[extropy-chat] global warming eats island

[Lúcio de Souza Coelho]

On 12/31/06, Damien Broderick <thespike at satx.rr.com> wrote:
(...)
> Two features are being conflated, and I don't know how much expert
> work has been done on this (other than knowing that yes, stabilized
> solarettes could be put there). My wife the hands-on and
> theoretically-informed practical permaculture farmer is aghast at the
> handwaving involved. You cool the planet by deleting some significant
> proportion of current insolation (using shades or aerosols or
> whatever), and what happens to the crops and grasses and livestock
> that have evolved or been bred to roughly our recent annual round?

The impact on plants and animals would probably the same of, say, an
extended rain season producing a year with less sunlight in some
region. The sunshade and aerosol projects are meant to produce a
global drop of at most a few percent in sunlight, and locally there
are much larger sunlight variations on Earth.

(...)
> This is a vast multidimensional question.
(...)

Indeed. But more often than not small deviations in one of the
dimensions in a multidimensional system does not translate in huge
deviations in other dimensions.