re: #127 Decatur Deb

I’m looking for “muddling through” time, because that is the human default strategy. If reducing greenhouse gases radically and quickly wouldn’t
prevent a runaway, the political sell for action gets tough.

The decision we have to make is this: of the remaining hydrocarbons (near the surface of the Earth, at which we have access), which ones are we going to leave in the ground and which ones shall we extract and burn?

The more we extract, the greater the probability of causing very significant changes to the climate.

The “muddling through” case is the “business as usual” (BAU) process - that is what we do, as you noted.

This doesn’t even touch on the issues of land use (itself a driver in GW), or on the mass extinction that humans are causing regardless of the magnitude of AGW.

Here in the US we are blessed with perhaps the best balance of resources… we will not be the biggest losers on the planet. Knowing this, if only intuitively, Americans become hard to be convinced that actions are important. From a cost-benefit basis, many Americans are tempted to say “screw the World, look out for #1”. Only when the environmental negatives hit home is there an incentive to act.