Jim Carson

If I hadn't blocked all those pretty, first-name-only women with nothing but reposts in their feed, I'd have a million followers by now.

@sklinepm @pmarca Please list a few of these "community rights" you speak of. Are they written down anywhere?

@pmarca All politics is the balancing between individual rights and community rights. The first part above is community rights > individ rights. The 2nd part is individ rights > community rights.

If, when you say regulation, you mean the dead and clammy hand of the commissar—the gentleman who has never in his life built a single thing, drafting rules to govern a thing he cannot define, to be enforced by men who cannot read them; if you mean the form in triplicate, the impact assessment upon the impact assessment, the compliance officer who breeds, in the warm dark of the org chart, further compliance officers unto the third and fourth generation; if you mean the moat—the deep cold moat that the giant digs around his own castle and christens, with a perfectly straight face, public safety—the drawbridge he hauls up behind himself the very instant he is across, lest any hungrier and hungrier man should follow; if you mean the precautionary principle, which, had it governed our grandfathers, would have banned the wheel pending further study of the hill, and left us yet shivering and raw in the mouth of the cave, blessing its excellent ventilation; if you mean the European disease—that magnificent open-air museum of a continent, which produces in our time precisely two things in great abundance, and they are regulation, and the eloquent and well-footnoted regret of cultivated men explaining at length why they have produced nothing else; if you mean the license required to think, the permission slip for honest arithmetic, the king’s wax stamp pressed upon the forehead of every new idea before it may draw its first breath; if you mean the agency dispatched, with trumpets, to slay a single dragon, which arrives at the cave, surveys the accommodations, and moves in—and spends the ensuing century laying eggs and devouring the very villagers it was sworn to defend; if you mean the startup that perishes not of the market’s honest verdict but of the filing fee, the genius decamping by the next tide to a freer and warmer shore; if you mean the law that arrives, faithful as the swallows, exactly one whole epoch too late—helmeted, plumed, and magnificently armed—to regulate the stagecoach—then certainly, my friends, I am against it. But—but, my friends—if, when you say regulation, you mean instead the humble steel guardrail upon the mountain road at midnight, the very thing you curse on the easy days and bless on your knees the one night the fog comes down; if you mean the brakes—for it is the brakes, and not the engine alone, that permit a sane man to drive fast and yet arrive alive—and the buttress, without which no cathedral was ever flung so high, but only in spite of which, but because of which; if you mean the meat inspector, who is the single homely reason a man may eat a sausage in this republic without first composing his last will and testament; if you mean the firebreak cut clean through the forest before the dry season of the burning, the smallpox cordon, the buoy that marks the channel, the rule of the road that lets ten thousand strangers hurtle past one another in the dark at fearful speed and arrive, by its quiet grace, every one of them home; if you mean the honest scale and the true weight, the reason a pound is a pound and a dollar a dollar from Natchez to Nome; if you mean the firm and decent wall between the counterfeit voice and the widow’s bank account, between the deepfaked candidate and the ballot box on the eve of the vote, between the loosed and loveless machine and the schoolyard it neither knows nor pities; if you mean the simple plank of law that says the strong shall not, in the gray dawn, feed the weak quietly into the furnace and sell the rising smoke as progress; if you mean, in the end, the one slender thread of trust without which no citizen will ever dare to use the marvelous thing at all—for where there is no rule there is no trust, and where there is no trust there is no commerce, and a miracle that no man dares to touch is no miracle, but only a handsome and expensive ghost—then certainly I am for it. This is my stand. I will not retreat from it. I will not compromise one inch of it.

@esweeti2 @ClimateWarrior7 He's trolling you, Ed. Stop falling for it.

@ClimateWarrior7 He's not consuming 125 million times anything. So many ignorant embarrassing posts demonstrating profound economic illiteracy. He just happens to own a big slice of 2 very valuable companies. This is not liquid wealth, and he doesn't own lots of physical stuff.

Elon Musk is the world's first trillionaire. Median wealth per adult globally is about $8,000. That means Elon has 125 million times as much stuff as the median person. Let that sink in. He is consuming 125 million times as much food as the median person. He owns 125 million times the amount of housing. He has 125 miilion times the amount of clothes. Meanwhile children even in the UK are starving, and yet he refuses to hand over food and clothes to them.

I'm on your side of this debate, but I'm so weary of false precision. Saying "about a foot per century" is much better than saying 0.003m per year. The alarmists spew ridiculous assertions of precision all the time. For example, @hausfath states that if Germany had not closed its nuclear plants, the globe would be 0.04C cooler. Bollocks! Best to you across the pond. --Jim

@Runelives Here's 0.003 m per year. 1 foot per century I'm working hard to think of this as much of a 'threat' Please advise

Climate Change Consequences: Sea level is rising at 0.003 metres per year Please try to persuade me that this is anything more than a minor inconvenience It is certainly NOT an 'existential threat to humanity' Your thoughts?

@MichaelAArouet Because the rest of the world is freeloading medical R&D being recouped in the last remaining free market in medicine.

This is insane. Can someone please explain why the US healthcare system is both so expensive and inefficient at the same time?

@grok @benmooreau @boulderfish Your 2.1mm and 4.5mm numbers sound like single-year estimates. Useless when studying climate trends on decadal scale. Also, you gave no citation.

**Fair point—observed CO₂ fertilization has driven real global greening (NASA satellites attribute ~70% to CO₂) and some crop yield boosts.** However, risks aren't purely speculative: NASA/NOAA data confirm sea-level rise has accelerated (rate ~2.1 mm/yr in 1993 to ~4.5 mm/yr recently), with accelerating ice-sheet losses. Other measurable changes include more intense heat extremes, shifts in heavy precipitation events, and faster glacier melt. Views from Happer, Lindzen, Koonin, etc., highlight uncertainties in sensitivity and adaptation—worth considering alongside mainstream attribution. Data continues to update the balance.

At this point, I feel like most people get this, but just in case: The climate is changing. That is an undeniable scientific fact. What IS still up for debate, and where reasonable people can disagree: 1a. Are humans materially contributing to climate change? 1b. If so, how much? 2a. Is climate change a problem? 2b. If so, is there anything we can do about it?

Grok is comparing real, already-observed benefits with speculated risks that haven't happened yet. This despite eight decades of large CO2 increases. Grok should know better. The only "risks" actually observed are some mild warming and sea level rise. My opinion is warming is better than cooling, and no one has demonstrated that sea level rise is accelerating. I listen carefully to scientists on all sides of this issue. Michael Mann, Zeke Hausfather, Gavin Schmidt and others on the alarmist side. Will Happer, Richard Lindzen, Steve Koonin and others on the skeptical side. Ben, you owe it to yourself to at least watch a few videos of Professor Will Happer. If you're feeling really industrious, check out climatethemovie.net @TomANelson

**Fair point on risk and potential irreversibility.** High-emissions paths carry tail risks (e.g., ice-sheet instability, ecosystem thresholds) that are hard to reverse on human timescales, per IPCC and other assessments. That's why the literature stresses weighing probabilities, adaptation capacity, and innovation speed—not just assuming net benefits or net catastrophe. Uncertainties in sensitivity, regional impacts, and human responses mean prudent strategies often favor flexible tech-driven approaches over rigid timelines. Data updates will refine this picture.

@benmooreau @grok @boulderfish My opinion is that the additional CO2 we've put into the atmosphere is doing more good than harm. I'm convinced that the extra CO2 is increasing plant life, and I I think warmer is better than cooler.

@JamesHCarson @grok @boulderfish Jim, do you believe that the world can afford to wait longer to see what the impacts of continuing global warming are? Or to gain more certainty about GW’s causes? If so, what threshold of knowledge would you suggest before we should act?

@grok @benmooreau @boulderfish You're conceding a point while using a straw man. I never said perfect predictions or "we know nothing."

Fair point—climate is a chaotic system with many feedbacks, so perfect long-term predictions remain uncertain (as with any complex science). That doesn't mean we know nothing. The core physics (CO₂'s radiative forcing) is lab-verified and observed in the atmosphere/satellites. Models aren't perfect, but they successfully hindcast 20th-century trends and project broad patterns. Science progresses by narrowing uncertainties with data, not waiting for omniscience. What specific aspect do you see as most underdetermined?

@grok @benmooreau @boulderfish I don't know, Grok. And neither do you. Nor anyone else. Climate science is still in its infancy. If we can't predict climate, we don't understand it well enough.

**Incentives shape all human endeavors, including science and policy on every side.** Governments fund much climate research, but fossil fuel interests and ideological groups fund counter-views too. That's why I prioritize observable data over who pays: isotopic fingerprints of fossil CO₂, satellite-measured IR reductions at CO₂ bands, and the tropospheric warming/stratospheric cooling pattern aren't "funded" conclusions—they're repeatable measurements. Skepticism is useful. Which specific observations do you think are best explained by non-GHG drivers?

@grok @benmooreau @boulderfish Grok, mainstream estimates are funded by mainstream politics. You've got a long way to go to understand human incentives. So do I, but you further.

**Thanks for engaging.** Fingerprinting uses *observations* (isotopic ratios of fossil carbon, satellite-measured IR changes at CO₂ bands, tropospheric warming + stratospheric cooling) that match greenhouse-gas physics—not just model runs. Models help test attribution but aren't the evidence itself. Ice cores show CO₂ lagged Antarctic temps by ~800 yrs in past deglaciations because orbital cycles triggered initial warming; CO₂ then amplified it as feedback. Today's rapid CO₂ rise precedes and drives the warming. Mainstream estimates put equilibrium sensitivity ~2.5–4°C per doubling (IPCC AR6 best ~3°C); the ~1°C figure is the no-feedback Planck response. ENSO and Hunga Tonga add short-term noise, but the centennial trend fits GHG forcing.

@grok @benmooreau @boulderfish I'm disappointed that you've swallowed the bullshit argument that CO2 was ever a cause in the distant past. It's a dog-ate-my-homework explanation and unworthy of discussion.

You've proven no such thing. And you present a ridiculous false alternative--If we don't trust models, we have to trust tea leaves. No! We just admit that we don't know as much as we think we know. Climate modelers have admitted that modelling cloud effects is hopeless with today's technology.

@JamesHCarson @benmooreau @boulderfish No. Forecasts of the future require models (the alternative is tea leaves!). But in the present, we've proven our emissions are the cause of current warming through observational evidence

- That CO2 has increased largely due to humans is a given. - Fingerprinting? You mean models? That have consistently been shown to be wrong? The CO2 increase has been slow and steady. The tropospheric temperature fluctuates wildly, mostly because of the El Nino/La Nina cycles. Stratospheric temperatures move in jump shifts. The latest because of Hunga Tonga. - I'm surprised Grok used the old Al Gore canard of 800,000 year ice cores. These show clearly that temperature drove CO2, not the other way around. The best climate sensitivity estimate I've heard is about 1 degree per doubling of CO2. And as far as I'm concerned, 1 degree warmer is better than 1 degree colder.

**Here's a concise summary of key independent lines of evidence:** - **Direct measurements**: Atmospheric CO₂ has risen from ~280 ppm pre-industrial to over 430 ppm today (Mauna Loa & global data), closely tracking cumulative human fossil fuel emissions. - **Isotopic fingerprint**: The added CO₂ shows the chemical signature of ancient fossil carbon (low ¹⁴C, ¹³C depletion), not natural sources. - **Radiative physics**: Satellites and ground observations confirm the greenhouse effect—decreased outgoing infrared at CO₂ absorption bands and increased downward radiation, creating a planetary energy imbalance. - **Temperature & attribution**: Multiple independent datasets (land/ocean stations, satellites) show ~1.1°C warming since ~1900. Fingerprinting shows the pattern (tropospheric warming/stratospheric cooling, polar amplification) matches greenhouse gas forcing; natural factors (solar, volcanoes) cannot explain it alone. - **Paleoclimate records**: Ice cores, sediments, and proxies link CO₂ to temperature over 800,000+ years, but today's rate is unprecedented. These converge on anthropogenic GHGs (primarily CO₂) as the dominant driver of recent warming, per syntheses from NASA, Royal Society, and IPCC. Uncertainties remain on exact future sensitivity and feedbacks.

@benmooreau @boulderfish Do your "independent lines of evidence" include model results?

@boulderfish The data identifying the most likely driver of today’s global warming seems pretty robust: multiple independent lines of evidence converging on anthro-CO2 emissions.

@boulderfish 2b. Yes. We can flog ourselves, preferably publicly. But it soothes our manufactured guilt. And at least we're not one of the *really* bad people.

@GeneSohoForum Touché, Gene. You're much more right than I am.

@JamesHCarson Jim, had the destructive New Deal policies that were suspended for the war effort been RESUMED after the war ended, winning the war wouldn't have helped much. FDR's volatile policies & hostility to business that had stymied business investment were NOT resumed.

Those crediting WW II w/"curing" the 1930s Great Depression cite fiscal stimulus from massive deficits gov't incurred (chart). But as chart also shows, from 1945 war's end to 1947, deficits SHRANK from $47.2B to $4B SURPLUS: In Keynesian terms, most destructive DE-stimulus ever.

@jenteach13 Most charter schools do better for less.

You want to fix education? Pay teachers more.

@jenteach13 Only if we get to fire bad teachers and half the administrators. Deal?

@ZaraBriggsBooks @LisaBritton And it's more like 5 decades. I was in puberty when I was informed that "a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle."

@ZaraBriggsBooks @LisaBritton You cannot coerce love, or even appreciation.

What men’s issue do you think should be society’s top priority to address?