Jumping around on a pogo stick near the edge of a cliff increases the risk of going over, even if you’re trying to hop away from the edge. I am not comfortable with making any particular predictions with regard to the medium term consequences of our intervention.
Would you go so far as to say ‘we should release more greenhouse gasses so we don’t all freeze’?
Spreading black ground sheets on ice-sheets is another idea which I discuss on that page.
Restricting greenhouse gas emissions appears unnecessary—but AFAIK deliberately accelerating their production has not been seriously proposed—and I am not sure it makes sense.
How convenient—a school of thought that holds that we should keep doing exactly as we are now. I expect a high portion of that school’s adherents are examples of motivated cognition—that their search for evidence and explanations went about as far as needed for that outcome.
Yes, I replied only to the final fragment of your overall comment (that pertaining to emissions). Sorry for the confusion. I understood that to be a report by you of others’ tendencies to not suggest increasing emissions; I was criticizing those others. My accusation was that it’s suspicious to support exactly the present levels on the basis of a putative overall warming-is-good project.
It may also well be that it’s too expensive to spew any more CO2 into the air than we already do, but it’s still odd if the possibility hasn’t been suggested.
FWIW, I don’t know how fast the planet should be warmed. Maybe we are going too fast—or maybe we are going too slowly.
I suspect that we are going too slowly—on the grounds that reglaciation is a clear catastrophe, while the effects of warming are mostly fluff, and the inertia of the huge ice caps slows warming to an intolerable crawl.
Anyway, I think it is unlikely that we are warming at the “right” speed—for much the same reasons that a randomly chosen number from 1 to 100 is unlikely to be 10.
FWIW, trees at high latitudes and blackening ice are also rarely suggested. I expect there has been research into the effects of increased carbon emissions—but it is not an trivial thing to search for, due to noise.
If anyone knows of research relating to what the “best” gas to pump into the atmosphere to produce warming would be, feel free to speak up.
One obvious problem with pumping out more carbon is that this can have side effects distinct from warming. People will protest about the heavy metals that are dug up with it as well being put into the atmosphere, for instance. It is not clear that additional greenhouse gases are the best way of further warming the planet.
Jumping around on a pogo stick near the edge of a cliff increases the risk of going over, even if you’re trying to hop away from the edge. I am not comfortable with making any particular predictions with regard to the medium term consequences of our intervention.
Would you go so far as to say ‘we should release more greenhouse gasses so we don’t all freeze’?
It’s pretty-much: “less-ice:good, more-ice:bad”.
I am not certain where warming resources would be best placed. One of the options I have looked at involves planting trees at high lattitudes:
http://timtyler.org/tundra_reclamation/
Spreading black ground sheets on ice-sheets is another idea which I discuss on that page.
Restricting greenhouse gas emissions appears unnecessary—but AFAIK deliberately accelerating their production has not been seriously proposed—and I am not sure it makes sense.
How convenient—a school of thought that holds that we should keep doing exactly as we are now. I expect a high portion of that school’s adherents are examples of motivated cognition—that their search for evidence and explanations went about as far as needed for that outcome.
Somehow you managed to write this as a reply to a comment where I discussed making some active interventions.
Yes, I replied only to the final fragment of your overall comment (that pertaining to emissions). Sorry for the confusion. I understood that to be a report by you of others’ tendencies to not suggest increasing emissions; I was criticizing those others. My accusation was that it’s suspicious to support exactly the present levels on the basis of a putative overall warming-is-good project.
It may also well be that it’s too expensive to spew any more CO2 into the air than we already do, but it’s still odd if the possibility hasn’t been suggested.
FWIW, I don’t know how fast the planet should be warmed. Maybe we are going too fast—or maybe we are going too slowly.
I suspect that we are going too slowly—on the grounds that reglaciation is a clear catastrophe, while the effects of warming are mostly fluff, and the inertia of the huge ice caps slows warming to an intolerable crawl.
Anyway, I think it is unlikely that we are warming at the “right” speed—for much the same reasons that a randomly chosen number from 1 to 100 is unlikely to be 10.
FWIW, trees at high latitudes and blackening ice are also rarely suggested. I expect there has been research into the effects of increased carbon emissions—but it is not an trivial thing to search for, due to noise.
If anyone knows of research relating to what the “best” gas to pump into the atmosphere to produce warming would be, feel free to speak up.
One obvious problem with pumping out more carbon is that this can have side effects distinct from warming. People will protest about the heavy metals that are dug up with it as well being put into the atmosphere, for instance. It is not clear that additional greenhouse gases are the best way of further warming the planet.