Of Sealand, corp, and country [was: nation-state]

[dan at geer.org]

For the purpose of this note, I'll stipulate that global
warming is happening without arguing why.  The question
for science would be whether it has a positive feedback
loop, as it would if rising temperature releases, say, 10%
of the carbon locked in permafrost.  Given the wild temp
excursions in geologic time scales -- "snowball earth" vs.
the Cretaceous (when there was no ice at the poles) -- it
is reasonable to imagine that some excursions have a phase
where the feedback is positive and thus if the temp heads
either north or south its velociity will, for natural reasons,
accelerate as the excursion grows more extreme.  That implies
that the present time is an unstable equilibrium, thus our
imapct, whatever it is, seems likely to be an initiator or
a potentiator but not a cause in the classical sense of,
say, a dose-response curve.

Put differently, I don't believe that we (humans) can push
the climate to a place it has not been before, but we can
change the clock.  One might then ask what government has
your confidence in its being capable of managing a comprehensive
program of compensatory global cooling and what powers would
be required to enforce same?

What this topic has to do with this list is unobvious.

--dan