Start reading the technical literature. Dragging red herrings about like this is wankery and nothing more.

Among cap-and-trade systems, some are more interventionist than others. Nothing being considered in the mainstream entails restrictive lifestyle changes–they leave the changes up to the market. One could model such a system after the US's mechanism for reducing sulfur dioxide emissions, and allocate permits year after year that are only good for one year's emissions, or one could allocate annual emissions permits one time. Coaseian bargaining becomes much easier in such a scheme, the means to reducing emissions is straightforward and fair–buy and retire a permit–and thre is much less room for year-to-year governmental tinkering.

People who don't dig deeply into this often see this as being about automobiles. Maybe it is, but it's also about transoceanic shipping, farming and land use, electricity generation, and concrete making. Wilkinson makes the mistake of assuming who will make the cuts when we're finally in a system in which nest-fouling behavior is limited. It's possible that reductions will not be made in the quality-of-life areas the “do nothing and take all harm” set set assumes must be terribly negatively affected by mitigation.

Regarding whether or not warming is harmful, the IPCC report neatly summarizes why we're concerned about this. Scientists don't talk about whether or not a particular radiative balance is optimum. They work on the local climate changes that come with a “hotter” radiative balance courtesy of anthropogenic warming and find tremendous harm. Regarding whether or not observed warming is anthropogenic and whether anthropogenic warming will continue, so much effort has been put into presenting the evidence, too, that there's really no reason to not believe humans are the primary cause of global warming and that human emissions will continue. I get the impression that you haven't sought out mainstream materials on this. Forget the alarmists and read the IPCC report, following references therein for details.

As for space dust, telescope mirror guru Roger Angel proposed something similar, albeit interference-based. An interesting idea, but it puts us in a very dangerous situation if maintenance of such an arrangement were ever to cease, moreover, it does nothing about ocean acidification.

Start reading the technical literature. Dragging red herrings about like this is wankery and nothing more.

Among cap-and-trade systems, some are more interventionist than others. Nothing being considered in the mainstream entails restrictive lifestyle changes–they leave the changes up to the market. One could model such a system after the US's mechanism for reducing sulfur dioxide emissions, and allocate permits year after year that are only good for one year's emissions, or one could allocate annual emissions permits one time. Coaseian bargaining becomes much easier in such a scheme, the means to reducing emissions is straightforward and fair–buy and retire a permit–and thre is much less room for year-to-year governmental tinkering.

People who don't dig deeply into this often see this as being about automobiles. Maybe it is, but it's also about transoceanic shipping, farming and land use, electricity generation, and concrete making. Wilkinson makes the mistake of assuming who will make the cuts when we're finally in a system in which nest-fouling behavior is limited. It's possible that reductions will not be made in the quality-of-life areas the “do nothing and take all harm” set set assumes must be terribly negatively affected by mitigation.

Regarding whether or not warming is harmful, the IPCC report neatly summarizes why we're concerned about this. Scientists don't talk about whether or not a particular radiative balance is optimum. They work on the local climate changes that come with a “hotter” radiative balance courtesy of anthropogenic warming and find tremendous harm. Regarding whether or not observed warming is anthropogenic and whether anthropogenic warming will continue, so much effort has been put into presenting the evidence, too, that there's really no reason to not believe humans are the primary cause of global warming and that human emissions will continue. I get the impression that you haven't sought out mainstream materials on this. Forget the alarmists and read the IPCC report, following references therein for details.

As for space dust, telescope mirror guru Roger Angel proposed something similar, albeit interference-based. An interesting idea, but it puts us in a very dangerous situation if maintenance of such an arrangement were ever to cease, moreover, it does nothing about ocean acidification.

Excellent statement. People must come first. The livelihood of people is of the utmost importance. It should not be sacrificed for the unknown.

Similar issues have arisen between environmental activists and local peoples in the Andean region of South America, where environmentalist have pushed to purge local economies of anything that may harm the environment, even if it means crippling the local people economically.

People should be the priority.

Anyway, humanity's tendence to fear destruction from technology already as already been baptized by Isaac Asimov, with the very cool name of Frankenstein complex. 2 points about Will's post:

1 – If he is truly worried about malaria, he could write a post defending an increase in foreign aid, focusing on medical supplies. The U.S. is one of the countries with the lowest % of GDP in aid.

2 – I'm sensible about the argument of immediate harm vs. uncertain future benefits. But, in the question of global warming, I would frame the choice as between immediate harm vs. not-so-uncertain future incredibly greater harm.

Could you expand on this more(I’m genuinely curious)? What policy changes would you see as beneficial? One of the problems I have with climate alarmism is that alarmists (and by “alarmists” I don’t necessarily mean most scientists but a smaller subset of the more religious doomsday advocates) seem to peddle a pretty narrow set of solutions, many of which (perhaps not coincidentally) require extensive government regulation and, for that matter, restrictive lifestyle changes. Combined with rampant rent seeking from a variety of industries, this makes me very skeptical that the motivating agenda of climate alarmism has anything to do with altering the climate or an interest in assessing the tradeoffs between solutions.

For example, is adaptation a better strategy than reducing emissions (This has the added benefit of working even if, by chance, warming isn’t CO2 related)? How certain are we that a warmer climate would be worse? If we can alter the climate, should we try to insure the Earth is even cooler than it is now, or was the early 20th century the best possible climate? What about depositing a large amount of dust in the L1 Lagrange point to reduce solar radiation – I admit this last one is a bit silly, but if a massive change in energy production/use will cost the economy trillions over many years, why not spend it on mass drivers to launch moon dust if it can cool the planet just as well?

Let me reiterate that my beef is more with alarmism than the idea that the Earth is warming (My understanding is that there is a pretty clear 150-year warming trend in the historical data) or even that humans may be the primary cause (I am less convinced on this point but I may have allowed my suspicion of alarmist motives to unreasonably color my judgment so I’m not going to dismiss it, and certainly humans are having some climatic effect if for no other reason than land use changes). Unfortunately, I don’t know if I can adequately operationalize “alarmism” for you, but I would say that it is a combination of advocating costly measures out of proportion to the dangers (I realize this is a debatable point and may not be helpful as part of a definition), a refusal or reluctance to assess alternative solutions other than those that fit into an advocate’s seemingly preconceived notion of proper socioeconomic structures, and the appearance of being more concerned with promoting said environmental solutions as a means of societal change than looking for effective solutions. Note, of course, that I don’t apply this rather cynical description to anyone concerned with this issue. I am happy to say (as noted in another part of this thread) that there those who are serious about global warming looking at previously taboo solutions such as nuclear energy.

Wall of Text hits you for 13423 health points.
You die.

And for the record, our great great grandkids will be just fine. And if they're not … who cares … we'll all be dead anyway. I mean, honestly, how many of the AGW, blog reading, cosmopolitan crowd out there actually believes in an afterlife.