Moonbox

Trudeau is a shoe-in for the Liberal leadership. Unless he's nothing like his father, I won't even consider considering him for my vote, but there's enough people who will vote for him simply because he's his father's son. I think he's going to give Harper a run for his money purely because he's a Trudea, good looking and young. Mulcair is going to be in trouble.

When you can write without sounding like Yoda and at a better than grade 7 level, perhaps I'll start taking advice from you. The historical cumulative emissions approach is where this whole thing falls apart though. It's not hard to understand why people think this is a good idea, but it's similarily easy to see why it's not going to be accepted at anything but a token level. This is what's going to completely derail any realistic emissions reduction negotiations. Emissions reduction is the overall goal right?

bingo. Motion 312 will be summarily rejected and that's the way it should be.

Ignore cumulative emissions? Absolutely. What's the logic here? "We're not going to do anything about our pollution because we haven't polluted NEARLY as much as you guys yet!" That's a brilliant position to take.... If that's what you believe and what you're going to propose then good luck, because nobody gives a shit about fairness and we're certainly not going to put ourselves at a competitive disadvantage with China on the basis that they have 'catching up to do' in terms of prosperity and emissions. This lag is certainly not based on any moral high ground. They can thank glorious Chairman Mao for that.

Avoid it!? I want to dive right into it, because this is where you and your little buddy have everything all screwed up! You've spent the last 30 pages telling everyone how serious climate change is getting, and I'm asking how are we going to reduce emissions if countries like China and India (which account for 30% and growing of world emissions) aren't included in the solution? Your rationale for this is that the west prospered and polluted heavily, so China should be given an equal opportunity to pollute and prosper? This is infantile, school yard logic and it doesn't help get emissions reduced. Nobody outside of China gives a shit about China's prosperity, nor about the fairness of them not being able to pollute like we did. If we're interested in meaningful emissions reductions, all of the big players need to be included. They have 12 times the emissions and you're claiming they spend more money on emissions reductions than us...whatever that means. I was trying to highlight that China's massive scale makes your statement meaningless. I'm not expecting you to actually think that through critically, however, since you clearly couldn't when you made the statement in the first place. This is your response? I call your mental gymnastics cringe-worthy, and you come back with what's essentially, "No YOU!" ?? Glad to know what I'm dealing with.

We are talking about climate change and not economic equalization, right? Not only is China's economy 4x bigger than ours, they're also notorious for cooking their books. Fix it? How on earth do we fix it? It's cringe-worthy watching people like you attempt the mental gymnastics required to support this sort of position. Because the west got rich polluting the atmosphere, developing nations have no responsibility in ensuring they don't make the problem worse?

lol. I didn't bring up Kyoto and made no mention of exceptions to it as far as I can recall. You brought it up. Let's talk about Copenhagen and things more recent. So it was a legally binding agreement that you could bail out of unilaterally with no consequences? Okay... Waldo, I brought this point up in the first place. All your chart is doing is supporting my claim that the West outsources its pollution to China. At least we can agree on that. Let's move on to Copenhagen now then. You follow this stuff more closely than I do, clearly. Maybe you can answer my next question then. Didn't China flat-out refuse to enter a binding agreement and to submit to transparent and independent verification of their carbon reduction? A yes or no would do nicely.

Our legal system is full of useless old laws from days of yore. They're still there on paper but they're effectively dead. If nobody cares/would prosecute, and any judge would throw the case out, who cares? It's expensive and time consuming to change it so why bother if it's just being ignored anyways?

Neither are worth considering until an internationally binding agreement can be reached/strong-armed with all the major players. We're kind of talking about this now in the other thread.

So...what then? We wait until 2030-2050 for China to pollute their way to prosperity and equality with the USA? Isn't the damage already being done? Who are going to be the next set of developing have-nots after China and India? Kyoto was a toothless and therefore useless agreement, as was Copenhagen. If people are serious about actually doing something about it, the agreements have to be binding and they have to include all of the major players. Thanks!? That's precisely what I was talking about. There's a reason why this is happening. Western countries are outsourcing their manufacturing to places where labour is cheaper and environmental laws lax/non-existant. Slapping new and expensive climate regulation on western industry while not doing the same for China only accelerates this trend. We end up with little/no net emissions reductions and weaker domestic economy. If we want a climate treaty, China and India etc need to play ball, otherwise we're going to need to wait for nuclear fusion or something equally spectacular.

My bad. I did not. I'm too conditioned to having to decipher barely coherent ramblings. I should keep in mind that occasional clarity (and even wit) are still possible!

Whatever it is it's barely even English. A Grade 8 english class would work wonders I think. Anyways, I have a serious question, more along the lines of how we'd try and fix things assuming everyone agreed on the topic. Canada and the USA have been exporting manufacturing jobs for decades now to the point where we're primarily service-based economies. Most climate change initiatives and treaty negotiations have focused on expensive measures to be taken by developed nations only. The logic behind essentially adding environmental taxes to countries with declining manufacturing industries, while at the same time exempting the countries whose manufacturing continues to expand explosively, seems a bit screwy. What we'd essentially be doing is giving companies in North America added incentives to outsource their jobs and their pollution to China etc. Can someone please explain why this would be a good idea? Considering many climate experts are telling us that it's already getting to be too late to fix, the argument that developing countries are still playing catch-up and that they're the worst-affected or that we should lead by example just doesn't fly. Just think about it. We need to reduce our emissions because, which especially hurts developing countries, who are going to refuse any reductions and expand their emissions exponentially even though it apparently hurts them....

Waldo man...wow. You need to take a break. I think you missed the 'tone' of the original post.

Oh boy! A cross/re-post from 2010! This should be interesting...wait...nobody is going to read it.

It's about as safe as driving your car to work. Find out how many nuclear reactors there are in the world. Google nuclear disasters. Run the math.

Let me make it crystal clear to you, in your own language (lol what a contradiction): Notwithstanding the fact that you may have relevant point to make, the aforementioned excessive use of quotations...as well as the unnecessary and constant use of cumbersome words, poor punctuation and sentence structure...whether or not that comes from insecurity and pompous grandiloquence or an inability to articulate, your posts are often just painful/tedious to read...resulting in most people just skipping over them...and yes...you just left here bashing your head against the wall trying to convince Shady and whomever of something they're determined not to listen to.

You were both mocking him for stating that people didn't want to bother reading your badly written and poorly-formatted posts. He was right and I'm more than willing to back him up on that. You seem to think that these massive walls of verbosity, cross posts and re-posts are winning you arguments, and it appears your ego desperately needs this to be true given how much effort you obviously put into the cutting and pasting etc. Unfortunately for you, nobody is reading that garbage. It's to clumsy and tedious to waste time with. Ultimately it's up to you to decide whether you want to post and discuss like a normal human being, or continue with this verbose natter and quotation overload. You're only wasting your own time and bandwidth.

I don't know if this 'drama' you speak of is some attempt to personalize the argument, but I'm not really concerned. If you don't want people to pay attention to what you're saying, keep doing what you're doing and they'll ignore your points. Maybe you like writing for your own sake alone and your tediousness makes you feel smart. I don't know. I won't say another word on the subject.

Lol...Drama Queen? I didn't say a thing about it until your little tag team started trolling jbg for it. He was right. Buddy, you lobbed a wall of quotations boxes within quotation boxes at us, which literally filled over half of an entire thread page. Your pissing contest with Keepitsimple might seem interesting to you, but it's not to the rest of us. Cross-posting some debate you had with him 4 months ago, especially THAT thoroughly, is extremely irritating, not to mention against the forum rules. I have no interest in sifting through that garbage, even if it's the abridged version, to find worthwhile posts and responses that other people are writing. What is this? Kindergarten? But...but they did it too!? Suck it up. I don't read a thing they write about climate change usually and I was ignoring them, just as I was ignoring you, until you started trolling jbg for taking issue with your overbearing quotations. If you're going to fill the thread pages with cross-posts and overquotation, and then flame someone for speaking up against it, you earned any ridicule you're getting.

Hey, if someone takes the time to dredge through the oppressive use of quotations and the excessive wordiness, your point can be deciphered. Chances are, however, that most people won't bother. Excessive wordiness is usually associated with an inability to speak intelligently. Resumes get tossed, academic papers get graded poorly and public speakers get ignored if you can't just make your freaking point.

I was trying to take part. Go back to page 16 & 17 to see that. Wayward Son and I were having a fair and reasonable discussion about what all of this meant. Waldo then proceeded to squeeze us out with about 2 pages of garbage quotations and reposts, and then you both trolled jbg for saying something about it. Your basis for this was that he was dismissing a precisely written argument when it was obiviously and demonstrably the FURTHEST THING from that. This is a discussion board, not quotation or prolixity wars.

Hey take the suggestion or don't. I don't really care. Mark Twain: "...generally, the fewer the words that fully communicate or evoke the intended ideas and feelings, the more effective the communication." Don't take Mark Twain's word on it though, or the countless other famous authors and statesmen who've said the same thing. You like links and proof so here it is: http://www.psych.utoronto.ca/users/psy3001/files/simple%20writing.pdf I'll highlight the conclusion for you: Thus it may be worthwhile to investigate ways of either preventing the tendency to use needless complexity, or look at ways that fluency biases might be overcome. In the interim, we can conclude one thing. The pundits are likely right: write clearly and simply if you can, and youll be more likely to be thought of as intelligent. As I said before, your actual conclusion made sense and I agree with some of it. You didn't make a particularly strong case for it though, so hopefully people read my condensed version.

Who says I read it? Okay, fair enough, but most of them can be easily skipped. I don't need to furiously scroll my mouse to get through them to get to the next worthwhile post. As it stands, these climate threads are some of the worst on the whole forum to read.

It's not just GOP people. 'Gotcha' tactics like this are brilliantly useful at influencing the idiots who won't put more than 30 seconds of critical thinking or research into their election decision. To them, redistribution = socialism = communism = the end of freedom and the collapse of Amurrica as they know it.

The rhetoric isn't getting you anywhere. THAT is an articulate post and THAT's all he needed to say. What waldo did is throw a block of quotation boxes at us that nobody is going to read. No that's just reposting and it's against the forum rules. If you want to refer us to old exchanges, do so via link or page # etc, but don't assault us with a giant block of irritating quotation boxes that nobody is going to even bother reading.