Pretty much this. I'd be much happier with a $50 billion commitment to fusion research, and a stopgap plan to expand nuclear fission capacity.

The last few big conferences have proved even modest global emissions cuts are impossible to agree, much less enforce.

Or really ANY renewables.  Renewable enrgy research or even any alternate energy research is awesome.   Trying to stop using fossil fuels though only hurts us, with no actual enviromental benefit.  

Instead of spending more for gas, we should use those savings on scientific research.

That's how China got so good at renewables. (well that and hacking American solar companies.)

Yes. I've seen some very cool ideas about geothermal in the US, for example. But I don't want to encourage wind (never going to work) or "biofuel" (not clean at all, serious downsides, misleading name, huge lobbying interest). A general $50b plan to invest in "clean energy" would be misappropriated to biofuel, wind and solar (which doesn't need the cash).

Hah, geothermal.   You know what's funny?  George W Bush's house if run by Geothermal energy.  Despite is anti-green polcies, he's actually quite possible the most personally green president we've had. That was always a funny thing about the Bush V Gore campaign... and Gore in general.  He's a HUGE pollutor.  Like one of the worst personal pollutors in the country.

I always judge by effective policy. The cult of personality around individual politicians stops people from seeing whether their ideas are good/bad for the country. From both the liberal and conservative sides. As an outsider, it's absurd that limited government reach, and basic social liberties, are on opposite sides of the US spectrum and cannot be combined on the same person whilst remaining electable.

I wish Gore's stamp wasn't on the debate. He's so politically and personally charged that conservatives find it easy to dismiss climate change on his image alone, without actually thinking.

That's for sure.  It doesn't help to that he didn't just put a stamp on it but more or less lead the vast over exaggeration of it that more or less caused permanent skepticism. 

It's like overexagerrating to a kid to get him to listen to you, the problem is...when they don't listen still and the problems aren't happening as fast as you said they would, they just assume you've been lying the whole time.

That's more or less exactly what an inconvient truth was... an exagerration to try and win over support.

Heck technically at this point we're supposed to already be in the "feedback loop" that's supposed to fuck us over.  According to the oldest research it should already be too late to do anything about the enviroment.

I haven't looked into the research enough to tell.

I do know that we should be appealing to people via their wallets (with investment, renewables can be cheaper than the rising price of oil/gas) rather than altruism.

Basically how it works is that eventually once it gets hot enough, it creates a feeback loop because it will melt the icecaps quickly.

The icecaps have a ton of greenhouse gases trapped inside them along with water vapor itself just being a greenhouse gas.

So the feedback loop should be pretty apparent.  Hot weather melts icecaps, which releases tons of greenhouse gases into the air, which melts icecaps, repeat until no more icecaps.

This is essentially how it was thought natural warming periods came about.

Or more simply

Also

and

I'm a physicist, I do know about that.

I meant I haven't examined the actual published papers to see what the consensus is about whether we've reached runaway or not. Most information out there is by proxy via news articles and usually badly communicated.

Oh we haven't.  It's just the bulk majority of earlier research suggested the water vapor effect would be worse.  Really the truth is... we still have no idea though.  Hell we're not even really sure why it hasn't warmed up as much as the models say it should.  Right now it's a combination of deep sea tempetrue increasing more/chinese coal clouds.