Centerfield

Benford's article in particular deserves some serious attention when considering the hysterical doomsaying, even if it's a bit dated (November 1997).

Such hand wringing is as unimaginative as it is unequivocal. Instead of draconian cutbacks in greenhouse-gas emissions, there may very well be fairly simple ways--even easy ones--to fix our dilemma. But the discussion of global warming never makes this clear; it seems designed to preclude any hint that we might remedy the situation except through great sacrifice, discomfort, and cost. Indeed, it seemingly assumes a direct relationship between the level of sacrifice, discomfort, and cost demanded by any proposed solution and its scientific efficacy.

Indeed it does. When the enviro-left picked up the human-agency global-warming baton, they immediately loaded their agenda on the donkey cart and started trying to strap us into the traces. If you pay attention, not only is the human-agency hypothesis being overhyped, but the "solutions" always seem to fall right into the overall enviro-left agenda. As Benford notes:

At root, such people see mankind as the problem; only by behaving humbly, living lightly upon our Earth, can we atone. Here most scientists and theologians agree, at least for now.

Actually, some of them think the Very Best Thing would be if we just up and died, leaving Holy Mother Earth unmolested in the future. The allegation against us is that we are inadvertently altering the global climate. That remains possible but unproven, both as to causality AND scope and scale versus natural variability. But the proponents are working hard to make sure their own agenda is the only "solution" being heard. The obvious "interventionist" approach is being buried in the chorus.

It shouldn't be. Even if the enemy actually is us, the problem is still that global climate is NOT a constant, and never has been. It WILL change, whether due to our actions or Papa Sol acting up. In the long run that still leaves us with the same basic choices humans have faced since we first staggered upright in the Olduvai--alter it, adapt to it, or die. We could ask our cousins the Neanderthal about it, but they already flunked the final.

And here I thought this article was going to be about the world's population getting dumber.

Jon, you should try to keep up to date here. Global Dimming has been replaced by global brightening...
Of courseI'm cheating here as I'm a 30 year member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and get my weekly copies of Science to peruse and hoard. This is not for everyone as they are more potent than back issues of National Geographic and perhaps I may have put my neighborhood at peril given my proximity to the Hayward Fault.
Anyway there was an article last year about how a number of sites in the Northern Hemisphere were recording increases in insolation since the 1980's.
"From Dimming to Brightening: Decadal Changes in Solar Radiation at Earth's Surface"
Science 6 May 2005:
Vol. 308. no. 5723, pp. 847 - 850
DOI: 10.1126/science.1103215

So global dimming seems to have evanesced to be replaced by solar brightening. That plus the greenhouse effect makes for a nasty synergy.

One of the possible explanations fo the original "dimming" is the decreasing aerosol burden due to more effective clean-air regulations and the decline in the economy with the political transition in Eastern European countries in the late 1980s.

They suggest that the cooling trend may have masked the greenhouse effect in the 70's and 80's.

Global warming is quite real.

Okay - complaint to Tully, not everyone screaming for change is some hysterical enviromentalist. There are some pretty sober people out there saying the same thing and doing something about it. Massive sacrifice is not necessarily called for as we sort through various technical innovations over the next decade.
Close to you Colorado University has 3 building powered by wind energy with 3 more coming online later on.
If you look a t the state of Montana they are moving ahead of the curve and doing what most people will do despite the Bush administration think globally act locally. Having seen most of their glaciers drastically shrink or disappear there is a certain amount of urgency and so the state of Montana passed some laws encourging the use of alternative energy and lo and behold, in the space of about a year, they went from being the state that uses the least wind energy to one that uses the most. 8% of their power now comes from wind and why not? It's darn windy up there.
So much so the estimates are that wind energy from MOntana alone can supply the US with 15% of its electricity. Right now they have 135MW of capacity and 500MW on the drawing boards.

There is a LOT of low hanging fruit. It wouldn't take much effort to get at those initially while we come up with plans to deal with the more difficult issues in the coming decade. Some positive changes will come just because of normal innovation, like the current push to reduce power consumption in processors. This is not limited to portable computers as it is aggressively pursued in chips for workstations and servers.

As mentioned before, moving off the train tracks when you hear the train whistle in the distance makes a lot more sense than waiting to wait to see the whites of the engineers eyes...

Okay - complaint to Tully, not everyone screaming for change is some hysterical enviromentalist.

Didn't say they were. Said that the enviro-left is working real damn hard to impose their preferred "solutions" and exclude others from consideration. And they are. Issue hijacking.

There is a LOT of low hanging fruit.

Indeed there is, I agree entirely there, and thanks to both higher oil prices and improving technology, much of it is now being picked. There's a windfarm forty miles from here. I say, huzzah! Markets work. The difference btween that and the enviro-left hradcore is that they don't care--they still want their package. Even if it's not the right package for the problem.

Global warming is quite real.

I've said that. And so is global cooling. We don't live in a steady-state micro-universe. The problem is still that global climate is NOT a constant, and never has been. It WILL change, regardless. See final paragraph in reply above. I've seen both the solar emissions and insolation data. I've also seen the data on short, medium, and long-term climate change far predating human existence. It's the hysterical claims of overwhelming human agency leading to inevitable apocalyptic catastrophe and requiring "THE" preferred deep-green "fix" to avert that I dispute.

Add-on: Anyone "screaming for change" is by definition hysterical. Whether or not they're an enviro is a seperate question.

GLobal warming does seem to be the dominant theme right now, not cooling. Overall temperatures in teh ocean have increased about a degree over a century, that is a tremendous amount of heat. What could save us would be some nice explosive volcanoes to cool things off. A Krakatoa every 3 to 5 years. Not really practical however.

If we happen to be a significant agent of climate change, which it appears to be so, and the consequences are expensive - sea level increase - then it behooves us to see if we can avoid said consequences, right?
That's called responsibility.

Of course nowadays, responsiblity, thou art fled....

The sooner we act the more choices we have. I prefer that rather than having choices thrust upon us

But Marcus, what if we had acted when the "dominant theme" was cooling, rather than warming? Might we not then have made the problem worse, if it turns out warming really is the problem?

Keep in mind it's not like we never act in response to environmental climactic concerns. We've banned the use of ozone-destroying fluro-carbons, remember?

In a more philosophical vein, it is interesting the way that many consider humans to be an unwanted intruder on earth. People talk about "human effects" as if somehow humans don't really belong on earth. In fact, the mere fact that humans have the capability of manipulating their environment (ie, big brains) suggests to me that human effects are a natural part of the ecosystem. To me, it makes no more sense to decry humanity's effects on the world as it is to complain about the existence of natural diseases. Humans building machines is just as natural as birds sitting in a natural habitat. That doesn't mean, of course, that we shouldn't try to alleviate the negative effects of or human intervention, just as we try to eliminate natural diseases.

Yeah, that'a a rather obvious point by Pat, and hard to dismiss.

Notice Marcus how you might be prone to forwarding analogies that reflect your own certainty, while what what we are questioning here is the certainty itself. Like the train analogy. In that case, if there is only one track and you are on it and the train is coming, that'a a very high-certainty situation, isn't it? But suppose you were in an area with hundreds of sets of tracks going in all different directions. In that case, you wouldn't necessarily jump off the tracks every time you heard a whistle, would you? It would depend on what you were doing, how distant the whistle was, how far you could see down the tracks, and how fast the trains generally traveled.

Notice how I can use your analogy to prove MY point.