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I am glad that my blog prompted two well-thought-out comments, although it would have been nice for the people to identify themselves by name in the body of the post.

For the benefit of those posters, let me clarify my reason for responding as I did to the New Scientist article.

It is often hard to distinguish between the legitimate sounding of an alarm or warning and "alarmism" that can lead to over-reaction and bad choices made in haste. The book review I linked to in my blog comment describes two titles that sound legitimate alarms and call for an urgent response.

On the other hand, the New Scientist article seems to overstate the case by not distinguishing between worst-case scenarios, which may force us to respond with extreme measures like additional planned geoengineering (I accept that technology has been unplanned geoengineering), and other scenarios where policy changes may be the solution.

My reading of Frankenstein tells me that we need to guard against hubris, and that includes putting too much faith in the projected outcome of geoengineering. As noted by the commenters, the climate is too complex for us to avoid some unintended consequences.

Thus my concern is that we need to persuade people to act now, when policy changes may mitigate the harm and avoid the worst-case scenarios, and thus eliminate the need for a risky technological-fix Plan B. This particular article in New Scientist, one of my favorite magazines by the way, has such an alarmist tone that (a) people may dismiss it as unrealistic, and (b) people may be less likely to consider more reasoned appeals to action, like the books I cited.

In other words, the article is too heavy on hype and too light on context. Call a worst-case scenario what it is, and point out that it is a reasonable scenario if we don't act. But to state matter-of-factly that it is already too late to consider other approaches is, to me, bad journalism on behalf of a good cause.

Fred Bortz
Children's Science Books
and
Science Book Reviews