Re; The day should come when releasing carbon into the air will be thought to be like putting lead in water or mercury in fish or nicotine in lungs.

This is an exaggeration since CO2 is an essential rerquirement for life on Earth, unlike lead or mercury. Plants can't function without it. Moreover every breath we exhale puts CO2 into the atmosphere and I doubt you want us all to stop breathing.

With this administration, unfortunately, we will continue to run the ecology into the "ground".

Their answer to the problem then will be to "privatize"- if you can afford your own air, water and power generation, no problem!

If you can't, well, problem solved! Less humans, less human activity!

Another great plan from the people that brought you Iraq.

Alphonse ( Al ) Kada
Iranians are fighting the Americans in Iraq so they don't have to fight them on the streets of Tehran

This issue dovetails with several others that would make for an interesting Democratic presidential platform. Not only is global warming becoming the public policy problem of our time (excluding Iraq, etc.), but a good candidate could link it to national security by promoting non-fossil energy and less dependence on the Middle East; new jobs and industries building the machines that don't run on fossil-intensive energy; the need for something like universal access to college to generate the thinkers and technology necessary to solve these climate and new technology problem(s); and also the need for tougher curricula and better public schools to prepare students to go to college to solve the problems. The latter two could appeal to middle class/suburban voters who, while not totally on the climate change bandwagon, still value education very highly.

One of the reasons I support massive changes to stave off the more obscene horrors of climate change (because let's face it, nothing we can do right now would stop it completely, it's already started) is because once we get to a model with minimal emissions, we'll have largely a sustainable use of energy. Think of that.

It'll be like the 90s again when we don't have to worry about anything. Gasoline prices? Sustainable, slow rise based on more people not random shocks. Heating/cooling houses and business? Sustainable. Middle-East? We don't have to have anything to do with it anymore. Dealing with unsavory governments? We don't have to be held hostage to anyone. We can concentrate on everything else.

To me that idea is nearly like a paradise on its own.

"...I support massive changes to stave off the more obscene horrors of climate change (because let's face it, nothing we can do right now would stop it completely, it's already started)..."

Already started?! It has never stopped. The climate has been changing as as far back as we can tell, at least hundreds of millions of years. What we see now and whats projected is well within the range of past experience. The pitch that climate change is something new and frightening is a good scare story, but with zero basis in fact. Beware politicians blowing smoke up your fart pipe.

The sons of the prophet are noble and bold,
and quite unaccustomed to fear.
But the bravest by far in the ranks of the Shah
was Abdul Abulbul Amir

I wish you were correct but I'm pretty sure that you are not. All that recoverable oil in the ground will eventually be used. Much worse, all that coal in the ground will also eventually be used. Let's look at two examples.

China has vast coal reserves. Their problem right now is they can't mine it fast enough. Is someone going to prevent them from mining and burning their coal? Russia is the largest oil exporter in the world. They have plenty more oil. What incentive do they have not to sell that oil? Many Russians I'm sure believe that global warming will be GOOD for them, making the vast Siberian wastelands more habitable.

No, the real question is not whether fossil fuels will continue to be burnt (they will), but how rapidly and how ecologically they will be utilized. For instance I can imagine the consuming countries putting a fairly large tax on fossil fuel end use. I guess the world could cut the fuel usage by half (by a factor of three in the US). I can imagine widespread carbon sequestration is not impossible.

But beyond that, we humans will consider large-scale terra-forming schemes. And also, inevitably we will live with it. Global warming is not the end of the world, probably.

Yes, and those periods when it changed rapidly, such as the eruption of volcanoes that formed the Deccan Traps, meant huge extinctions. You would not have enjoyed living then, or during the fires and storms following the Chixclub impact, or duuring the major Ice Ages, and mainly you would not have enjoyed living before Life caused the first ecological catastrophe, an oxygen atmosphere. If lowly bacteria can change the atmopshere, you think humans can't?

As a species we can adapt, but our food sources will adapt more slowly, And adaptation here involves (like all adaptations) selection. Put bluntly, some people won't die, and will reproduce. Others will die (lots). Current projections from the IPCC do not include ice melt, which if drastic, would involve tremendous sea rise. Expect wars over reduced land area.

What is projected is not within human historical experience. No writing has ever mentioned an ice-free North Pole, for example. But nations and underwriters are negotiating port privileges for summer Northwest-Passage shipping. You're on the losing end here, since the money is going the other way, assuming climate change instead of denying it.

Since we must all acknowledge that global warming is occurring and will continue to do so for the forseeable future, we need to be addressing the issue of determining as accurately as possible what effects this will have on what parts of the globe. Then we need to be looking for how to continue to live here, with adequate food, water and shelter under those circumstances. Going off on wild schemes to continue to do business as usual, except for _______________(fill in the blank with your favorite scheme, from space mirrors to artificial fog, to carbon sequestration.) is not a good plan.

Theoretically a computer can determine with acceptable acccuracy what weather patterns, ocean currents, etc. will result from global warming, and in how many years. But, that is one massive computer - so why aren't we building it? Once we have the reliable predictions of the effects we can plan what is needed to continue to support the world's population.

Hoppy in Sacramento

There is simply no telling where nuclear power would stand in terms of cost of electricity, if we removed the explicit and implicit subsidies originally put into place to encourage "peaceful uses of nuclear power" ... because a substantial portion of the costs involve special legislation limiting liability for damage in the event of a serious nuclear accident (or deliberate sabotage), and we have no idea how the liability insurance industry would price the coverage for that risk.

However, the point also should be made that the US has more domestic renewable energy resources per capita than the global average. On the one hand, if we push to Energy Independence based on Renewable Energy, its only a step toward a sustainable global economy ... but on the other hand, given our tremendous gluttony for imported energy, it is an important step in its own right. And further, it would also help accelerate the development of technology that lower income nations will need to reduce their own carbon emissions.

And there is no doubt that we could replace all of our imported energy with a combination of renewable resources and "mining our gluttony" by scaling energy demand back toward the level of other high income nations. For the US at least, it is not necessary for the US to pursue the nuclear option (with the high external costs connected to the way we originally subsidized nuclear power development) in order to make massive reductions in our total carbon dioxide emissions.

I should have said, human induced combustion of carbon products for the purpose of generating energy and with the byproduct of releasing co2.

So why didn't you? In your bio, it says you're a lawyer, writer, and lecturer. Do you usually express yourself so badly?

I think you should go back and strike out what you wrote, and put something else in its place.

Somehow I bet you won't, though.

P.S. What you claim you should have said still includes the food I eat, whose sugars I burn to provide the energy to power my everyday activities (and to keep me warm), and one of whose combustion products, CO2, I breathe out with every breath I take.

You want me to die. And everybody else too.

 All of the food we eat is from recycled carbon from the atmosphere - animals eat grain grown with largely with carbon from atmospheric CO2.  Vegetables grow using atmospheric CO2.  So, no fossil fuels are used as carbon sources for our food.

Of course we breathe out CO2 as do all other animals on the  planet, but all of that CO2 comes from the food we eat, which gets its carbon from atmospheric CO2.  Our breathing just closes the cycle.

But, burning coal and oil, whether for heat, for power, for transportation, is taking fossil carbon and sending it into the atmosphere millions of years after it was naturally sequestered from the atmosphere.  That is the big difference.  

Hoppy in Sacramento

I never thought you would, Josh.

My bitter comment was not aimed at you.

In fact, I don't think I'll ever aim a really bitter comment at you.

The really serious matter is whether some author can be allowed to get away with some crass claim, without having to recant (i.e. strike out) his own remarks. He said that "I should have said.." And I think he should be allowed to say what he should have said. And why can't he be allowed to retract what he said. We are no longer living in a print age, where what one has written is eternally fixed on slowly decaying paper. All he has to do is press the Edit button.

It's down to you to decide. This is an editorial matter, and it's your website. And I think you're probably about to make a beeeg mistake, because you're so Gutenberg.

Think well and deeply upon it. But don't worry if you get it wrong. Everybody gets it wrong every day.

Re: First world people don't have large families. Second and third world people do

That is changing. Mexico for example is below replacment. Even in Africa and the Middle East birth rates are falling.

Reed Hundt is a lawyer, not a scientist. Your anal retentive nitpicking at his prose (which is completely beside the point of his post--the inevitable social unacceptability of excessive greenhouse gas release) is indicative of an obsessive, oddball malcontent. Your assertion that this is a "really serious matter" is in itself evidence of thinking that could be charitably described as nonlinear.

Not one adult in a thousand would misapprehend Hundt's statement in the manner your absurd post suggests. It's just non-scientific shorthand understood by all.

Hundt's statement is in no way "crass," nor
is the editorial dilemma you're hallucinating a "really serious matter." In fact, your mischaracterization of his post is far more crass (though certainly not to be taken seriously!). You're just an obsessive sorehead, and, I suspect, a right wing shill.

...and stars have been exploding for 13 billion years or so, so why are we worried if Iran gets nukes?

Yes, you and perhaps another reader "picked up on" Hundt's inconsequential 'error', but you didn't misunderstand his meaning, did you? No. His meaning is very clear, if technically imprecise. Only an ass would suggest that he intends to say mouth-breathing should be socially unacceptable.

And you may disagree with Hundt's opinion that greenhouse gas emissions should become highly socially unacceptable, but it's neither a "garbage" opinion, nor a particularly stupid one.

And I suggest you peruse your Freud for a discussion of the anal phase of child sexual development. In it, a child's drive to affect his own environment is expressed through the expulsion or retention of feces--one of the few things children of 1 to 2 years of age can control themselves. It's only psychobabble if you don't understand it. Perhaps I should have just said "tight ass."

My intuition tells me we can't do a planet wide carbon sequestration program without using a huge amount of energy, and that would most likely mean adding still more CO2 to the atmosphere. An upper atmosphere aerosol solution involves an unimaginable quantity of whatever the aerosol is made of, with enormous energy expenditures to get it into the upper atmosphere, not to speak of the fact that the same blockage of solar radiation would occur in reverse - more greenhouse effect, in other words. A sunshade? It would presumably be in orbit around the earth and arriving at that orbit would also involve huge energy expenditures, plus the shade would have potential catastrophic consequences unless it equally shaded the entire planet. So, I don't think there is any chance at all of going in that direction.

There are some very effective things we can do though, to prevent global warming from being catastrophic instead of just terribly serious. The latter is now a certainty, in my opinion. We can develop wind energy, solar energy (another form of wind energy), and solve the nuclear waste disposal problem. And, by far the most controversial, by orders of magnitude, would be to eliminate borders between countries. That latter scheme wouldd pretty quickly equalize standards of living around the planet, reducing much of the pressure for population growth. Americans and Europeans would experience a lower standard of living, but not to the poverty level, but the poverty stricken would experience orders of magnitude improvements in standard of living.

Now add a generous helping of "social democracy" to the mix, and away we go.

Hoppy in Sacramento

Tom Wright is correct about all of this. Here is an article about the "sunshade." www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/11/061104090409.htm
Here is an article about sequestration www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/02/070207090926.htm Aerosols are perhaps the most promising, I didn't find a definitive article.

Of course putting all that CO2 into the air will have other effects than warming, such as turn the oceans into mild carbonic acid www.innovations-report.com/html/reports/environment_sciences/report-46018.html

Be clear that I agree with you. Amelioration technques such as above are really scary, and would likely happen only much farther down the path of warming, if the effects of doing nothing were bad enough. Not a chance of it being done before we're desperate.

I made no estimate of the cost of large space structures. One does not need to schlep all the fuel up there. If we're talking about the pace of climate change an extra year or few wouldn't matter, so we would use solar-electric propulsion to move large masses after reaching low orbit. This type of engine is typically low-thrust but can be scaled up. and because it isn't pushing its own fuel mass it is much more useful thrust. Ground launch fuel is not primarily carbon. It is either oxygen/hydrogen or nasty solid fuels.

Sequestration will of course require craploads of energy. That's not an issue with all the solar available, if it is used. A coal-burning plant covers kilometers. If much of that was photovoltaic panels it would be roughly 200 megawatts of free power (at peak, typical efficiency) per square kilometer. Seems like enough to me. If all the carbon in the exhaust was buried, there is no issue with burning coal. Big "if", of course.

You can't think your way out of a paper bag, can you? You lament the existence of asses, yourself among them, who would willfully misinterpret an opinion like Hundt's. You magnanimously say that the "study of human psychology" [sic] may not be unimportant, but then immediately dismiss the past 130 years of research and experimentation as "junk science", along with the work of thousands of meteorologists, geographers, and climatologists. What's next? Is modern biology also junk science? How about sociology and anthropology? Geology and
archaeology?

Your opinions are based on emotion and prejudice, not knowledge and logic, as you yourself admit, passing judgment on Freud without having read him. You pass judgment on whole swaths of intellectual endeavor while refusing even to acquaint yourself with their basic elements. You're a sorehead and an ignoramus--and to paraphrase Deam Wormer, "that's no way to go through life, boy."