We have a slight warming - around 15 degrees Celsius - and as you say, it does us 'good' in that without this, we and life as we experience it wouldn't be extant. I read what you say as the entirely sensible perception that, "a little of what you fancy does you good." No evil out of the ordinary is seen, heard or done here, [perhaps]. However, the rising concentration of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere is now causing this 'slight' warming to increase. The future projections of change go beyond the 'slight-ness' of the status-quo to levels above 'normal', out of the 'ordinary', to accelerated rates of energy exchange in the bio/geo/hydro-sphere that are manifest as increasingly violent and damaging 'weather-events' and changing climatic trends. The obvious conclusion pertinent here is the dangers we face as these trends continue, if emissions continue to rise and drive them. Many people are now rightly concerned about this. Aubrey

This is fun. I am going to make four assumptions about your life/style. One by one, these are either correct or in error. Will you please indicate which - if any - are correct, and which - if any - are wrong. You can say why as an optional extra . . . 1. You have ridden above twenty miles per hour in a car. 2. The car had no brakes. 3. The reason for this was that brakes were not needed. 4. The reason that brakes weren't need was because accidents were presumed to impossible or impossible to avoid. Aubrey

Yes. The point of the 'comparison' comes out rather nicely when you say that "you would never get in any car that had no brakes . . . [and] . . . driving a car means 'being-in-control' . . . " So the issue is 'control', and then also in your train-analogy, 'trusting who is in control' . . . hmmm . . . There seem to be two relevant headline control possibilities in the car analogy here: - 1. Use the brakes to avoid a 'speed-accident' 2. Don't drive so fast and avoid creating the conditions for a 'speed accident'. Accelerating emissions of greenhouse gases are also accumulating in the atmosphere raising atmospheric concentrations. The historic and pre-industrial source/sink equilibrium 180-280 ppmv CO2 is sharply up [40% or 380 ppmv against 280] in the 200 years since humans started burning fossil fuels, and rising now with an exponent. [Check the NOAA data]. In anybody's book, this is acceleration. Slowing emissions is applying the brakes to avoid further acceleration to the climate accident of runaway conditions - sink become sources. [Check the Hadley Centre site]. Re-establising source/sink equilibrium is putting the brakes on and staying within that speed-limit. I conjecture that the car-analogy has helped clarify this. However, your trusting attitude in the train-analogy is actually more revealing. You seems to denote that you expect that those stoking the boiler and accelerating the train, may hope that you are smoking enough not to consider that they may be faced with the train going too fast and out of their control, and will accept that loss of control when they lose it and realize that they have lost it and that you realize that too. You may be right; we may have lost it. What a life. Aubrey Post Script . . . All I can say as a practising musician is that what you can play slowly, you can [to some extent] play faster - it is a practice-and-control situation. However, if you can't play a thing slowly, playing it faster just isn't going to be possible until you can play it slowly. The serious point is that if acceleration [economic/emissions/concentration/damage/etc-'growth'] is the problem, we have to solve it faster than we create it. Otherwise all the effort to address the problem is wasted. What I fear reading into what you are saying is that, there is a problem , but there's no solution. If you are right, will you please tell me how I explain that to my kids?