Person A: These piercing notes assault my ears! This is a tortious offense!

(Person A’s oddly stilted manner of speech is a totally intentional effort to prevent Person A from resembling any particular person in the real world and is not just because I’m bad at writing dialogue.)

Person B: Look, I’m not trying to hurt you in the first place! Leave me alone!
Person A: INTENT IS NOT FUCKING MAGIC! You went out in public with a baby when you *should* have known it would hurt me; you clearly don’t *care* enough about my hedons. If you run over my foot with your car —
At this point the baby’s volume sharply increases. (Babies do not deal well with angry shouting.)
Person A: NOW look what you’ve done! Because you made me come over here and yell at you, I’m now subject to even greater assault! Which represents, by the way, the idea that defending against accusations is itself a further crime, rendered literally true in the form of increased anti-hedonic baby-screaming.
Person B: …who are you talking to?
Person A: I just thought I should clarify, since the metaphor was getting pretty tortured.

So far I’ve gotten shouted at by three of four possible groups:
(1) offended people for saying their feelings are the same as some totally unreasonable complaint about a crying baby,
(2) people who feel oppressed by baby-screaming for saying their genuine discomfort is the same as totally unreasonable attacks because something something the pitch of a baby’s cry activates neurons something something human universal whereas catering to busybodies breeds more busybodies,
(3) parents who are outraged that I could compare *their* being made to feel guilty by other people’s nasty glares when they didn’t do anything wrong to Bad Unrighteous People saying nasty things and trying to get away with it.

I also got (4) one complaint from a gentleman who was upset at me for calling men who have feelings ‘babies’ and saying that only women can have legitimate feelings and feel hurt when someone attacks them. I explained to him that my intent was not to offend him, and that I only used the specific example of a crying baby because it is a something unpleasant that everyone has personally experienced and can call to mind. I confess that I said all this without my brain making any connection between the exchange and the topic under discussion.

I also got two separate people get angry at me for saying that people who complain about hurtful language are babies. I’m…pretty sure that they just noticed the word ‘baby’ and didn’t actually pay any attention to the rest.

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http://s32.photobucket.com/user/starkeymonster/media-full//johncwright_gaypanic.jpg.html

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They’re totally right that the existing fandom is elitist and discredited: the fan-base is drawn from an overwhelmingly white, aging, middle-class, college-educated demographic that does not represent the public, and the awards represent nothing but “what a small bunch of middle-class old lefties like”. As the ‘social justice’ atmosphere of SF gets steadily worse and nastier (and yes, even with RequiresHate gone, it’s going to continue to degrade) so more and more people are going to jump ship. By attempting to fight for the territory of Science Fiction, the Puppies are fighting for control of a sinking ship.

I’ve been involved in sf fandom at least marginally for more than 25 years, attended dozens of conventions including Worldcon, and I have trouble recognizing it from your description.

Of course it’s not representative of “the public”! Most of “the public” has zero interest in sf. Of course people who read and write for fun are more likely to be college educated than the norm. That being said, almost one-third of U.S. adults have a college degree, so it’s not like that’s extraordinarily distinctive any more.

There are quite a few progressives in fandom, certainly, though I think few of them match the SJW stereotype. When it comes to politics, the libertarian perspective is substantial and at times dominant.

You don’t have to be left-wing to be appalled at Vox Day.

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Does anyone else think that this “Yes! I would do it!” sounds like the scene with Davros from “Genesis of the Daleks”?

What this person misses of course, is that once men have that same ‘persistent, gnawing fear that women have of men’, (which I’m not sure all women have, but yes, some do) then things are going to get ugly very fast. I think that’s where we’re heading.

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But they won’t do that, because there’s some kind of deep-seated human need to fight for existing territory.

As for the ‘lizard mind’, all the lizards I’ve met were perfectly harmless and never caused any trouble. It’s always the primates you’ve got to watch out for.

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And most people being attacked by someone are only going to hate back. It’s a sticky question this, because if you’re being attacked on an ideological basis, then I would say there’s clearly something wrong with the ideology, but many people conflate the ideology with the people delivering it, or worse, with the people it claims to defend. I think it’s likely that ‘social justice’ will make the situation more dangerous for minorities, because a lot of people will feel it’s the minorities that are attacking them, rather than a subset of predominantly white, middle-class, university graduate types.

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“People in the 1900s didn’t have many ways of causing significant changes that would persist for centuries.”

They believed they did—as in all three of my examples. Using up all of England’s coal, for instance, would have been a significant change that would have persisted for much longer than that.

My point was not about what they could do but about what they believed. If anything, the world is changing faster now than then, making it even harder to predict future problems and solutions.

“Higher CO2 content increases productivity for plants, as long as they have enough water and a good temperature range.”

Higher CO2 reduces water requirements, as I already pointed out.

“Those conditions may obtain in some parts of the world. I doubt it’ll increase production worldwide, and I expect the effects of previous prime agricultural areas no longer being prime agricultural areas, at least for the crops they usually grow, will suck.”

As I keep pointing out, we are talking about very slow change. Looking at the world at present, do you observe that if two places have average temperatures a few degrees apart, they grow not only different varieties but different species? Wheat is grown in North America over a range of 1500 miles North to South, from Alberta to Texas. Varieties vary with climate, but what do you think the odds are that, even without AGW, agricultural areas will keep growing the same varieties of the same crops a century from now?

“The IPCC’s SLR estimates are likely low.”

The simplest test is past performance. Was the SLR projection in the first IPCC report higher or lower than what actually happened? For temperature it was higher—have you checked SLR?
The second test is bias. It’s easy enough, reading IPCC reports, especially the summary for policy makers, to see what conclusion the authors want readers to reach. That suggests that any bias is likely to be in the direction of exaggerating the arguments for that conclusion, not of minimizing them.

“I do think that a substantial fraction of large cities are within the range of SLR we should expect.”

That range, for 2100, being? Something much more than the high end of the IPCC projections?

“The Dutch have been occupying land below sea level in a world with comparatively small year-on-year sea level rise. I expect it would be much more expensive if the wall had to keep being built every year. And, of course, that depends on local geology – with that much sea level rise, south florida isn’t a place any more, dikes or no dikes, because the local rock is porous.”

I don’t know what your “that much” is. I pointed at a web page that lets you see the effect of various levels, calculated from topographical maps. Even without diking, one meter still has a tiny effect on Florida.

And SLR *is* slow year on year sea level rise. Eight inches in the past century.

“Warming will be faster than the average since 1911. We know that because it’s already faster than the average since 1911. Trendline from 1970s (you know, where there’s actual statistical evidence of change in trend and aerosols aren’t a concern) is ~.17c/decade.”

Or in other words, you first assume that the previous pause (roughly 1940 to 1970) can be eliminated from the record by special casing it to aerosols, then deduce the average rate by looking at the period thereafter. As I think I already pointed out, the pattern of warming suggests some effect that alternately cancels and reinforces warming. If that interpretation is correct, you are taking a full cycle of reinforcing plus less than half a cycle of cancelling.

“If CO2 content in the atmosphere continues growing superexponentially (i.e., we do nothing), that will accelerate.”

You earlier made a claim about the effect of exponential growth in emissions. I questioned it. Are you now conceding that that claim was false, retracting it, and shifting to a claim about “superexponential,” whatever that means?

Why do you think emissions will continue to rise, exponentially, “superexponentially,” or even linearly, given the issues I already pointed out about resource exhaustion and development of alternative technologies?

“And yes, that is rapid. We’re seeing heatwaves that would have been once-in-a-thousand-years in the preindustrial (Moscow 2010).”

Given a large world, do you think it is surprising that there is a once in a thousand years event somewhere in it?

“I don’t understand why the evidence that if we continue emitting CO2, the Earth will warm up, on average, 1.7 degrees every ten years isn’t terrifying to you.”

Does the rate you are now claiming decribe the effect of current emissions on the equilibrium that will be reached several thousand years from now, ceteris paribus? It’s an order of magnitude higher than the trend line you just reported.

“3.2 mm/year is a fair amount of sea level rise, yes. Again, that one is going to accelerate if we continue growing atmospheric CO2 content superexponentially. This should be obvious given that straight-line extrapolation gives 32cm by 2100 and the IPCC projects as high as a metre (and their projections are running below reality here, by a fair amount).”

One meter, last time I looked over the report, wasn’t what the IPCC projected. It was the high end of the range of projections produced by the high emission scenario. The one that apparently burns twice the current estimate of the world’s supply of coal by 2100.

“RE: temperature mortality. See this paper, particularly these charts.”

Thanks. Bookmarked. Looking at the table, the only place for which they give separate figures for the effect of heat related mortality and cold related is England, for which the reduction in cold related mortality is about ten times the increase in heat related mortality. Have you noticed any of the people arguing for the perils of AGW mentioning that fact? If not, does that suggest that you may be basing your views on a biased sample of evidence and arguments?

Observe that the comments to that page emphasize reasons to minimize estimates of the benefits and maximize estimates of the costs. Given any complicated externality issue, it’s almost always possible to tweak the calculations in the direction you want—a point I have been making in the climate context for a long time.

“(and broadly speaking that has to be true eventually – at ~7c warming, some parts of Earth reach wet-bulb temperatures high enough that an inactive human in shade will die of heat exhaustion, but that’s probably not going to happen in any reasonable timeframe. We’d have to burn literally all the coal.)”

And in unreasonable time frames, populations shift. The U.S. alone had a million migrants a year in the period before WWI. The world is much richer now and transport technology substantially improved. If you are talking about changes over a millenium or two, you should expect populations to be highly mobile. Lose equatorial lowlands, gain Antarctica and the northern parts of the northern hemisphere.

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Note that we’re already past this generation, and current self driving cars are incomparably safer than human drivers, and not that much slower.

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