Originally Posted by rickair7777

Aviation is rather more black and white.

My family (and circle of family friends) are mostly science academics (hard science PhDs). None of them feel that the current "climate science" sold for mass political consumption is rock solid. Climate scientists are not inherently trustworthy when grants and celebrity are at stake. There are a lot of complexities and most likely NOBODY fully comprehends all of the interactions. For example they were pretty darn sure about global warming... until they had to rebrand it. "Rebranding" to adjust your hypothetical model does not smack of good science to those who know what good science is supposed to look like.

There's obviously something going on, but it's really hard to predict the ramifications or even how the root cause(s) interact.

Also hard to predict how successful any proposed solutions will be. And it probably doesn't matter what the first world does with carbon if the third world keeps slashing and burning rain forests... equatorial forests really do account a lot of absorption, and there is a very large natural metabolic cycle of emission and absorption by living things. That cycle still needs rain forests, unless we want to build CO2 absorption machines (theoretically possible, but probably pretty expensive).

But all that said, the political reality is that carbon emissions must be reduced. Certain political critters love nothing more than tearing down the system, and carbon is a great excuse to do just that. They're going to hold on to this with a death grip, and the inherent complexity of the science only works to their advantage (hard to prove, disprove, or quantify the cause or correction).