Well, of course it does. Personally, I like clean air, but the environmentalists do insist that we must sacrifice by immediately stopping whatever we're doing that contributes to global warming. Everyone out to the garage and take off your catalytic converters.

I can never remember, is ozone layer coming or going?

Global warming is a well-established fact. It is the question of anthropogenesis of same that is still waaaay up in the air (no pun intended). It may be, in fact, that human activities both hinder and help global warming in equal proportions, leaving our net impact on global temperatures at zero. The primary source of global warming, after all, is that big yellow thingy that comes up in the east every morning and cooks us all day long until it goes down in the west in the evening.

Personally, I don't like global warming, because I like snow. Other people living in other parts of the world may have more serious reasons to worry about it, such as droughts, floods, and temperatures rising above habitability levels. But pretending that we know what to do about this is highly premature, unless we suddenly develop the ability to orbit enough flexible mirror arrays that we can increase or reflect the amount of sunlight reaching the earth's surface at will.

Having said that, I am still all for reducing particulate pollution in the atmosphere. Regardless of what it does to the climate, either pro or con. Breathing (and looking through) black sooty stuff is no fun.

So this means the new ideal for the global warming crowd would be Pittsburgh in the 1940s?

The fallacy is starting with the notion that there's some perfect natural state and all our actions must be made with regards as to how much it will cause the world to deviate from that state. Why is it so hard for Dirt Worshippers to get it throught their rammed earth thick heads that it's a dynamic system, with a wide range of possible equilibrium states, so there is no perfect world?

Personally, I think that if so-called global warming is really happening and must be stopped, then we should set off a whole bunch of nukes and counteract it with a "Nukular Winter." We can call it the Carl Sagan Memorial Climate Control Project. It seems Iran and North Korea willing to volunteer the necesssary real estate for a pilot project. (Although his estate, in the spirit of that pompous, sanctimonious blowhard, might prefer his name be replaced with Butt Head Astronomer.)

Again, the left has become the reactionary party. "Change is bad; Up with stasis."

I predict that the globe will continue to get warmer, unless it doesn't. This will be disastrous for humanity, unless it isnt.

where are those human shields when you need them ?! geesh.

Flip-flop, flip-flop.

Say, that sounds like a potential folk song...

*sings* "Since improved tech-NO-logy is sacri-LEGE,
"Oh, let's just all join HANDS... and jump off a BRIIIIIDGE!"

Now, what rhymes with "anthropogenesis"? Hmmm...

HT;

Actually, we do know how to put up enough sunshades hanlde the problem and could do it for much less than the cost of complying with the Kyoto treaty. The fact that the option isn't discussed tells you what you need to know about the real motives of the doom sayers.

P.S. How, you ask? Just put them at the Sun-Earth L1 point and spin stablize them. We have already done that with space probes, it's just a matter of scaling up. Sure, it'd cost a few hundred billion dollars, but that's only 2-3 years of the Kyoto compliance cost, so it would be relatively cheap.

AOG: hadn't thought of that. Of course, they'd have to be adjustable, just in case our preliminary swags at the correct amount of shade proved to be ever so slightly, er, completely wrong. I mean, I like snow, but I'm not prepared to do an Iditarod to work every day.

AOG:

Even cheaper if we just wait a few years and then catapault them into place, no?

...now there ain't no jobs to fund their 'full boat benefits,

cuz they believed global warming had anthropogenisis.

___

Some how the word doesn't fit the genre.

"A few years" might mean thirty, but space elevators and catapults are a no-brainer, once materials science provides the means.

Posted by: Michael Herdegen at April 9, 2006 5:23 AM

In either case a sunshade is about the only way to actually deal with Global Warming in any meaningful way, since it's the only solution that addresses the actual cause of Global Warming: that giant fusion reactor that sits in the center of our solar system.