Climate Change is not a sufficient problem to justify Geo-enginerring or abanding our fossil fuel economy. Our freedom is more important than the warming of the Planet to pre-ice age temperatures, which is inevitable anyway. The last Ice Age is coming to an end: if human release of locked up Carbon back into Nature’s Carbon Cycle is speeding up the inevitable, so be it. It is time to adapt to a wetter, warmer planet.

If AGW exists at all, it is itself a Geo-engineering project designed to speed up the beneficial effects of Global Warming. The underlying cause remains the end of the Ice Age: 80,000 years ago the Earth was 3 degrees warmer, the sea was 10 metres higher, and the deserts of today were rain-forests teeming with life. The new world climate will be welcomed after the transitional difficulties have been dealt with. We have 8000 years before the sea level will reach its interglacial maximum of 10 metres higher than today: if we can’t retreat inland, or build seawalls faster than 1.3 mm per year, we don’t deserve to survive.

Since we cannot in a free World impose on free people “the large-scale lifestyle changes necessary to deal with climate change”, and accepting that interglacial warming is coming regardless of CO2 emissions, we should instead use the power and wealth generated by a high-energy Capitalist society to mitigate the effects of global warming where feasable, and adapt to the new reality where it is not.

We should save Geo-engineering for the next real existential threat — the next Ice Age.