Rendezvous With Destiny....

The argument over global warming seems to have been derailed time and again, and curiously in much the same way as the constant skirmishing over evolution. Evolution and global warming are facts; what are at issue -what must always be at issue in Science as presently conceived- are the theories applied to explain the facts.
A theory of the cause of global warming, which has gained much momentum, states that it is demonstrable that the activities of the human race has produced the rise in global temperatures for the past several hundred years. Given a bit more of a push, a cup or two of religious fervor and maybe a dash of paranoia, and we will see putative remedies being applied willy-nilly, in hopes that the effects of centuries can be reversed in a few years.
Don't get me wrong: some of the things that will be done have been pending for three decades or more, need to move forward, but have nothing specifically to do with global warming. The most salient example that comes to mind is the move to alternative energy sources. What I am referring to is a rush to address global warming that amounts to a massive over-reaction to a situation, the remedies for which may not be well understood, with disastrous consequences on a world-wide scale.
When it comes to some things, like flirting with Geo-engineering, it's playing Russian roulette with a big, big gun. If we're right about the causes, it may succeed. If not, we may spend trillions of dollars and, if we're lucky, accomplish nothing. If we're not, we may achieve at a stroke what forty years of the Cold War couldn't- a very acceptable substitute for Nuclear Winter.....except we could just refer to it as the end of the Fourth Post-glacial Period in the Pleistocene. If that occurs, we may hope that genetic engineering has progressed far enough to resurrect the Woolly Mammoth, because we're gonna need to hunt them (again) for food.
There was much doomsaying during the Cold War, which dominated the first 50 years of my life, bemoaning the fact that mankind had finally achieved the ability to destroy himself. This was made doubly bad because it was going to happen in a Nuclear Holocaust. The irony is that we may accomplish the same thing, and with the best of intentions. There have been five Great Extinctions in geologic time since the Precambrian, and those who point to a sixth -the increase in the rate of extinction in the past 10,000 years due to the activities of man- may be right about the extinction, but wrong about the species. Such people worry about our powers threatening other species, and ignore the fact that a relatively small miscalculation -a mistake in some gene-splicing lab, for example- could eliminate the human race far more efficiently than all the nuclear bombs ever made.