You and I are in agreement, in principle if not in detail.

The fact that human activity is having any impact, whether it is the main impact or just one factor amongst several, is worrisome. And it is surprisingly easy and only moderately costly to actually change the way we do things so that we can reduce our impact in an appreciable way. Switching to florescent lights, driving more efficient cars, turning off the coal fired power plants: in our lifetime, if we did all these things on a massive scale we could probably reduce our impact by 30-50%.

My thinking is that we know vanishingly little about the climate, despite all the brilliant people and advanced technology looking at it. There could be (and almost certainly are) other things going on with the climate that we barely understand- things like sun activity cycles. If we blind ourselves to the data, we might make a big mistake: for example, pumping billions of tons of carbon into the ocean floor (artificial carbon sequestration). A massive project to do something like that could have repercussions on a scale that would dwarf our pollution problems- unless we really understand what is going on, which I honestly think we do not.

As for rain… I just got back from Vegas, the rain here is quite nice 🙂 Mind you, I’ll be happy to see some sun again this weekend 🙂