An inevitable step is human progress it to realize that there is no controlling the planet's climate.
We might be at the top of the food chain, but we are still at the bottom of the interplanetary dust chain, and always will be.
That’s an odd thing to say, we’re controlling it right now. We’re about half way through pushing up global temperatures by several degrees over a hundred years or so. We didn’t set out to do that, but we’re doing it nonetheless.
It’s not a question of whether we can significantly change the climate, we know we can, the question is how we should choose to do that going forwards.
> It’s not a question of whether we can significantly change the climate, we know we can, the question is how we should choose to do that going forwards
This I agree with. What the GP and I are trying to say is that, in our opinions at least, we should choose to do it by adopting practices that minimize how much we affect the climate.
Does it look like we have the climate under control? No, quite the opposite. We're not controlling the climate, we're the climate equivalent of toddlers who just set the house on fire.
Technically we're already changing the planet today, it shows that it is very much inside of our grasp, it just requires the cooperation of every human on the planet and right now we just have that cooperation both incidentally and in a bad way.
We just need to get to a point where it does not require such mass cooperation, and as our energy scale increases that will become more and more possible with time.
That is assuming we don't collapse or regress or stagnate, which is possible, but I would hope that doesn't happen.
They in total would need to be able to dim up to 2% of incoming solar radiation.
1. Whether it's physically possible to accomplish this. The natural course of the Earth is to enter into another ice age at some time in the future. Is there a way for us to prevent this from happening, without compromise or sacrifice? Without side effects? I don't have the needed knowledge to disqualify that possibility, but I lack the confidence that it is an achievable outcome. I imagine the closest comparison points we have for such efforts is our attempts to introduce non-native species to impact local flora and fauna. And that hasn't typically gone well in the past.
2. Whether having such control is at all possible. If we develop the means to control the climate to such an extent, I can only imagine what that would lead to in terms of global politics. It has to be something that the entire planet is cooperative about, and hope that no personal agendas try to push for misuse of the technology.
We knew about fossil ressource depletion in the 70s and about the effect on Co2 on temperature in the 19th century (the earliest article i've found is from 1912, but the science was available earlier).
We could have invested in better infrastructure and better housing since at least the 90s, and pushed the research towards material science and fission/fusion after the 80s. Pushed to create more public researcher jobs would've been nice too (most innovation is built on top of public research, and forming researchers is nice for the industry too)
Instead we built more stuff for cheaper (by outsourcing the production and crippling the productive apparel of small third-world countries).