As I read the literature, there is one whopping flywheel out there (underwater) -- but it is unclear to me how that tiny sliver which is land+air can be the driver. Put differently, either it is irrelevant or it is not; if irrelevant then we have to ask how it is that the oceans are warming when the land+air which we are modifying is so puny -or- if fully relevant then we have to ask how much negative excursion the land+air has to take in order to wind down that flywheel. If it takes 300 years of burning coal to create the warmed waters, then would one not have to scrub the atmosphere clean of greenhouse gases for a couple of centuries to cool those waters? As I recall the models for "snowball earth," the presence of ice down to the equator was a direct result of global algae blooms that did, in fact, strip the atmosphere of greenhouse gases and sequestered them in marine sediments leaving only volcanism as the source of replenishment. If taking the flywheel at face value, then one must conclude that prevention is lost and only adaptation remains as an option. Depopulating the coasts would thus be the most urgent target for human-preservation planning, no? Zurich would seem well positioned to take over from London and NYC, for example. The biggest public display of scepticism to date w.r.t. global warming might have been the $jillions of taxes spent to rebuild New Orleans' 9th Ward. If one remains convinced that action is possible and needful, the question (for the anarchist persuasion, in particular) is what government would you trust to administer compensatory global cooling? Would you happily inject sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere(*) for that purpose? Should weather modification be subject to direct democracy or does interventionist climate management require a despotism? Is this where sovereign unilateralism ends and world government begins (wherein your personal needs and desires will be vastly less relevant than they are even now)? However satisfying, please to not pick one phrase in the above to argue with; for cpunks relevance, the question is one of control in a world of data-driven algorithmic regulation by non-human actors acting in the name of the common good but uninterrogatable. --dan (*) "One kilogram of well placed sulfur in the stratosphere would roughly offset the warming effect of several hundred thousand kilograms of carbon dioxide." -- The Geoengineering Option, Foreign Affairs, March 2009