Why is global warming a bad thing?

[Tommy]

There's a pretty good and concise article on global warming on Wikipedia (click here to see it). It makes a good case for those who believe atmospheric warming is occuring and it correlates with increases in human population and industrial activity. But it is very uncertain regarding the effects of future warming on people who don't live near a glacier, the sea shore or very arid lands. Lots of people have presented their predictions, but I didn't see that there was a consensus of agreement within the scientific community.

The article mentions that there are three broad approaches that could be taken to deal with global warming: mitigation, adaptation and geoengineering. Mitigation includes actions to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases (e.g., taxing gasoline an extra $2 a gallon to discourage burning of fossil fuels). Adaptation includes actions to minimize the negative effects of warming on people (e.g., moving people who live in low lying areas near the sea). Geoengineering includes actions to keep greenhouse gases from entering the atmosphere (e.g., storing carbon dioxide from power plants in underground chambers). Of these three approaches, my intuition tells me that adaptation is both the least expensive and the approach most likely to be required regardless of our efforts at mitigation and geoengineering.

Fortunately, homo sapiens is a very adaptable species. In fact, the ability of an infant human to adapt to whatever environment it is born is one of our greatest strengths. Raise a baby in an igloo above the arctic circle, in a rain forest near the equator, or in inner city Chicago and it will quickly adapt to its surroundings. I believe many of the people who will have to change their lives to cope with global warming will find it a traumatic experience. But their children will grow up thinking that is the way it has always been. I believe the effort to significantly change the pattern of global warming will diminish as soon as the real world cost of fighting it becomes more apparent. And 10,000 years from now when the next ice age is underway, no one will remember these lively discussions.