Is there a 'conservative' solution to global warming?

I don't know of and "conservative" or "liberal" strategies in specific. There are obvioulsy a few environmental groups that think we should just shut down any/all fossil fuel based consumption and then move from there but that seems to be a bit out there for a workable strategy.

IMO, the question of whether of not global warming is actually aman-made issue and whether or not it can be reversed (or should be reversed) have to be answered before any real solution becomes viable. Otherwise we're just tilting at windmills.

Those questions, IMO, are within the realm of government responsibility. Conducting real research without a predefined set of results based on political agendas.

Once that is done then there may be a market-based solution (or multiple solutions) if the problem is determined to be real. I'm guessing that these would be the "Conservative Strategy" in the long run.

nimh,

Interesting question. It is difficult to simply assume global warming, as currently described, exists and look for distinctions between liberal and conservative approaches. There is something essential from the liberal viewpoint in the (to me, very odd) insistence that global warming does exist and that it is a result of human activity.

There is no doubt that greenhouse gases (primarily CO2 and methane) are accumulating in the atmosphere, and that these gases can contribute to the increased absorption of solar radiation by the earth. However it is far from clear that this phenomenon will not yield a new quasi equilibrium state with respect to the carbon cycle, or that any lasting change in the earth's temperature will result of this one effect.

Available tree ring data and the geological record establish beyond doubt that the earth's climate undergoes continuous variation on a number of time scales due to various factors, ranging from solar flares, to volcanic activity, shifts in oceanic currents greenhouse effects in the atmosphere (including dust), and other factors. There have been,I believe, about six major ice ages recorded in the geological record of the earth. Our planet has warmed and cooled many times and will do so again.

However to take up your challenge and assume warming does exist to the degree that it compels concerted action,and then look for liberal and conservative solutions ---

Liberals look to the developed nations and blame them for consuming an "unfair" per capita share of the earth's resources and thereby an unfair production of greenhouse gases. Thus they come up with things like the Kyoto treaty which utterly exempt China, India, Indonesia, Egypt, etc. from any corrective action at all. (Notwithstanding the facts that greenhouse gas production is rising faster in those places than anywhere else, and that primitive methods of energy production (wood & charcoal cooking & heating fires) produce far more CO2 per unit of useful energy production and release much more particulate into the atmosphere than mod3ern methods. Note the recent furor over the "brown cloud" over South Asia).

Conservatives look at other indices. In this case greenhouse gas produced per unit of production of the food and goods humanity wants and consumes. In this scale the industrialized nations (former Soviet Empire states excluded) look pretty good.

Liberals call for government mandates for the use of hydrogen as a fuel in compound engines and new design fuel cells.

Conservatives point out that free hydrogen does not occur in nature. To get it we must burn coal or gas to produce electricity and use it to separate the oxygen and hydrogen in water. Sadly a good deal of energy is lost in the transitions and we get far less from the burning of hydrogen than we did from burning the coal or gas we started with.

Liberals believe that solar and wind power can solve the rest of our needs.

Conservatives know that , even under the best of conditions, these sources can meet only about 20% of our requirements. We must look to other sources, including nuclear power.

How's that for a start?

It is very much likely that changes of climate on the Earth follow multimillennial cycles that are characterized by intermittent warming and freezing of the Earth.
I want to quote my own posting I placed on the open A2K forum:

The source of the quote appearing in the body of my posting is: http://www.museum.state.il.us/exhibits/ice_ages/when_ice_ages.html — BBCode was not preserved in course of copying and pasting, hence I had to post the URL explicitly.