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Marsden
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Joined: August 20th, 2001, 5:42 pm
Location: Maryland

Re: Jan DASH: QuantRisk-27Papers; FinanceCrises/RFT; Book2Ed; CarbonClock; ClimateEncyclo; Portal; ClimateCARO; TalksVid

May 27th, 2022, 1:29 am

Skimmed through your very thorough slides. Thanks for putting this all together.

My favorite publication on global warming is a grade school-level report that the US federal government sponsored way back in 1997: https://atmos.uw DOT edu/~dennis/RTN4.pdf

(Then, of course, the Trumpublicans took over the government and nothing like this was ever produced again.)

I'm afraid I think we're doomed short of engineering some some sort of positive undertaking -- something to remove incredibly immense amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere is the one possibility I can think of -- to address the problem, recognizing that you hold geoengineering to be a bad idea. And recognizing that the scale of such a thing would have to rival that of all of industrialization ... but at least it's something that some committed people with resources can do on their own, without requiring buy-in from the rest of the world; THAT is the quality I think is desperately wanted.

But everything else is negative undertaking: getting basically everyone NOT to do various things. And the record of our species in managing things like that isn't even spotty; it's horrendous. There are a lot of substitute technologies now that could take a chunk out of our carbon footprints and some passive efforts like just insulating buildings better, but I don't see these being implemented quickly enough to keep us from going over the cliff we're rushing headlong toward.

And I think the first drop in the cliff that we hit will be the tertiary effect of a refugee crisis on the order of ten times as bad as what we've seen -- and dealt with so abysmally -- so far. I think that hits in my lifetime, and that it throws a huge wrench into whatever we're working on otherwise, likely in the form of a lot of wars of various sizes.

So there's my cheery message for the day.