WA, NY and CA Governors Announce Formation of United States Climate Alliance

They are providing additional facts, which may or may not change your point of view. If the additional facts are not interesting to you, that's cool. But consider, maybe the information they provide is interesting to other people? For example, the top-level poster in this thread asked many questions which are explicitly answered in this article.

> Tons of smart folks I know are leaving CA for TX or east coast.

That is very true, but CA also has a large in migration of smart folks, leaving the number of smart folks here at a slowly increasing number. Small towns in red states for the most part don't see in migration from smart folks, the best people they have are the children of those residing there, and in my experience the ambitious ones chose to leave.

> omg, this is CA. Have you driven a freeway lately?

CA supports a relatively dense living situation compared to many areas in 'red states'. While CA might not have the best roads, they have the population and economy to support their maintenance. Many areas in red states have decided to stop paving their roads all together, and are crushing them back to gravel, because the cost of maintenance is unable to be supported by the population and density of people using them. We are definitely at "peak road" in red state America.

> CA to the letter.

Yeah, but I can also get a cushy corporate job in California. Most of the people I knew from [small town in a red state] that stayed either inherited a family business, got hooked on drugs, or settled into the life of mid/low paying government work.

This is a reasonable question, though tangential to the original article so you're going to find some criticism among those who miss the nuance. I assume you're not making an argument against climate change being an issue, but asking a related question.

By my understanding the natural cycles in climate that you refer to occur in hundreds of thousands of years time scales, and we know a reasonable amount about them with regards to Milankovitch cycles, but there are other factors like solar cycles that can influence climate that still add some uncertainty. How we might go about cooling the earth or whether we even need to in response to a natural warming cycle may be entirely different to our response now, because of this difference in time scales.

Over hundreds of thousands of years, populated areas that would be affected by rising sea levels are likely to be rebuilt many times. Any increase in sea levels is likely to be accounted for in this naturally, and such issues may never arise in large enough cities. Other places that cannot be built up will likely be abandoned and eroded by the sea over time, with abandonment not unusual for localities that are deemed no longer habitable or economically feasible.

As far as cooling the earth if it is necessary, I expect that we will be looking toward space exploration to help us here. Any science toward terraforming other planets will help, so colonizing Mars may be a useful near-term goal. I assume technologies to control the heat retained by the planet would be important, either by reflecting solar radiation before it reaches our atmosphere, or by controlling the levels of greenhouse gases. If we had the technology now, we could essentially do the same thing, however we don't, and won't.

The difference in time scale involved here is the main point. Man-made climate change is occuring on a time scale that our current technology has no ability to counter directly, and this has huge ramifications on short time scales economically, and for the quality of life for coming generations. Natural climate change occurs on a much longer time scale, so any economic impacts are likely to be amortized across the duration of the change and will probably end up in the noise, with technology likely to be able to keep up if we are intelligent about managing our own contributions.

> but I'd be surprised if its wind power production is even a tenth of its combined fossil fuel power production.

Surprise!

http://electricitymatch.com/blog/customer-choice/texas-elect...

>China has huge reserves of coal but little oil and natural gas.

So the real reason is not that china is a developing nation, but it has little oil and natural gas? That is not going to change, right? So you are saying that China can burn coal forever?

And what happens when a country run out of oil and gas. Can it start burning coal if it is available? Doesn't this mean that the source of pollution will keep shifting perpetually, without a net reduction in emissions?

Why not help these countries with setting up renewables, as much as it is possible.

>Are you saying poor countries should NOT industrialize to help save the world after the industrialized nations have had 100 years to pollute all they want and generate enormous sums of wealth...

No one is saying anything about stopping industrialization. But it does not make sense to exclude some countries on matters like this. The US had 100 years to pollute does not make much sense. Other countries also had 100 years to develop. That they weren't able to do so is no fault of US or other developed countries....