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But climate models will tell us exactly what will happen, so there's no risk of anything going rong! :-P I'm being snarky, and I both believe AGW is real and w

But climate models will tell us exactly what will happen, so there's no risk of anything going rong! :-P I'm being snarky, and I both believe AGW is real and we should be taking strong specific action to alleviate it (building nuclear plants as the only proven-viable replacement for base-load coal, investing in solar and storage, shifting taxes from income to carbon emissions and putting on carbon-equivalent tariffs to export domestic policy world-wide), but it bugs me a little how people (not necessarily you personally) can on the one hand say, "The science is settled! The models are telling us in detail how the Earth's climate system is going to be affected by the additional 0.5% effective insolation due to GHGs!" and then turn around and say "We mustn't even think about geo-engineering because we can't possibly predict what effects it will have!" Anthropogenic GHGs are nothing but uncontrolled geo-engineering, and either we can predict their effects accurately or not (spoiler: we can't). If we can, then we can predict the effects of other forms of geo-engineering comparably accurately. This is a bit of a hobby-horse for me because I think the public puts far too much credence in the detailed predictions of climate models, and it's going to go badly for us when those detailed predictions turn out to be not so good.

dragonwriter 12y ago
> Anthropogenic GHGs are nothing but uncontrolled geo-engineering, and either we can predict their effects accurately or not (spoiler: we can't). If we can, then we can predict the effects of other forms of geo-engineering comparably accurately. Without addressing the first sentence or its "spoiler" (preserved only for context), the second doesn't follow: our ability (or inability) to predict the effects of GHG emissions in the ranges relevant to evaluating the effect of actual and reasonably-possible human actions with regard to them do not really have much bearing on, say, our ability (or inability) to project the impact of changes to (for example) solar energy input that are outside of past experience.

dragonwriter 12y ago

> Anthropogenic GHGs are nothing but uncontrolled geo-engineering, and either we can predict their effects accurately or not (spoiler: we can't). If we can, then we can predict the effects of other forms of geo-engineering comparably accurately. Without addressing the first sentence or its "spoiler" (preserved only for context), the second doesn't follow: our ability (or inability) to predict the effects of GHG emissions in the ranges relevant to evaluating the effect of actual and reasonably-possible human actions with regard to them do not really have much bearing on, say, our ability (or inability) to project the impact of changes to (for example) solar energy input that are outside of past experience.