The whole problem is we aren’t capable of doing what we know needs to be done.
So does the CO2 itself. The oceans are getting more acidic already, killing shellfish and throwing off food webs.
Throwing additional geoengineering on top of the geoengineering we're already doing will almost certainly cause as many problems as it solves. It would be so much simpler, cheaper, and more effective to just stop digging carbon out of the ground and putting it in the sky.
I’m fairly certain we will resort to this type of geo engineering soon - cutting down energy consumption is not a viable path, it’s just not going to happen. Quite the contrary, humanity’s energy consumption is likely to grow a lot.
I agree with you about keeping carbon in the ground - but it will only happen for economic reasons in reality (ie. solar being cheaper than oil and gas) and the transition will take decades.
I hope we don’t hit irreversible feedback effects in the next couple of decades!
I know every generation feels special - the pinnacle of humanity, a special time - but this time around it really feels like what happens in the next 20-30 years can have make it or break it consequences for later generations (not just climate, also chemical pollution, risk of nuclear/biological weapons use and possibly AI - though that could also solve a lot of our problems)
It seems much easier to have unintended effects, than to get exactly the effects you want with from a global geoengineering campaign on the first try.
You're still being quite optimistic...
This plays out with a country like Bangladesh or India, under duress, ignoring everyone else and attempting to do it themselves
The US and EU countries get more migrants than they can handle; resentment grows; attempts to solve the problem with bureaucracy and policing fail spectacularly; calls for outright violence grow louder; and the well-meaning citizenry agrees that Something Must Be Done!
Geo-engineering is something, and it will be done.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_European_migrant_crisis
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/10/us/migrant-crisis-massach...
[2]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/immigration-us-mexico-border-cr...
[3]: https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/policies/eu-migration-pol...
- we make an AGI or find a human genius that figures out a way to make it work, in which case we're all good
- we try it with known methods, it fails and we possibly go extinct faster in the worst case scenario
Fun times. No pressure.
On the bright side I suppose it only makes sense to plan for success though, since if we fail then we're dead anyway.
People seem to be accepting "the new normal" very fast. I'm not sure geo-engineering will be popular, since the status quo bias that's currently preventing us from reducing fossil fuels, will also stop any "artificial weather manipulation".
By what mechanism would you expect something bad to suddenly happen?
Up-thread, you said "and replaced it with renewables", but we can't do that right now.
Bluntly, if we hard-stop the use of fossil fuels today, a large chunk of the human population are going to die.
> > > It seems reasonable to me to assume that nothing bad would happen if we stopped fossil fuel consumption right now.
For what most people mean by "right now", something bad happens - many, many people die. You chose that phrase; I didn't. So within the normal meaning of the phrase, you are very wrong.
> Nothing bad will happen if we suddenly stopped all fossil fuel consumption and replaced it with renewable energy.
Do you really need me to repeat this for every subsequent reference to the hypothetical? You yourself acknowledged it in your first comment, so you obviously understood it.
But if you need me to, fine, replace the sentence you quoted with:
> It seems reasonable to me to assume that nothing bad would happen if we stopped fossil fuel consumption right now and replaced it with renewable energy.
We can't actually do that right now.
When can we? 10 years? With all the combines, and all the tractors, and all the semis having to be electric? Can we even do it then? We maybe can in 20...
If it's 20 years from now before we can do it, that's not "right now".
The problem with the way you said it is that it makes it sound like we could do it now (for reasonably normal values of "now"). We can't.
It's incredible how rabid people get when talking about phasing out fossil fuel. In your eyes, I haven't stated clearly enough that the hypothetical (which you keep telling me is impossible) is a hypothetical. Now, any normal reader might see that and think "Hm, if that's not possible, he's surely talking about a hypothetical". But not you, you keep going about how I haven't made it clear enough that it's a hypothetical. Have you stopped to reflect on why you're acting the way you are?
As for your second paragraph... Physician, heal thyself.
What are you trying to argue about?
But it certainly seems much easier to predict compared to the results of further CO2 in the atmosphere. We've lived through the transition period from lower CO2 to current CO2, so it's reasonable to assume we'll see the same effects in reverse. We haven't lived through the period of current CO2 to higher CO2.
> and I am even hesitant to list some ideas because they sound like climate denier conspiracy theories
Understandable, no worries!
> But just as a hypothetical example, there may be effects from aerosols ejected along with CO2 when burning fossil fuels, which act on shorter time scales in the opposite direction, which could lead to overshoot.
Sure, it's possible, but it seems much more likely that continued increases in CO2 will have worse unpredictable effects.
I completely agree.
Also curious if the earth maybe has some tricks (last one I can recall was more clouds were causing more cooling than expected in the climate models) that will invalidate the current climate change models.