I’ve read koonin’s book. And that review of koonin’s book.
His conclusion at the end is pretty good i think. He says that global warming is happening, but any changes we’ve seen so far are subtle. Like, it’s difficult to see any changes in hurricanes because of global warming. Or droughts. Or sea level has only risen an insignificant amount…
He didn’t mention the arctic though. As I remember. Thats where there is the most change due to climate change. Maybe he doesn’t mention this because it contradicts his argument.
He says increasing co2 won’t make any difference because all the co2 is already blocked. Its like a window that’s painted black won’t let and less light through it if you put more black paint on it. Except if you put more co2 in the atmosphere, the IR will be absorbed at a lower altitude, so it’ll get warmer lower in the atmosphere, which will probably make a bigger change to the climate.
Towards the end of his book, koonin says that he acknowledges global warming is happening, but we don’t know if it’s going to be that bad. Therefore, we should do more research to figure this out, and in the mean time, we should at least make easy changes.
I kind of agree with that but I think I would consider more things easy enough we should do. Solar and wind is cheaper than fossil fuels so we should definitely max out on those, for example.
I kind of disagree with koonins concept that you should only do things when you’re sure this is a crisis. Just the opposite, if you’re not sure, you should take more action.
We only have limited resources so we do the most important things first. And there are a lot of other problems besides global warming we also have to work on.
