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> even if we magically had a green revolution and became the worlds first zero-emission nation, it’s unlikely that this would be enough to avert climate change.

It's actually quite likely that it would go a long way towards averting climate change. Sure, the US contributes only about 6 GT of greenhouse gases of the 50 GT emitted by the whole world annually, so it first seems that zeroing out this would still result in 44 GT worth of emissions left.

But going from 6 GT to zero cannot be done without huge innovation. Technological innovation, innovation in policy, oversight, enforcement. These pieces of innovation can (and will) be shared with the rest of the world. When the price of solar panels went down, it went down globally. If the US Navy implements a way to scrub CO2 out of seawater and make fuel out of it [1], others can use the method too. Even if the US won't share the technology outright, just knowing it can be done will let others know the idea is worth investing in.

[1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/07/200715123120.h...

The innovation is the easy part.

The hard part is that the structure of our governance is such that extractive industries wield way more power than they would in other environments.

My sincere guess is that we'll kludge the problem with relatively low-tech geoengineering solutions. Primarily stratospheric aerosol injections. The technology is very well understood and fully mature. We know with certainty, from historical volcano eruptions, that a large enough dosage will lower global temperatures near instantly. And the cost is low enough that even a single mid-size economy could afford to unilaterally engage in it.

The downsides are secondary environmental effects (e.g. ocean acidification), the hesitancy of a single country to make a climate altering decision for the rest of the world, and the general bad optics of sweeping the problem under the rug for future generations. All that being said, up until now the tangible costs of climate have so far been relatively mild. If nothing big enough gets done on the carbon side, which seems increasingly likely, then warming will reach the point where it starts imposing major economic and humanitarian costs.

At that point, it's nigh inevitable that at least one major power will bite the bullet and start pumping the stratosphere full of sulfur dioxide.

I’ve seen enough sci fi movies and watched human behavior long enough that the aerosol idea terrifies me. I can see that going so wrong and plunging us into an ice age that we didn’t predict or many other scenarios because we didn’t understand everything as well as we thought we did. Let’s hope that is the absolute last resort.

And I’m not anti science. I’m a former scientist and almost all my experiments usually ended with me realizing I don’t know what I thought I knew, especially when I took something from a simple system I understood and added it to a complex system (the earth in this scenario).

Atmospheric scientist here, currently non-practicing. You’re making the same mistake that climate denialists make, but in reverse. We actually know a great deal about climate feedback mechanisms now. We know the residence time of SO2 in the upper atmosphere. We know how to calculate the change in solar flux as a result. We can model what will happen — we know this because our past climate models did well with the uncontrolled experiment we're already running. Simply because the Earth system is complex doesn’t mean we don’t understand it enough to foresee catastrophic failure.

And if we overshoot cooling, we know how to fix it. Just pump methane into the atmosphere. Stuff lasts a few decades before breaking into ozone and CO2 (via NOx). We already know how that turns out because we’re doing it now.

Lack of perfect knowledge about the Earth-atmosphere system is not an excuse for inaction. The grand experiment was already begun in the 1800s, and it’s too late to call it off now. We must take both decarbonization and geoengineering strategies if we want to escape the worst of this.

I'll admit, I'm also skeptical about our ability to manage climate by pumping even more into the atmosphere. The CO2 models have been very accurate, but doubling the number of variables more-than-doubles the complexity. SO2, for example, is even more acidic than CO2, so we'd risk helping the temperature while making the oceans worse.

SO2's instability is somewhat reassuring, and I'm willing to consider a plan, especially if atmospheric scientists can come to a similar overwhelming consensus as they have on CO2. But until such a plan exists, I believe we need to focus heavily on decarbonization because that's a plan we are absolutely certain to be effective. To the extent that geoengineering reduces the urgency of that, it risks making things worse.

Not sure what you mean by doubling the variables. Climate models have to take as input levels of all sorts of greenhouse gasses: CFCs, methane, water, and CO2. And land use change, which changes albedo and CO2 and water. And aerosol emissions, which are often point sources, which vary from light reflective particles to black carbon on snow. And also feedback mechanisms like deglaciation and sea ice change and three different cloud feedbacks. And change in aviation as a direct creator of clouds.

The amount of geoengineering we are already doing is massive and multivariate. If you don’t believe we can handle one more variable of a well known aerosol’s effect in our models, then you should consider disbelieving all climate models.

Here's another way to put it: The "zero dimensional" model of CO2 is incredibly straightforward. You add CO2, temperature goes up. It's trivial and undeniable, and all by itself tracks fairly well with the observed warming.

Better modeling adds precision, and has been even more accurate, but is difficult for the non-expert to evaluate. It should be easy to trust its track record, but without that positive gut feeling I get from "We've been burning fossil fuels and it would be bizarre if the temperature didn't go up".

So I'm able to base my confidence in the models on a simpler model that I do understand. It's easy to accept that the existing additions (CFCs, methane, ocean currents, land, ice, etc) are valid (especially since they also track the data so well). But SO2 would be a brand-new variable, so I don't have as good an intuition.

I know it's not brand-new. As with CO2, the basic physics of SO2 are well understood, we've observed natural experiments with SO2 emission several times. It's definitely promising.

But I really want to see a full plan in place and become comfortable with it before we begin to rely on it. Because otherwise, having watched people deny that trivial, obvious stuff for ideological reasons, I expect them to seize on geoengineering as "stage 6 denialism": "It's real, it's our fault, it's not good, reducing CO2 would help, it's not too late... but only because somebody will dump SO2 into the atmosphere and so we should start all the coal factories up again".

No, that does not require some incredible earth-shattering event. It requires political consensus of a majority of nations. Like was done to forbid emissions of ozon-layer damaging chemicals.

People thought that obviously, all countries would see the common interest in protecting Earth's climate. There was ONE major rogue nation in this big plan: USA. G.W Bush was the one who presented climate change denial as a respectable policy. I am not sure people measure the impact of this position.

Most other advanced countries cut down their emissions, much more than the US did (no, it is not a matter of density, distance between cities or so on: even if you remove all emissions due to vehicles, USA is still way above EU).

> The developing world wants modern life, and if they have to burn fossil fuels to catch up, they will.

China will peak at a much lower level of CO2/capita than the US currently has. Given the current trajectory, it is quite possible that China will never in its history emit more CO2/capita than the US.

> Extraordinary visionary leadership in the right place at the right time

Give me a break. Listening to the consensus of experts, both international and domestic experts, on issues that threaten the whole ecosystem, is not "visionary leadership". It is called "not electing a cartoon villain in office".

> even if we magically had a green revolution and became the worlds first zero-emission nation

You would also need to nuke Bhutan and Suriname, two carbon-negative countries.

> frankly, too US-centric

Try buying petroleum from OPEC in anything but USD: https://www.opec.org/opec_web/en/data_graphs/40.htm

Corollary: http://www.cnn.com/2000/WORLD/meast/10/30/iraq.un.euro.reut/

USD is the world reserve currency. Most international trading occurs in terms of dollars.