Horace - If you don't think it's relevant, then you don't think you know exactly what's driving it (and you'd be right), and therefore you couldn't possibly know where it would go if you tried driving it yourself. But Horace, if you *know* that you *can* predict and even steer an immense chaotic system like planetary climate - please please pretty PLEEEASE email me your stock picks NOW!!!
Again, here in a nutshell are our areas of common ground: climate change risk management (but not direct mitigation/manipulation attempts), and energy alternatives to oil. That's it. If you're good with those two and are willing to broom off the rest of the chaff - the socialist takeovers and loss of liberties, carbon caps & trades, crazy high taxes and similar shenanigans, I think we could rather quickly become successful in dealing with climate change. Change in the climate would still be inevitable, as usual. Probably hotter, maybe colder. But then we'd be much better positioned to adapt flexibly and intelligently without clobbering our prosperity. Remember Rapa Nui. When you're down to your last few stands of trees and the food is running out, collective rational action to deploy the resources you have left towards practical solutions for your survival would be the right call to make. Using up those precious resources to carve giant tikis and drag them across the island to impress imaginary gods - not so much. Although, they do look pretty cool on post cards. We can prepare for the weather, but we cannot control it. That much has got to be obvious to any rational citizen of this planet. - Rick -----Original Message----- From: Horace Heffner [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, September 08, 2008 5:50 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [Vo]:Re: Sunspotless On Sep 8, 2008, at 8:51 AM, Michel Jullian wrote: > (typo: 2009 in last heading) Thanks! > > Good points Horace, but note Rick doesn't deny global warming, he > "only" disputes the anthropogenic explanation for some reason (maybe > he owns oil fields or something?) > > Michel It strikes me as not directly relevant as to whether we caused this disaster or not. The fact remains that we might be able to fix it. If I had my hand in a pot of scalding water I'd want to either turn off the heat or pull my hand out. We know what our contribution of greenhouse gasses is. We have a pretty good quantitative handle on what that means in terms of greenhouse effect and overall atmospheric effect, though the effect has been grossly underestimated by calibration that occurred without understanding global dimming. If we have our hand in a pot that is 0 C and we add 30 deg.C no big deal. If we start out with the pot at 30 deg.C and add 30 deg. C we might be very uncomfortable. Now if we can prevent the extra 30 deg. C I'd think we might find we want to do that regardless the cause of the extra initial heat. Best regards, Horace Heffner http://www.mtaonline.net/~hheffner/
