[extropy-chat] Alleged Climate Collapse

[Robert J. Bradbury]

On Mon, 23 Feb 2004, Harvey Newstrom wrote:

> Which means you can blame the greens for pushing diesel.  But again, this
> accepts global warming.  It merely reassigns the blame for it on the
> environmentalists.  Ironic and fun to do, but not really helpful in the
> larger scheme of things.  Even if environmentalists are to blame, this would
> be a human cause of real global warming which is having a real impact.

I *would* like to see a real (in-depth) analysis of whether
global warming could be good for humanity.  For example there
is a *lot* of land in Alaska, Canada and northern Russia which is
problematic from an agricultural standpoint.  There can't be
that many people on islands that can't take a 5, 10, 15m, etc.
rise in sea level who could not be relocated to land which has
become habitable due to global warming.  Hell, the deicification
of Greenland and Antarctica would open up a lot of land.

It seems to me that an extropic discussion of this topic should not
focus on the details (though one needs them for good discussions)
but should instead focus on whether or not a significant change
in the architecture of the Earth would be extropic or unextropic.

For example -- did the study cited list any benefits that might
develop as a result of global warming?  If not then it would seem
to be biased on the negative side.

I read an example of this earlier today where the predictions were
that global warming was going to kill off the Great Barrier Reef
by 2050.  None of the authors bothered to consider the fact that
sequencing the genomes of the coral and algae involved in creating
the reef structure is feasible *now* and engineering strains with greater
heat tolerance is feasible within the next decade.  Anyone predicting
anything past 2020 or so is in the middle of the swamp.

Robert