Joe,

The final two sentences of The Economist article caught my attention.
"Climate change is arguably an experiment which mankind has unwittingly
found itself performing on the planet. To start a second experiment in
the hopes of counteracting the first would be risky, to put it mildly."
The author seems not to have noticed that if the geo-engineering
measures undertaken were actually to have an undue effect, they could be
stopped. But more to the point, here's my argument against the author's
"arguable" assertion that climate change itself is an "unwitting
experiment." 

Mankind's "unwitting experiment" is that only if climate change is
actually due to anthropogenic causes. But the contention is whether that
is the case. If it isn't, then the real experiment - of unprecedented
proportions - has been not environmental control but social control - an
experiment in global demagoguery and superstition for which climate
change was the pretext. 

That experiment has at the very least retarded the access of people in
the third world to electrical energy and prevented a reduction in their
death rate due to consequences of prolonged exposure to the smoke of
cooking fires. (That doesn't trouble the elitists who say there are too
many people anyway.) To say nothing about the diversion of taxpayer
money to conduct studies in which the outcome is predetermined to
conform to orthodoxy. (If that sounds extreme, re-read recent postings.)

If, as an article (or link, I don't remember now) previously posted
asserts, the warming over the past half century is due to an increase in
the sun's output, and if the output has now reached a maximum and is
about to decrease, the coming global cooling would some day allow
everyone to claim success: the activists, for having made CO2 emissions
an issue (thereby promoting increased fuel efficiency and at least
diminishing emissions' rate of growth), the geo-engineers, for having
come up with techniques which obviously made things better, and the
politicians, for having managed the crisis. (On the other hand, should
the climate get warmer, Greenland may once again become green. Nature
would be restored to the condition it used to be in. Who could oppose
such a green outcome as that?) 

The part I like the least of this hopeful scenario of global warming
some day becoming historical hysteria is that the activists wouldn't
retire. If the cooling trend lasts, some day global warming will have
been forgotten and there will be an opportunity to make global cooling
an issue. In the mean time, they would of course have to find another
crisis. Their proposed solution, whatever it turned out to be, would of
course require people to reduce their standard of living and relinquish
some measure of control over their own lives. Activists need crises of
course in order to frighten donors and maintain their (the activist
organizations') positive cash flow and the political influence of the
leaders. 

Whatever the crisis, the activists will continue to try to push their
beliefs (or what they say they believe) down the throats of unbelievers,
threatening excommunication, or worse, for failure to get with their
program. This program will be spelled out by an edict, which they will
call a "protocol," named after the city where the believers decide to
convene to concoct it. Unbelievers for their part will once again have
to scramble to try to convince the undecided that the crisis has been
manufactured for political ends.

Of course, we know the activists will remain busy. Even if climate
change loses its currency they have not yet achieved their goal of
ridding the biosphere of toxic substances. I can hardly wait to see what
they come up with. Maybe they will try to convince governments to phase
out the use of copper. 

Gordon Davy