The Conquest of Climate

Here is an interesting take on climate change.

What everyone seems to be ignoring is the possible ease of modifying climate to make it cooler, thereby offsetting the impact of greenhouse gases, and the fact that, at least in principle, population size can be matched to environmental resources.

Here is a link to the article.

Here are a few excerpts.
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How bad will climate change be? Not very.

No, this isn’t a denialist screed. Human greenhouse emissions will warm the planet, raise the seas and derange the weather, and the resulting heat, flood and drought will be cataclysmic.

Cataclysmic—but not apocalyptic. While the climate upheaval will be large, the consequences for human well-being will be small. Looked at in the broader context of economic development, climate change will barely slow our progress in the effort to raise living standards.

We have come to think of climate change as the canonical “extinction-level event,” a catastrophe so multifaceted and all-encompassing that it puts human survival in doubt. But when we think harder about the specific problems global warming poses—problems of water management, agricultural productivity, cooling and construction—the threat becomes less daunting. Our logistic and technical capacities are burgeoning, and they give us ample means of addressing these problems.

Moreover, the scope of warming issues, even under worst-case scenarios, is modest compared to the task of feeding and housing several billion extra people over the next few decades and accommodating the higher living standards that impoverished countries demand. That “development crisis” dwarfs the climate crisis, yet we don’t think of it as a crisis because we are steadily (though too slowly) resolving it and will continue to do so in the future. Along the way, we will resolve the climate crisis, which is fundamentally the same thing as the development crisis. Pre-modern Europe endured many climate crises—famines caused by inclement weather lasting a season or a century—that subsided with modern development; our contemporary warming issues are also symptoms of lingering underdevelopment. The faster we develop, the faster we resolve the climate crisis by decoupling our well-being from the weather.

Global warming will have serious consequences that need to be reckoned with. Cleaning up the energy supply is an important—and accelerating—aspect of development that should be nurtured, but it must be balanced against more pressing needs that sometimes conflict with it. To get the balance right greens need to give up their anxiety over development and over technologies like nuclear power that can make development both faster and cleaner. Like the man said, freedom from fear is the greatest liberation of all.