraction of their inflated land values. Coastlines move, even here on the lake, that lands expensive because people like to live on it so they will dole out the cash for a retaining wall who cost and upkeep is less than their property taxes, land that is only valuable because it has a nice view, running a 100k an acre when good farm land runs 3k, what if we do jack nationally and just leave it to people to build their own retaining wall or move, even then little is lost.

Really, I'm not putting on blinders, I got raised mega-eco, I live very green because it matches my lifestyle, and I can't bring myself to say "Hey guys, assuming in spite of some evidence to the contrary that not only is this stuff all totally true but the worst case scenarios will happen, assuming somehow in the next century all our scientists turn into drooling morons and don't tackle any, not one, of the milestones we're expecting in the next 10-30 years, assuming all that, we may have a problem which even if we lose all of our ingenuity we can tackle via raw brute force methods for less cost than we spend on either road construction or any random branch of the military, and if we don't, we may be in for a relatively rough time, though I can't really see how that would happen, but maybe if we all turn into retards we might get stuck having to live a bit more frugally and go a bit hefty on birth control, which is more or less the current proposed solution, so yeah, in every possible worst case scenario where every dumb ass option happens it may be necessary to slowly adopt to the very hardships the other side is pretty much suggesting we do right now, oh, and odds are if all of this stuff is true, we'll have much more rigorous proof about a decade or two from now, and probably a way in hell better way to deal with it, but let's act right this second." That's kind of a tough sell.

So I maintain my skepticism, and I'm not overly worried, and its kinda pointless to worry about since we can't do anything about developing countries becoming carbon spewers, and I sure as hell even if convinced couldn't change many minds on the right who are a little chilly on the whole issue for being called retarded evil monsters for the n-teenth time even though the previous occasions didn't seem to bear out, us not freezing in our bunkers after a nuclear winter, scorched by acid rain, burnt by our missing ozone layer, starving in mass from the population boom to 16 billion people that was being presented as a certainty my the 2010s as recently as the mid-80s, strangely still feeding 6 billion plus people after being told one or two billion was the top or the various prior repetitions on how our capitalist greed would lead to misery and slaughter.

And no, I know there were some legitimate reason to worry about all those things and that if we sat on our asses we might have had some real suffering to face, and yeah, I really do worry about limited resources, ecological change, habitat destruction, erosion, soil depletion and all that other stuff, and I'm not some lone voice lost among the conservative hoard, but they, we, want to see a bit more iron in the data and we want to spend more time looking for solutions when that seems all very probable to be available and the current option is otherwise accepting that the house is on fire and we must jump out the window and break some bones.