Climate Debate

Finally (?) a voice of reason.

While I've been a skeptic on the issue of Global "Warming", over the holidays, I read James Lovelock's book: The Revenge of Gaia: Earth's Climate Crisis and the Fate of Humanity

I'd read his original Gaia work, and have followed his and others writings.

Finally, the picture is becoming clearer.
Mankind's activities are not the primary cause, only a contributing cause.

I may quote from Lovelock's work later, after a re-read, but what I took away is that Gaia has maintained a series of stable, self-reinforcing conditions on planet earth since soon after life emerged.

When the young sun was cooler, the earth was kept warm, as the sun has grown hotter, mechanisms or feedback systems have helped keep the earth cooler, hospitable to life as we know it.

Changes in the "Solar Flux" as well as periodic fluctuations of the Earth's orbit, have led to long term as well as cyclical trends in the Global Climate.

Massive changes in the atmosphere have occurred (large variations in CO2, shift to an Oxygen rich (poisonous) ) but life (Gaia) has adapted.

Now we have a period where human activity, including burning of sequestered hydrocarbons and clearing (often by burning in the 3rd world) of forests. This becomes a perturbation of the feedback forces and may lead to a shift to some other "stable state".

We may indeed face warmer conditions, rising sea levels, but it’s not like this has never happened before. Humans have adapted before, and will again.

Then comes a most interesting piece in today's NYTimes, knocking extremes on both sides of the issue: Middle Stance Emerges in Debate Over Climate

"Amid the shouting lately about whether global warming is a human-caused catastrophe or a hoax, some usually staid climate scientists in the usually invisible middle are speaking up.

The discourse over the issue has been feverish since Hurricane Katrina. Seizing the moment, many environmental campaigners, former Vice President Al Gore and some scientists have portrayed the growing human influence on the climate as an unfolding disaster that is already measurably strengthening hurricanes, spreading diseases and amplifying recent droughts and deluges.

Conservative politicians and a few scientists, many with ties to energy companies, have variously countered that human-driven warming is inconsequential, unproved or a manufactured crisis.

A third stance is now emerging, espoused by many experts who challenge both poles of the debate.

They agree that accumulating carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping smokestack and tailpipe gases probably pose a momentous environmental challenge, but say the appropriate response is more akin to buying fire insurance and installing sprinklers and new wiring in an old, irreplaceable house (the home planet) than to fighting a fire already raging."

Read it.

BTW: Lovelock is in the camp that favors Nukes and dislikes ideas like wind-power as misguided. And kudo's to him for giving favorable nod to technology in the form of communication, such as cellphones, laptops and the internet. Talk, don't travel.