It's been said multiple times that reduction is no longer enough - even a cut to zero won't prevent warming at this point. Geo-engineering to actively reduce carbon is the inevitable conclusion.
However its very apparent that there's no way in hell we'll actually stop emissions any time soon. I think that's what has been distorted into "it's too late". It'll take 30+ years at the most optimistic to see significant decreases in CO2 emission which is why some people advocate for geoengineering.
Armchair skeptic: manually removing CO2 is the least dumb way of doing climate engineering. It's possible, it hasn't got nearly the terrible side effects of something like sulfur aerosols, and it can actually produce useable products (although the commercial viability of producing graphite and hydrocarbons from CO2 is... suspect). It's a nice dream though, and a fun counterargument to people saying we will always need coal and oil for steel and plastics. Ultimately of course the amount of carbon exceeds our need for oil/graphite/coke by a factor of several million, even over several millenia.
Here's a data point: If we shoved the entire United States into the ocean and ended this nation as we know it, the reduction in GHG's (greenhouse gases) would be less than 15%, maybe half, if that much. A single massive wild fire emits more GHG's than the entire transportation and energy industry does in an entire year.
See "Emissions by Country" section in this report:
https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emiss...
Also,
http://www.pnas.org/content/106/6/1704.full.pdf
The paper explains, paraphrasing, how the issues created by carbon dioxide concentration are irreversible for 1,000 years after emissions stop.
Here's an excellent write-up on the conclusions from extensive experiments by Google:
https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/what-it-would-re...
From the article:
"We decided to combine our energy innovation study’s best-case scenario results with Hansen’s climate model to see whether a 55 percent emission cut by 2050 would bring the world back below that 350-ppm threshold. Our calculations revealed otherwise. Even if every renewable energy technology advanced as quickly as imagined and they were all applied globally, atmospheric CO2 levels wouldn’t just remain above 350 ppm; they would continue to rise exponentially due to continued fossil fuel use." Paraphrasing: If the world converted to 100% renewable energy, CO2 levels would still rise exponentially.
Another point they made:
"Our reckoning showed that reversing the trend would require both radical technological advances in cheap zero-carbon energy, as well as a method of extracting CO2 from the atmosphere and sequestering the carbon."