Cranky - the biggest way to change the albedo of the earth is to spread a few billion humans across it and tell them to chop down forests, proliferate agriculture, and build cities. And that effect correlates with human expansion as good or better than CO2 emissions does. Something to think about, anyway. And albedo effects, combined with the effects of direct heat, can actually be seen, instead of merely theorized upon. Google "urban heat island" for more information.
The willingness of so many engineers on this forum to throw out the informed scientific consensus on this subject based on rather amateur theorizing and the odd Google search or article from a dodgy UK news outlet is ample evidence to me that we're screwed.
I'm willing to question it based on the authority of the respected academics quoted in the article, and on the data the article presents. The funny thing about your "informed scientific consensus" is they all get paid for saying the same thing, and the more they say it, the more they get paid. And the ultimate benefactor of their work is a very rich bank (Goldman Sachs) that has positioned itself to make billions of dollars in a faked up "carbon credit" market as soon as they can donate enough money to senators to pass cap/trade as a policy, despite no model ever showing that cap/trade will have any effect on the environment, and the models we do have being unable to predict warming trends.
Something very important we learn in water policy, is you never propose a policy without some agreed upon understanding (model) of what result that policy is going to have. There is no such thing, AFAIK, for carbon cap/trade. Nobody knows if it'll do squat, yet that link is conveniently ignored in the public discussion.
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