To me, this seems like a natural extension of our hydrological management projects, and of our reshaping of the biosphere to our liking. Take the continental US as an example - we have totally transformed the ecosystem from primeval forests and plains into this totally human-managed ecosystem of crop lands and domesticated animals. The next step is to think about the entire planetary biosphere, and apply large-scale engineering projects to directly modifying and managing it. Emissions control is a primitive way to do that, but it will eventually have to be more comprehensive and sophisticated. Eventually we need to sequester atmospheric carbon, but we also need to manage things like ocean acidity and the nitrogen cycle - all of these are critical factors in the set of geo/biophysical systems that create planetary conditions favorable for human civilization.

The trick is to develop and deploy these methods fast enough that we can race ahead of climate conditions that become too unfavorable to support a civilization that is capable of deploying them. I think people underestimate how much can be accomplished on that front in a very short amount of time, but that still doesn't excuse the complacency about it. In particular, I'm frustrated by the lack of urgency when it comes to preserving what remains of the "natural world" - at this point, I'm basically writing off a lot of the natural diversity that exists currently, and expect that the current mass extinction event will be the most severe in planetary history. Even if human civilization survives, it will exist in a mostly artificial biosphere with a tremendously streamlined set of species.

    > Geo-engineering projects could not 
    > come too soon

"Ulcers aren't caused by stress, they are caused by bacteria!"

"Heresy!! String him up!!!"

If you've got compelling historical sources for holocaust denial or compelling scientific evidence against climate change, let's see it.

Before your automatic downvote, I'm not denying climate change and some of its future effects (maybe even catastrophic). But the fact that it's happening doesn't explain or justify why people seem so eager to see its effects in everything even without a scientific proof whatsoever.

Oh please. No one would even try in this political climate. As you said "don't believe in climate change? you are a nazi".

    > No one would even try in
    > this political climate

It is obvious to see - marathon runners, sprinters, etc

http://www.pewinternet.org/2016/10/04/public-views-on-climat...

Further, unless you're a climate-change scientist, holding anything other than the 97% consensus view among climate-change scientists is willful ignorance, usually along partisan lines.

I'm ready for another two terms; from the outside looking in I expected continuance of the bombs dropping, the climate talks to continue to end in toothless agreements, the off-shoring of abysmal labour conditions to continue unabated, and so forth, regardless of whether your executive wore red or blue.

Please give me reason for hope, because we need it.

The problem isn't trying to socialize them.

Their beliefs are a matter of faith and as such is not something they are willing to seriously question without help. You simply cannot "socialize" this problem away. The reality is, these are people who genuinely caught up in a web of charismatic con artists and unfortunately we reality is we will not be more effective than professionals. I have friends who I interact with daily who support Trump and socializing with them it has become clear they take dogma over facts. And I don't mean things that are heavily politicized like Climate Change. I mean, literally, year old events that have dozens of news articles (including multiple right-wing sources) they choose to disbelieve over their chosen charismatic leader on YouTube and Right Wing Radio.

This isn't something you can fix with socialization. This is a willing blindness of cult followers who have been decieved.

https://cultnews.com/2015/01/how-do-you-deprogram-a-scientol...

> Deprogramming a current member of Scientology would depend upon the concern and support of family and friends.

> a charismatic leader who increasingly becomes an object of worship as the general principles that may have originally sustained the group lose their power;

> a process [Lifton calls] coercive persuasion or thought reform;

> economic exploitation of group members by the leader and the ruling coterie.

1) They felt vulnerable and they were losing ground in what they believe is a religious war on "their" belief system by Cultural Marxists / PC / Liberal culture. They feel that old institutions that they value have been weakened or destroyed outright. (i.e. Marriage) They rely on charismatic leaders to focus their worship. (i.e. Trump, Rush Limbaugh, Milo)

2) The "cult" has created a filter bubble in which cult members discuss things among themselves and assume all outside influences are heretics acting in bad faith to lure them away from the light. (i.e. They attack credentialed experts while holding up small minority opinions that are not the views of almost all experts in that field of study) People who act against this are ostracized by the party, called cucks, RINOs, etc. (i.e. Right wing talk radio, Alex Jones, Blogspam, Fox News Opinion Shows)

3) The "cult" acts against the economic best interests of the majority of its members and instead focus on servicing the needs of its ruling coterie of donors. (i.e. It focuses on servicing the needs of the wealthy donors and their beliefs.)

Socializing and normalizing people who claim people never shot BLM protesters, Mosques don't get burned down, and Sandy Hook never happened is the opposite of what you should do.

I'm sorry, but normalizing that behavior is not a viable solution.

If the numbers were different we could marginalize these people. But the numbers aren't different and it doesn't help that generally speaking liberals tend not to vote in off elections. So the problem is even worse. Marginalizing will blow back.

That makes it clear you don't understand the problem.

This isn't about scientific consensus (which they can deploy reasonable sounding experts to "debunk") but literal fact denial of events (such as shootings and arrest records) that happened in the previous 1-5 years.

Once a group of people start arguing that events that occurred a few months or a year ago simply _did not happen_ because it is wrongthink it is no longer a political animal but a cult. It is at that point you can't "socialize" those people and you need to seek alternatives.

Please explain to me why people are denying Sandy Hook was a real event?

They also deny things like this happen:

https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2015/11/the-3-a...

http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/760250/Texas-mosque-burn...

Despite the fact I can link them to articles.

Please explain to me how that isn't cult thinking and fundamental denial of reality?

This isn't some lunatic fringe at this point but includes people the President of the United States either takes advice from or treats as friends (i.e. Alex Jones).

Ideally, we need a climate change solution that can be enacted in a decentralised fashion by large numbers of motivated people without much need for government intervention.

You've more or less just described global efforts to reduce CO2 emissions. If and when those efforts fail, Geo-engineering might turn out to provide a cheaper and more effective partial solution.

But that's from memory, and I could be recalling the details wrong.

I fear humanity may be in a race condition between our ability to engineer solutions and the problems that come with scaling our population.

That's a big if. The global climate is an extremely chaotic and complex system; ur ability to accurately model it is still extremely nascent. (Scientifically, understanding the global climate seems at least as hard as deciphering the architecture of the human genome, say.) If you are at all skeptical of our ability to master geoengineering in time for it to matter -- I'm talking a few decades here -- then it behooves you to opt for conservation instead. Literally the only system that we know for a fact is sustainable is the one that existed before industrialization.

This is the only proposal I've seen regarding ocean acidification.

In brief, we need massive amounts of lime to dump into the ocean as an artificial carbon cycle. The problem is how to get lime? If we have massive amounts of clean power, something similar to the cement process (CaCO3 -> CaO) is possible because limestone is cheap.

The problem is the energy requirements are insane. One of the estimations in the talk that remediates only 10% of our yearly CO2 emissions requires 700 TWh (2.52E18 J). Unless we start building \several hundred new GW-scale nuclear[1] power plants (and started a decade ago), I doubt we will be able to do much to address ocean acidification.

[1] I know solar has improved a lot recently. Unless it's possible to generate >1TW of continuous power (24x7), nuclear is probably the only option.

We're only really acidifying the very top layer, unfortunately that's where a huge fraction of the stuff that matters is.

Artificial upwelling is a somewhat promising geo-engineering tech to reduce acidification and increase primary production (and thereby carbon capture). The idea is to somehow bring deep sea water up to the surface. Early attempts used long tubes with one way valves that were lifted up and down by wave energy. New more promising techniques use wave energy to compress air, pump the air down deep and then bubble it (and the surrounding water) up from a grid of pipes.

If you provide them with solar, wind, nuclear, geothermal, tidal, or possibly fusion power at costs lower than or equal to organic fuels, they will not suffer (and might benefit).

The Saudis can go a hell of a lot cheaper for oil.

Unless you're willing to kill people we are going to have a mess to clean up in the future.

Which is ok, because in the future tech will be way more advanced.