Unfortunately, environmentalists in general and climate alarmists in particular, are sending us on a bitch ride to hell.

As Eric Drexler blogs in Greenhouse Gases and Advanced Nanotechnology, most people make the mistake of thinking CO2 will just disappear if we stop producing it. Instead it remains in the atmosphere over a century timescale, affecting the heat balance. If one is a believer in that there are already sinister effects on biosphere, and especially if one is concerned with tipping points and positive feedback loops, then this is a very serious matter. Just urging (or achieving) emissions reductions will not fix the problem. There has to be very large carbon sinks, or one should argue for much bigger attempts at climate adaptation than currently is fashionable.

As I like to say, if you are in a car rolling downhill and want to stop, it is not enough to just stop pressing the gas pedal, you better find the brakes, keep a hand on the steering wheel and wear your safety belt. A lot of past rhetoric has been of the type: "For heaven's sake, stop reaching for the brakes! They will distract you from not pushing the gas pedal! Or they might cause a skid!"

It was fun to see my audience when I explained that probably the choice might be climate change or widespread use of carbon sequestering GMOs (while I like Drexler's approach, it may take a while to get there; we could seriously start working on ultra-sequestering plants right now, I think). They didn't like that at all. Because largely, to their minds, climate change is just politics: get the politicians to make the right decisions, expected to be roughly some kind of anti-consumerist program that brings out the nice old values of community, environment and austerity.

The real risk is of course that climate change becomes ecostalinism instead. One common theme in the discussion was how irrational and selfish people are, so it would be a good thing if this short-sighted behaviour gets inhibited by suitable authorities with long-term interests. Democratically controlled and accountable, of course.

Get off the bus. Nothing that the climate alarmists advocate will actually help with climate issues but their policies will make life exceedingly ugly and weaken us so that the real work is harder to do.

The real way forward is to stimulate exploration and dissent in order to figure out more about the situation. The current orthodoxies (that consumerism is the problem, that geoengineering and serious adaptation are out of the question, that only traditional technology is relevant etc.) are likely wrong at least in part and need challenging. If we all need to pull together, then we also need really good information to guide us and not just faith in authorities. For this we need strong protections for dissent - the social pressure towards conformity is going to be strong in any case. We mustn't loose the critical voices that point out that certain emperors lack clothing or that we ought to cover Wales with GMOs. They might be wrong, but they protect us from the overconfidence in planning we know has wrecked past projects and states. To give them up is to close one's eyes and let the car roll out of control.

The Drexler post, and the Edge article it references, Knowledge Spreading, are a few months old and you may well have seen them already, but are perhaps worth another look.

Update:

The connection may elude you but consider this Roger Scruton essay on binge drinking.

This puritan legacy can be seen in many aspects of British and American society. And what is most interesting to the anthropologist is the ease with which puritan outrage can be displaced from one topic to another and the equal ease with which the thing formerly disapproved of can be overnight exonerated from all taint of sin. . .

For Aristotle it is not right to avoid anger absolutely. It is necessary rather to acquire the right habit — in other words, to school oneself into feeling the right amount of anger towards the right person, on the right occasion and for the right length of time. . .

Puritans lack this sense of measured and temperate appetite. . .

The ancient proverb tells us that there is truth in wine. The truth lies not in what the drinker perceives but in what, with loosened tongue and easier manners, he reveals. It is "truth for others", not "truth for self". This accounts for both the social virtues of wine and its epistemological innocence. Wine does not deceive you, as cannabis deceives you, with the idea that you enter another and higher realm, that you see through the veil of Maya to the transcendental object or the thing-in-itself. Hence it is quite unlike even the mildest of the mind-altering drugs, all of which convey some vestige, however vulgarised, of the experience associated with mescalin and LSD, and recorded by Aldous Huxley in The Doors of Perception. These drugs — cannabis not excepted — are epistemologically culpable. They tell lies about another world, a transcendental reality beside which the world of ordinary phenomena pales into insignificance or at any rate into less significance than it has. Wine, by contrast, paints the world before us as the true one, and reminds us that if we have failed previously to know it then this is because we have failed in truth to belong to it, a defect that it is the singular virtue of wine to overcome. Something similar might be said of beer and English proverbs testify to the honourable place of ale in popular thinking, as a source of insight into human society.

Hence drinking in company induces an opening out of the self to the other, a conscious step towards asking and offering forgiveness: not for acts or omissions, but for the impertinence of existing. This suggests another reason for the centrality of wine in the communion ceremony, which is that it both illustrates and in a small measure enacts the moral posture that distinguishes Christianity from its early rivals, and which is summarised in the prayer to "forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us". That remarkable prayer, which tells the Christian that he can obtain forgiveness only if he offers it, is one that we all understand in our cups, and this understanding of the critical role of forgiveness in forming durable human societies intrudes too into Islam, in the poetry of Hafiz, Rumi and Omar Khayyam, winos to a man. It is a sign of the extremism of Islam, in the versions that seem so threatening today, that it emphasises the Koranic interdiction of wine, and forgets that the rivers of paradise, according to the Holy Book, are actually made of the stuff.

Get off the bus, bathe in the river.