*I always wanted to be in a fifth camp which was aesthetically opposed to polluting the sky for design reasons. I mean, why exactly did we want the blue sky we inherited to be brown for our grandchildren? 'Cause it was cheap? 'Cause we knew no better? That was it? Those were reasons enough for our misbehavior?
*Very wise and foresightful things by Stewart Brand here. Except for one issue. Real calamity, as opposed to futurist calamities and scifi calamities. If we all figure out that we're clearly heading for a no-kidding climate calamity, you can expect our other calamities to multiply rapidly, because we've proven to ourselves that we can't avert calamities, even when the calamities are slow, pretty easy to avert, and obvious to anybody in touch with basic facts.
*So, in a real calamity situation, you can expect denialists to become blind, bloodthirsty fanatics, skeptics to retreat from the world as sniveling holed-up survivalists, warners to enlist in armies and intelligence services, and calamatists will rapidly die in despair, possibly with some suicide bombs strapped on, because in any real calamity the pessimists die first even when they clearly saw it coming.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/15/opinion/15brand.html?_r=1&ref=opinion
"If climate change were to suddenly reverse itself (because of some yet undiscovered mechanism of balance in our climate system), my guess is that the denialists would be triumphant, the skeptics would be skeptical this time of the apparent good news, the warners would be relieved, and the calamatists would seek out some other doom to proclaim.
"If climate change keeps getting worse then I would expect denialists to grasp at stranger straws, many skeptics to become warners, the warners to start pushing geoengineering schemes like sulfur dust in the stratosphere, and the calamatists to push liberal political agendas — just as the denialists said they would."
