Do you notice significant persistent change in climate?

dan at geer.org dan at geer.org
Wed Apr 27 07:33:52 PDT 2016


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



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