Because the climate is a chaotic system. Not being a scientist, you may not know what this means, but you've probably heard of "the butterfly effect".
The message of the butterfly effect is not that you can tweak something a little over here and get a big effect over there; but that a little tweak anywhere will have a totally unpredictable effect--unpredictable in ways that no amount of extra information or intelligence can improve.
Tweaking the atmosphere's CO2 content might slow down global warming (the earth's climate is near the cold, dry extreme of its normal variation, so it doesn't take a genius to predict it will get warmer and wetter), it might accellerate it, it might plunge the climate into wild oscillations, or it might not have any impact at all. There is no way to know.
So the tradeoff is between the highly predicatble costs of tweaking CO2 production and the totally uncertain climatic results of doing it.
For some, the payoff is in doing something, anything, so they don't feel so helpless. Okay--but I'll want someone else covering my back in that dark alley.
Slashdot Mirror
Because the climate is a chaotic system. Not being a scientist, you may not know what this means, but you've probably heard of "the butterfly effect".
The message of the butterfly effect is not that you can tweak something a little over here and get a big effect over there; but that a little tweak anywhere will have a totally unpredictable effect--unpredictable in ways that no amount of extra information or intelligence can improve.
Tweaking the atmosphere's CO2 content might slow down global warming (the earth's climate is near the cold, dry extreme of its normal variation, so it doesn't take a genius to predict it will get warmer and wetter), it might accellerate it, it might plunge the climate into wild oscillations, or it might not have any impact at all. There is no way to know.
So the tradeoff is between the highly predicatble costs of tweaking CO2 production and the totally uncertain climatic results of doing it.
For some, the payoff is in doing something, anything, so they don't feel so helpless. Okay--but I'll want someone else covering my back in that dark alley.
You don't back it up--it IS the backup--for multiple generations of smaller drives.
The most important feature of the open source movement is the effect it has on Microsoft's product planning.