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Thanks for the long and seriously thoughtful post.

So, let's not block out sunlight.

Do you have a sense of what a reasonable approach is? It seems that most of the public attention is on reducing greenhouse gasses. Except for the methane, which I understand is much more effective a greenhouse gas than CO2, as emitted from cows. Your argument that we are adjusting the second derivative is convincing.

What is your recommendation for correction--more than just reducing greenhouse gasses?



The biggest thing for me, apart from emissions reduction, is habitat preservation. The climate is always shifting of course, and humans will be OK (some populations will suffer, some will benefit but probably fewer, but we won't go extinct from this). However, limiting the contribution of climate change to the very real wave of anthropogenic extinctions is pretty important. Habitat loss is the most important here because the ecological health of an area is superlinearly related to its intact area; large areas are necessary for apex predators and migratory populations, but larger areas are much better at absorbing point-source disturbances, and allowing for spatial shifts in ecology as coastlines move uphill, streams and lakes dry up, etc. The individual communities can adjust more easily if they're not squeezed.

Healthy communities mean that populations are less likely to be decimated by some of the 'chaotic', nonlinear problems that accompany climate change. For example, slight warming of winter temps mean that bark beetles can move much farther north and ravage forests. Stressed forests can't deal as well which causes massive tree dieoffs of a species or two, leading to lots of standing dead timber which helps fires spread, killing the other tree species that were less susceptible to the beetles. Etc.




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