The pro-AGW crowd sounds almost like the home­opaths who state that sci­ence hasn’t yet ‘found’ all the mech­a­nisms required to explain how their magic water works.

I heard Greg Craven on a recent Point of Inquiry pod­cast give a seat-belt anal­ogy about the Cat­a­strophic Cli­mate Change (CCC) hypothesis.

It’s not bad.

He said that we don’t con­sider the unlike­li­hood of get­ting into a vio­lent car acci­dent before we put on a seat belt, we do it just in case.  He offers the case that all the dire events pre­dicted by CCC need to be stopped and/or pre­pared for yeeeears in advance.  You can’t just quickly snap your belt on as you fly off the cliff–by then it is prob­a­bly too late.

Where I dis­agree with Craven is that I think it’s more like an Insur­ance Pol­icy, than a seat belt.  We can imme­di­ately see the prac­ti­cal ben­e­fit vs cost ratio involved with a seat belt.  It’s a noOoOooo brainer.  With insur­ance, there are sev­eral pack­ages to choose from.  I can get the works, and pro­tect my car from ZEUS HIMSELF acci­den­tally crush­ing my car as he epi­cally bat­tles it out with CHRONOS on my city street.  It’ll prob­a­bly cost me half what my car is worth each year, but I’m sure some insur­ance rep some­where will agree to that.

I don’t have to pay some­one when I put on my seat­belt.  It’s free with a huge pay­off for use.  ZEUS ain’t walkin’ down my street any­time soon, so I doubt I’ll be going for Option Z.

Maybe that’s just it though. Pre­haps the prob­lem is that we’re only being offered one pack­age to com­bat it.

Typ­i­cally it’s a Car­bon Trade mar­ket of some sort, such as the con­tro­ver­sial and poten­tially econ­omy crush­ing “Cap and Trade”.  I hear CaT is a pretty expen­sive insur­ance pol­icy.  Maybe we should just con­tinue with Option A and con­tinue to sub­si­dize GOOD green rev­o­lu­tions in tech­nol­ogy, but still allow old ‘steam­punk’ tech­nol­ogy work until it’s bested.  OZ, I feel, sug­gests that we stop all sin­ful, dirty, car­bon machines imme­di­ately and suf­fer until we find a new grass or sun fed option.

Pur­vey­ors of the OZ move­ment seem to have some extremely urgent data that shows that we are in immi­nent threat of self destruction.

I would like to see it.

Because, really, if OZ becomes the gov­ern­ment, that just means we’re all opt­ing for OZ.  There are a lot of issues com­ing to light lately that seems to indi­cate that the like­li­hood of need­ing OZ is dimin­ish­ing.  Per­son­ally, I don’t know what to think as I am still inves­ti­gat­ing the actual sci­ence behind it all.

Lately I just get that feel­ing that we have a lot yet to learn both about the cli­mate, and those who think they know it.