SCOTUS extended/confirmed the applicability of the takings clause to states in 1897.

Reality gutted Stevens' Kelo majority opinion logic, such as it was, in due time.  O'Connor got it right.

But as is all the rage these days, it's 'settled' law.

What does it matter? Jesus Christ. Before we start thinking about making vast changes to our economies and way we live we better bloody have an idea of how much is due to human activity.  I've already said, several times in this thread, that obviously humans have some effect. We produce CO2 and CO2 is a green house gas.  

Are you suggesting that anyone here is arguing that humans have zero effect? Every time I jump up and down I affect the earth. The question is how substantial effect that is.

So far we have:

a) We don't know how much effect we have 

and

We don't know how much it would cost for us to address whatever effect we're having.

Good job.

This article depicts a particularly gloomy future/past. Read the chapter on "The Emergence of the Canfield Ocean". It's pretty interesting and scary.

http://robertscribbler.wordpress.com/2013/08/12/a-deadly-climb-from-glaciation-to-hothouse-why-the-permian-triassic-extinction-is-pertinent-to-human-warming/

This article shows measurements about contribution of CO2 from volcanoes. All volcanoes on earth produce 0.2 billion tonnes of CO2. Humans produce about 30 billion tonnes of CO2 every year.

http://hvo.wr.usgs.gov/volcanowatch/archive/2007/07_02_15.html

We humans are pretty awesome. By ourselves we're nothing, but together we dominate the world!

If you compare our yearly production of about 10 billion tonnes of Carbon to the total existing biomass on earth, we're also pretty awesome

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biomass_(ecology)

In 56 years time, we will have dug up enough oil and coal to double the biomass on the entire planet (excluding bacteria).

OK...we've been going along pretty nicely now for 27 pages .... without 'real' issues of name-calling.

Let's NOT start now ....

 We've already spent trillions over the last decades without anything to show for it, except genocides and extremely wealthy dictators. 

Your optimistic albeit naive view is sweet. USA is near 17 trillion in debt which it can never ever repay , Europe is flat broke consisting of 3 'rich' nations and 24 poor ones, China has a more pragmatic view (mine) and anyway living on a huge economic bubble itself. There just isn't enough to go around for 2 let alone 7 billion people at the level we're accustomed to. 

In this light, everything we spent to 'help' poverty there will actually cause poverty with us.

Ever seen how many homeless/starving are wandering the streets in any given western town? Don't you think we owe our own citizens more then some far away strangers which had 50 years to get their act together and still can't manage?

Mine will be more Spike Milligan...

"I told you I was ill" ...

Found this website that lists the planets surface carbon reservoirs as such:

Atmosphere:  750 Gigatonnes
Ocean:       40000 Gigatonnes
Biosphere       610 Gigatonnes
Soil               1600 Gigatonnes

http://earthguide.ucsd.edu/virtualmuseum/climatechange1/05_2.shtml

The weight of CO2 is about 3 times the weight of carbon.

I don't know where you get that total weight of carbon from, but I suppose you're referring to the total Carbon content of the entire earth. Most of that carbon is locked up in the earth's crust and probably won't reach the surface. While our contribution seems so insignificant with respect to the entire (static) carbon of the earth, it is particularly significant for the dynamic part of the carbon cycle that acts on a timescale of a thousand years.

Perhaps you should focus on that, instead of including carbon that has absolutely nothing to do with it.

And what I was trying to tell was, that we're basically adding enough carbon every 50 years to create 2x as many forests as we have now. There is simply not enough room on the earth's surface for that. And 2x as many plankton in the oceans. The oceans don't have enough of other minerals to make that possible. So what we are doing is, we are injecting large amounts of carbon and there is is no spare capacity to absorb all that on a short notice, it stays there for a very long time.

You can also look at history for that - after big extinction events where lots of carbon was injected into the atmosphere, the carbon wasn't taken out of the atmosphere within a few hundred years or so ... it stayed there for a very long time. If we reach a triassic situation where we've put so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that we've reached 2000 ppm or more, then it can stay there for millions of years. And why ... well because maybe much of life as we know it gets destroyed and there is not much life left to absorb all that carbon. Most life exists at the equator, if temperatures there are so high that plants and animals cannot live there anymore, a big part of the carbon cycle is destroyed. If oceanic temperatures near the equator would reach 40 degrees celcius, there are no fish left that can live there. Life moves towards the poles, towards a tiny refuge for life. Most of the earth will be dead and will not contribute to the carbon cycle anymore. Or at least, much less than it does now.

It was only net positive in a very narrow way. It didn't include the waste power of the laser beams.

It's like shoving the dirt under the carpet and telling everyone how neat and tidy your house is.

You mean....like taxing it at least as much as the rest of the world does...and thus help subsidise alternatives?

Yep....while the world really seems to love the idea of a carbon tax.....

....not.

I'm not inclined to bother with the AGW debate, as no one here is changing their opinion...

I will however tackle a discussion about alternative energy...

Nuclear accidents are a problem...while rare, they are "big" and so when they do happen it's a big boondoggle...the uranium mining process is also a problem because it is a highly volumetric type of mining and all that radioactive rock is now just laying on the surface...

Coal power is dangerous too though...you got a lot of people getting injured or dying in the coal plants themselves or in the coal mines...then you have to factor in the health costs of the pollution...

I'm not going to quote specific numbers because, quite frankly, the research is often biased and dubious and I don't have the patience to play the game of "your sources are all part of an extremist conspiracy"...as it stands, I'm currently of the position that both are about equally deadly/problematic...the main difference really is that nuclear power gets more of a bad rap because it's deaths are more publicized...we will all hear about the nuclear incident of the decade, but not about the hundreds of individual deaths or injuries that occurred in coal power plants over a long period of time...in short, nuclear power is already safe enough...

Nuclear power is also already cost effective enough...to be fair, it does depend on where you live -- coal rich nations like the US and China are going to be less inclined to switch to nuclear...nevertheless, the costs per kilowatthour are comparable for coal and for nuclear...the real issue is not the cost to produce electricity, but the upfront investment needed to build the plant in the first place...nuclear power plants are riskier investments simply because they are more expensive and take longer to payoff...even if nuclear power plants produced slightly cheaper electricity, you'd still see a lot of coal simply because coal plants are less risky from a financial standpoint (ie they are better in the short run)...

In a way, the reason why nuclear power is avoided is the same reason most people don't buy electric cars...even though in the long run it may be the same cost, the upfront cost is the deciding factor...