Space bubbles, atmospheric flak, or other irreversible, completely untestable and entirely unprecedented interventions terrify the shit out of me.
Every time I see someone say why don't we "just" do X to fix climate change, the thing they suggest we just do is either drastically inadequate, really hard, or too slow.
We're way behind at this point. Climate scientists used to say 400 ppm was the highest level that might be safe, but we're at 420ppm and still adding 36 billion tons of CO2 every year, plus a lot of methane.
We're at serious risk of positive feedback effects taking things out of our hands entirely. Higher temperatures bring things like melting ice caps and methane release from permafrost melt, which heat up the planet more. Solar radiation management is a chance to head those things off, and buy time for the changes you're talking about.
And none of the proposed SRM solutions are irreversible. Some of them reverse automatically, shortly after you stop maintaining them.
Some people have tried to make a big deal out of higher CO2 making plants grow faster, but plant growth is limited by lots of other things like nutrient availability, disease, and drought. A lot of forests are not doing well these days.
Other than that, I agree, it would be way to easy to rely on this kind of measure. I'd like it to be a measure to give time to "draw down our unsustainable industries". But I don't think that human nature works like that. It would be taken as a mandate to continue.
In fact we might have the opposite problem: too easily reversible. What if we become dependant on it being there, and then it fails, as stuff in space easily does? What happens "when the levee breaks" ?
1) https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/L1_the...
Evidently not, or we would have done it already. Starting today, even if we adopted those strategies successfully, it would still be too late to prevent a catastrophic rise in global temperatures. In fact, the only thing that would prevent such a scenario is an aggressive and distasteful technological solution (maybe this, maybe something else). That's the situation we're in, like it or not.
Especially when we are trying to modify something complex as our climate.
Its about time we analyzed our actions and changed the way we modify for the better