Unintended Consequences

James Fallows has a series of guest bloggers putting material on his site. Here is a bit from Julio Friedmann that caught my eye. This is what a lot of advocates for "fixes" never bother to consider. This is why a lot of "fixes" sound so simple. They ignore unintended consequences:

Every energy technology we have scaled up has problems and unintended consequences. Recently, we saw that with the 2007 ethanol push. The drive to corn ethanol helped create a food crisis world-wide, and ended up increasing global CO2 emissions when soy farmers started plowing under rain forest to grow more soy (what economists euphemistically call "leakage"). It's reasonable to imagine that scale up of wind, clean-coal, biofuels, and solar may also have perverse consequences yet to be mapped.

I believe that Julio Friedmann's worries about "global warming" are overblown for many reasons. Smart people can disagree and still be smart and fully honest. He's busy feeling the elephant's trunk and screaming "it's a snake!" and I'm at the other end of the elephant saying "no, it's a fan and sure helps cool us down". He believes the models. I did computer modeling and I distrust any computer model of something that is even moderately dynamic and complex. Sure we can model simple linear systems. But give me a system with the kind of dynamics that scare Friedmann, the "non-linear, high-impact responses to climate change" and I will tell you that you are looking at something that is difficult to model.

But I do appreciate that Fiedmann, unlike a lot of climate alarmists, is willing to admit that "simple fixes" may come back to bite you.