OT: American National Academy of Science on Climate Change

According to "Cadillac Desert", the soil in the Gentral Valley is very slowly building up with salt. That's one way.

-- Les Cargill

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You don't know much, and seem unwilling to find out what you don't know.

As Les Cargill points out, persistent irriation does lead to salt accumulating in the irrigated land. You can leach the salt out again, but that takes even more water. Australia wrecked some perfectly good farming land on the Murray River by letting salt accumulate, and recovering it does seem to take a while.

there's a more recent MIT study which I've referred to here in the last week or so, but I haven't got time find it right now.

Anthropogenic global warming is a gloom-making subject, and your enthusiasm for denying that it exists is an all-too-representative response, which is another reason to be gloomy.

On the contrary, I hope that we will use our technological expertise to free ourselves from the necessity to burn fossil carbon to generate power. I can see, along with many others, pretty exactly how it could be done, and while it is an expensive project it does seem to be one we could afford, if we could all see the necessity.

It's called realism. You seem to be recommneding Pollyanna-ish optimism, which plays well in childrens books, but can be disasterous in real life. Engineers are supposed to believe in Sods's Law - also known as Finagles Law - "if anything can go wrong it will". One corollary to that law is the name one knows it by is never the name used for it by the people you are talking to about it.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen