Managing global-warming

Much as I despise the conversative instinct to declare a demonstrably-manageable problem unmanageable ("hurrd moonidy!"), that instinct is understandable. They (we) came off of decades of being hectored by the upper-middle-class midwits, still ongoing, concerning the Global Warming ("science is real!"). A minority report is that Climate Change Is A Hoax and, frankly, in the middle 2000s it was being oversold.

Some self-described alarmists take it all more seriously than others do. James Hansen supports investment in nuclear. And then there's Michael Moore of all people. But overall, as Moore points out, this alarmism has proven an excuse for the likes of the Gore family to wet their beaks.

One of the better conservative summaries (at present) of dissident literature, now stands at The Federalist (h/t the HQ Morning Report). Lomborg and Shellenberger say that, yes, there is a lot more carbon in our atmosphere than normal; and yes, it is a warming agent. The two dispute that a few more Kelvins up in the Northern Hemisphere represent a catastrophe.

Against that, we have more information about the Permian. Anton Eisenhauer at Kiel closes the case for 252 Mya: a massive carbon burp. This follows that study on the Carboniferous legacy, that volcanoes sprouted next to the carbon and un-Inferred it all at once. Hana Jurikova makes it relevant:

Ancient volcanic eruptions of this kind are not directly comparable to anthropogenic carbon emissions, and in fact all modern fossil fuel reserves are far too insufficient to release as much CO2 over hundreds of years, let alone thousands of years as was released 252 million years ago. But it is astonishing that humanity’s CO2 emission rate is currently fourteen times higher than the annual emission rate at the time that marked the greatest biological catastrophe in Earth’s history.

We are not, then, headed for the Permian... much less for Venus, as some alarmists claimed. A lot of that old Permian carbon is now locked up where we humans won't get at it again, in calcium carbonates. At "worst" we're headed for the Palaeocene / Eocene boundary with the Danish Blue Parrot. Not even an early Cretaceous problem - carbon acidification of the oceans ain't releasing more carbon. Obviously mammals and birds survived that. And I think their projections are more clustering at the Eemian, or the Green Sahara era in our Holocene.

In addition, I doubt our ecosystem is nearly as vulnerable to a carbon injection as was the Permian ecosystem. Land plants way back when weren't deciduous. Certainly the C-4 efficiency (millet-type cereals i.e. grass, and bamboos) wasn't there yet.

To sum up, 300000 dead from a virus at its early stages is cause for alarm. Please wear a mask before you're not asked nicely; and give credit to politicians who propose frequent rapid testing. The prospect of some farmers having to change crops and for rich people to ski Banff near year instead of Aspen... is not such cause for alarm.