"Levitt and Dubner tell the horseshit story as a prelude to discussing climate change: “Just as equine activity once threatened to stomp out civilization, there is now a fear that human activity will do the same.” As usual, they say, the anxiety is unwarranted. First, the global-warming threat has been exaggerated; there is uncertainty about how, exactly, the earth will respond to rising CO2 levels, and uncertainty has “a nasty way of making us conjure up the very worst possibilities.” Second, solutions are bound to present themselves: “Technological fixes are often far simpler, and therefore cheaper, than the doomsayers could have imagined.”" - Jim Norris from Bookmarklet

That's it. I'm moving to Canada. Oh, wait... - Mona Nomura

I shall laugh at all of you from my underground bunker the day yellowstone erupts and we have no geoengineering skillz to deal with the aftermath. :) - Private Sanjeev

where are you building your bunker? - bob

Get them pre-built: http://www.missilebases.com/ - Private Sanjeev

"Given their emphasis on cold, hard numbers, it’s noteworthy that Levitt and Dubner ignore what are, by now, whole libraries’ worth of data on global warming. Indeed, just about everything they have to say on the topic is, factually speaking, wrong." - Simon

"Would the trees take up CO2 while they’re alive, and release it back into the atmosphere only slowly, once they’re dead? If so, the world already has those sorts of trees. They are called, well, trees." - Al Gore made this same joke at Google today. - Darren

Al Gore must be reading my FriendFeed! - Jim Norris

He's still telling the trees joke? See, it's this alarming lack of awareness about what does most of the CO2 processing in the environment that has a tendency to discredit him out of the gate. - Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins

Care to elaborate, Mark? Trees don't have this property, or are you saying that it doesn't matter for some other reason? - Joel Webber

"constructing a vast network of tubes" - like the internets? - Alex Gawley

Trees do have this property, but trees aren't responsible for most of the CO2 absorption on the planet. The rate at which plankton absorb the planet's CO2 makes the tree population look insignificant. If you're talking about things that you could easily manufacture or grow that absorb CO2, single celled organisms would be at the top of the list. Incidentally, these could be much more easily bio-engineered to produce fuels, which is what Dyson was suggesting in the first place, and what many seem to ignore when making fun of this piece. - Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins

Al Gore's point was that deforestation accounts for a large portion of climate change, and rather than engineering fake trees to do what real trees already do well, we could just, well, stop cutting down the forests and plant some more trees. - Darren

http://friendfeed.com/search... Jim I am receiving deflamatory comments about me using my first and last name which is illegal, I tried to tell brent but he placed it on private feed, which was not a nice thing to do, could you pull some strings please and have this user warned - dawngordon