Re: Particles
Soot particles in the air cause a lot of health problems - article about Beijing's air quality on this very site today.
But what's more important is that ordinary volcano activity basically wipes out all of man's contributions for a year in terms of soot. Short of putting a hat on every volcano in the world, we aren't going to be able to stop the largest sources of it.
As with everything "global warming"-wise, we can't stop it all, natural processes have been beating us in terms of pollution on almost all fronts for millions of years (possible exception of mercury, etc. but the global warming stuff, certainly), and yet still nobody actually proposes solutions.
Let's assume the soot in the air is THE MOST IMPORTANT factor. How do we get rid of it? Stop burning wood. Stop using diesel. Fine. Let's assume (somehow) we make them both illegal and nobody ever burns a piece of wood in open air again, across the entire planet, and we combat all the natural sources of such. Now we save "half a degree" (per year? per decade? for ever? The article isn't clear). Now, what do we do instead? We now have entire fleets of vehicles out of action. The alternatives are petrol and electrics (which are nowhere near viable on that kind of scale - i.e. replacing diesel - and bring their own problems of supply sources and pollution). We can't use wood-burning stoves anywhere so we have to buy more gas, or more electricity, or more paraffin or SOMETHING to make up for it.
So even if they are right, even if we implement a perfect solution, even if we claw back that half-a-degree that "buys us ten years" (Until what? Death? On what? A century? A millenia?), we have no way to replace the things we were doing that we had to stop doing. People are out of work, transport systems near collapse, we're burning more of other things that we're also told not to burn, etc. I've taken it to extremes using perfect (and unachievable) assumptions, but the same happens on any scale you try (e.g. say we find a product that "collects" soot from the air on an industrial scale that can be fitted to anything - even a wood fire - how much is it going to cost, what is it going to be made of, how many will we need, how will we get them to everyone we need to use them, etc. etc. etc.)
It's the usual "global warming" problem: I believe you, in general. Let's assume I believe you 100% and that your science is absolutely perfect (unlikely, but let's just assume). Now what do we DO about it and, MOST IMPORTANTLY, what does that fix cost us? Because if it costs us more than it saves us, we might as well just carrying on doing what we're doing. Let's say we will eliminate soot, or CO2 or whatever we think is causing the problem: What's the knock-on effect of our fix, or reduced levels of those things (i.e. are we likely to trigger some natural process or even affect plantlife and wildlife because of a rapid change in the other direction?), and just what do we have to "break" elsewhere in order to "fix" this part? Robbing Peter to pay Paul comes to mind, and the situation comes up in ALL of these discussions but is never mentioned.
Let's assume we all stop burning any oil-based fuel tomorrow and go with the best alternative. Just what does that mean, not just for us, but for the switchover, for the long-term transition, for the costs of transitioning, for people caught up in that change, etc. If it's not PROBABLY less (and you can't say that without looking as deeply into it as you do the problems of global warming) than what we imagine to happen under global warming, then it's actually more sensible to DO NOTHING.
We're humans, we have a brain. When we change things it's often got side-effects that we didn't bother to think of and that can be worse than the original problem was (e.g. cane toads in Australia). And nobody is really looking at that.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
