On Sun, Jan 17, 2010 at 03:00:39PM -0500, paul stenquist scripsit: > Of course climate change is real. It's been changing since the earth > was formed. And our presence undoubtedly affects the rate of change. > But a doomsday is highly unlikely. We adjust. We've already begun to > adjust and will continue to do so.
Some of the historical -- for geological values of historical -- conditions Earth's climate has had we couldn't adjust to. Neither the end-Permian extinction conditions (anoxic oceans, ~15% atmospheric oxygen, 70 C temperatures, no ozone due to volcanic H2S release...) nor the Neoproterozoic global snowball conditions would be survivable. Even Oligocene climate would present truly drastic challenges; hard to feed people with most of the current grain growing areas turned into deserts. So while I think we're certainly going to adjust I don't think it's even close to a given that we're going to adjust enough, soon enough. Since pretty much all of the possible angles of adjustment are good things on their own, this is an area where I'm quite happy with the risk of going a little overboard in preference to the risk of doing too little. -- Graydon -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
