The overwhelming majority of climate scientists have concluded that human-caused global warming threatens the future of civilization, if not indeed of humankind.
The increasing outbreaks of extreme weather — heat waves, droughts, floods — suggest that major problems are already starting to arise, not conveniently postponed to the far future.
The inability of many Florida residents to purchase affordable home insurance is merely one of the problems that increasingly destructive weather will produce.
And it's no small problem.
Since carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere are the basic cause of the problem, most countries are attempting to phase out the burning of fossil fuels and rely instead on green energy — solar and wind.
But there are questions whether we can do this fast enough to head off worse problems.
The global predicament is bad enough that many are trying to figure out how we could "geoengineer" the atmosphere.
They want to make it reflect more of the sun's energy back into space rather than letting it get through where it can warm the world up more.
This is an interesting idea, and some of the people who have been thinking about it are technical people — scientists and engineers — who are well-educated in physics and chemistry.
Even so, we would all do well to be highly skeptical about any proposals to geoengineer the world's atmosphere.
Our planet has only one atmosphere, and if a geoengineering project were to get out of control, it could produce catastrophic results even faster than global warming is doing.
The history of the importation of rabbits into Australia offers a tiny example of how hard it is to predict the consequences of even tiny changes in a complex ecosystem.
CNN reports:
"What seemed like an innocent Christmas gift of 24 English rabbits in 1859 would go on to become Australia’s 'most devastating biological invasion,' according to a new study by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"Wild rabbits are not native to Australia and are considered an invasive species. Farmers say the animals multiply quickly and destroy their crops and land, which can lead to massive soil erosion and other environmental issues."
Since 1859 Australia's wild rabbit population has varied greatly , with as many as ten billion by 1920.
Thanks to disease and control efforts, there are "only" about 200 million rabbits there now.
The rabbits in Australia have been a major problem, but one that could be lived with. However, changes introduced into the world's atmosphere could be far more serious.
In the first place, atmospheric changes could change weather patterns so that parts of the world depending on rain to grow needed food crops could be hit with prolonged droughts.
Other areas might be inundated with so much extra rain that food crops are drowned out.
One can only begin to imagine the political consequences of such changes in world agriculture. Already, there are international conflicts over the allocation of water from rivers that flow between several countries, but geoengineering could aggregate such tensions and conceivably lead to mass starvation in several areas.
It could also bring on wars.
One of today's major problems in many countries is what to do about refugees trying to get into them and the resulting political reaction of current inhabitants.
Climate refugees fleeing areas damaged by global warming will undoubtedly increase as the warming continues, but geoengineering could accelerate the rate at which the number of refugees increases.
Rather than risking the future of civilization and humanity on untested theories about geoengineering, we probably should just intensify current efforts to replace carbon fuels with green energy.
Paul F. deLespinasse is Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Computer Science at Adrian College. Read Professor Paul F. deLespinasse's Reports — More Here.