re: The mass freakout over Bret Stephen's climate change article on NYT

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Still parroting rubbish I see. You have no clue how much those companies have internalized those costs

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Feel free to enlighten me wise guy!

Last I checked most of these companies have shareholders and shareholders are not keen on reducing profits simply because they want to be overly altruistic(unless there is a "goodwill" benefit) and internalize costs they produce but aren't currently being forced to. In fact CEO's have been sued by shareholders for far less.

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Your thinking is 30 years out of date on that side of the spectrum and you are woefully undereducated when it comes to the applied sciences here concerning "green" energy production. You are the type that's fooled into funding solar sidewalks and roads and you are unfortunately too common.

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I'm the type that made it through Micro and Macro econ 101 and passed the test that dealt with various types of market failures and distortions. Seems I am the only one in this conversation to at least get that far.

There is nothing "out of date" about recognizing when a marketplace has failed to address external costs. Then pointing out how that failure distorts the market and the price of goods.

I'm someone that supports functioning economic markets, not sure what your schtick is.

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Is it possible that the real results will be outside that range? Yes, and the consensus acknowledges that as well.

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Actually the consensus doesn't. You see, even the absolute best case predictions peddled by your consensus is still several times higher than what has actually occurred in the last nearly 40 years alone and those best case estimates are way lower than their median predictions. This all goes back to flawed models, flawed data analysis fed into those models, and the fact that current raw computational power is not even close to what it needs to be to make even reliable short-term trend predictions. Your consensus recently released a paper that showed the modeled trends are showing warming that is almost double what is actually being observed. This is the point you fail to understand here, you are asking for actions to be taken based on predictions made by those who are staking the continued flow millions of dollars of research funding on pushing trends predicted by computer models that are nowhere close to reality...

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I did read the op-ed,

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But from your defensive, accusatory posture, you read with no comprehension. Mind closed.

As a climate change skeptic myself, his argument about polls being wrong in the election is kind of lame

There's three separate reasons I think

(1) The article isn't that strong. It makes a gaseous, hand-wavey argument about uncertainty that essentially amounts to "people can be wrong about things," but also absolves the science itself. Since any decent climate paper is gonna have error bars and uncertainty ranges he confines his criticism to nameless "advocates" (Greenpeace types and Al Gore, one assumes). But "outcomes are uncertain" and "lots of laypeople get things wrong" don't get you much of anywhere, since uncertainty cuts two ways.

(2) Anyone familiar with Stephens' oeuvre at the WSJ knows he's being disingenuous. He had no problem attacking the science there, and often with the very certainty he decries in the "advocates." He flatly misstated some facts in the op-ed (e.g., confusing the global anomaly and NH anomaly). The sudden shift from "FAKE SCIENCE!" to "well, there's uncertainty" is baldly tactical and when you try to play to your audience too obviously it comes off as condescending.

(3) Stephens was putatively hired to bring ideological diversity to the NYT op-ed section. But NYT already had two Beltway NeverTrumps in Douthat and Brooks. So he doesn't actually add the value that they say he does and reinforces the idea that the "acceptable" MSM political spectrum runs from Hillary Clinton on the left to Marco Rubio on the right. Both Sanders and Trump style populists have a legitimate beef here.

Out of all those articles trumpeting global warming, how many include predictions and warnings of events like catastrophic ice melts, a big sea level rise, and a plethora of hurricane hitting the United States?

Shouldn't all the missed predictions and alarming forecasts that did not play out be in a third stack?

The left just gets nuttier each and every day.

Well he wasn't writing for a scientific journal to be peer-reviewed, it was simply an opinion article in a national newspaper.

Just for a moment, if any of the pen-pocket-protector-types can, forget about the science and look at the actual behavior of those at the forefront of this debate:

So we got Obama, exhibit #1 among the Climate Change AGW crowd -former leader of global super power, smartest-best-person-ever-to-have-existed according to some folk's mythologies. And what's he up to these days?

Last check, he and the wife were signing $65MM book deals, jet-setting around the world on private jets and yachts to hang with the regular types at ultra exclusive luxury resorts based mainly in tropical island paradises. (Guessing the carbon for that kind of stuff might lead to a so-called hotfoot)

Oh, and he's also charging $400K for 45 minute speeches on 'pertinent' topics (do ya think climate issues might be addressed in any of such speeches, ever?)

So, putting aside his burning a hole in the universe with all the carbon necessary to globe trot and be accommodated 'in style', what about all that money? What's he need it for, anyway?

Is he going to give it away to fund the solution that the Climate Change AGW crowd claims is required to save our planet? And, if he did, would however many millions he contributed even amount to a drop in the bucket against such an overwhelming problem? I mean, we're basically doomed to destruction via climate change in about 25 years -according to some of the (ever-changing) estimates thrown about, right?

And speaking of eminent doom, let's be generous and say he creates a foundation to save the planet and gives away a majority of his wealth. Do ya think that maybe, just maybe, just maybe, Obama is going to set up a little, itty-bitty bit of that dough for his posterity (Michelle, Malia, Shasha)? And how much you figure that might be? 5,10,20 million? More?

So here's the behavior question for all you geniuses pulling on your slide rulers (if you even know what those are or how to use one...): why would Obama burn up the atmosphere combusting jet fuel, or create a Sisyphean charity model that logically could't make a dent in such an 'enormous' global problem, or -and this is really the point- create an economic and generational safety net for his posterity, if he truly believed the whole world is going to hell post haste and within the lifetime of current generations -including his daughters????

Feel free to bring on "hope" and "synergy" but be sure you 'splain why any of those rationalizations accrue benefits specifically and exclusively to his line, if the problem threatens survival of the entire human species.

Do his actions indicate that he is really a true believer? And if he's not -former leader of the free world, had/has access to more data than imaginable, smartest-best-guy-who-can-also-shoot-hoops-etc-etc-ad nauseam-, why should anyone be?

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Dare I say Mr. Stephens, a noted anti-trump columnist, is a heretic in their eyes?

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Without doubt he's screwed. It's a nice piece, Thanks for posting.