So you don't think Marshall Savage's scheme to use OTECs to raise
lots of spirulina and dump some of it (with the attendant carbon)
to the ocean bottom will help? The scheme is described in his book
THE MILLENIAL PROJECT along with several other poetically-portrayed
engineering marvels. (Savage's book is also loaded with the most
entertaining flights of disasturbation, but I have no trouble
discounting that stuff. He's just trying to get people motivated,
so I just pretend I'm reading Steven King.)
One problem I have in thinking about these things is that everytime
I try to worry about global warming, I recall that we have recently
had four major glacial periods, each about 100,000 years long,
punctuated by four interglacial periods, each about 10,000 years
long. We've been in the current (fourth) interglacial for about
10,000 years. Now I must confess that I haven't delved into the
primary geological research behind these numbers, but if anyone on
the list is familiar with this stuff I'd be fascinated to hear
more.
Personally, I lump most forecasting discussions of global ecology
in with forecasting discussions of macroeconomics. They seem to
be about equally difficult, and the hit rate of opinions of experts
in these fields seems to be pretty close to chance. Local ecology
and microeconomics I treat with somewhat less skepticism.
Trying to *think* about global ecology and macroeconomics is a
tremendously valuable guide for helping me find gaps in my education,
though, so I do that all the time. I just don't have much confidence
in the opinions I develop along the way.
As an unrelated sidepoint, I'll mention that I've found Daugherty's
posts considerably more comprehensible after he explained to us
that what he calls "sophisticated conspiracy theorists" envision
the conspiracies they discuss as the Dark Side of spontaneous order:
implicit understandings that arise in the collective subconscious
of the old boy network. Admittedly, this still sounds wacky, but
not nearly as wacky as the idea that successful global conspiracies
are deliberately planned and constructed (the Illuminatus! fantasy).
-- Eric Watt Forste ++ arkuat@pobox.com ++ expectation foils perception -pcd