--- On Sun, 7/12/09, Anton Chuvakin <[email protected]> wrote:
> > The answer to 2 may be the kicker. It is entirely
> possible that we *should* be doing everything we can to warm
> the planet because natural trends are in the opposite
> direction. It is also possible that the trend is towards a
> warmer environment, in which case we would now be
> accelerating that change, which would be bad.
> Yup, my point exactly - that is the question that needs to
> be answered and nobody seems to be bothered with it. People only
> debate #1, but not really touch #2.
> > I have seen reports that the sun seems to be entering
> a cooler period, so maybe we will find that all our carbon
> emissions have been a good thing and that efforts to slow
> them down will be bad. But we can't forecast solar trends
> worth a hill of beans yet, so really we just don't know.
> Indeed, figuring this out IMHO needs to happen before any
> debate, but debate rages on while this question is not being answered.
Well, therein lies the primary problem. Figuring out *all* of these things
will likely take much longer than we really *have* in which to decide what
changes we should make.
My views on this whole thing lie (like the majority of my views) in the
pragmatic middle. First off, we aren't going to change everything overnight so
if we really do need to it simply isn't going to happen, anyway. Not burning a
bunch of shit to move our things around is a good idea for lots of reasons and
we should do more of not doing that, however we can actually make real progress
in that direction. All this against the reality that people like things that
work (like transportation, lights etc) - and imnsho they're right - so
shouting about radical changes in behavior is just another non-starter.
We may find ourselves spending way more to fix the related problems decades
later than we would if we started sooner, but what else is new? As long as we
tend on average to do as many smarter things sooner as can pragmatically be
achieved we'll probably figure it all out in the end (or if not, at least we'll
make a really spectacular smoking hole in the universe on the way out ;~).
-chris
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