(I do think we'll ultimately need to do something like this simply because the cost of not doing it is too high but I understand why people are scared by it, and it's not just down to belief in wood spirits).
Instead we'll just continually pump up some aerosols to ensure the heating doesn't get too bad. And if we ever fail to do so then we'll face incredible heating.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jul/08/exxon-cl...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97...
The audacious PR plot that seeded doubt about climate change: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-62225696
Etc, etc, etc.
So, blaming people for having stupid opinions that various companies spent billions injecting into the discourse seems misguided. At best.
We could have spent much more on solar, nuclear, and other cleaner power.
We could have punished media and politicians that helped sell out our planets future for some slimy oil dollars.
There's a lot we could have done. But instead we have takes like yours; a direct result of 40 years of FUD and misinformation. Do you have the faintest idea what those cars, those cows, those oil spills and methane leaks cost us?
And they're going to cost much much more.
I don’t disagree that oil and use of oil has caused a negative impact on Earth lol.
I don’t think we could’ve done anything in the last fourty years nor do I think we can do anything to stop. It’s too late.
There’s no way we can stop the use of oil and cars now. Sure we can switch to electric, but I don’t think that will stop the snowball.
It’s too entrenched and part of our life now. Sure we can be altruistic and ban the sale of non-EVs but what about all the millions of cars that are already in the streets?
The oil pockets are too deep for government to just ban existing vehicles. In fact the governments have caused wars to protect their oil assets…
Destroying the air we breath and the planet for an average 20 mile drive, that takes an average 25 minutes, is plain insanity. It's well within the capability of electric cars to get the average person to and from work, and most of any form of driving they usually do.
But if we wanted more, think about all the methane that thawing Siberian and Canadian permafrost will release.
Talk about producing less disposable crap, driving less, flying less, and cutting military budgets, everyone gets “exercise their 2A rights” in the US.
Drying less? You have politicians that would attack you for even suggesting that.
We've been trying to talk about climate for a long time.
Clearly, a good portion of the country doesn't care.
Our huge over bloated military keeps a lot of countries in check.
WW1 we went home and ignored the world. 20 years everyone was back at it. We didn’t leave after WW2. Longest period of peace in history.
You could cut the US military budget to $0 and it would be less than a rounding error to what’s needed globally.
That comment illustrates the problem pretty well. We could do all those things and we'd still be way, way behind on what climate scientists say we actually need to do, to avoid disaster.
What we need to do is reduce emissions to zero in less than thirty years, with steep declines starting now. That's not just electric grids, it's all transportation, industry, direct emissions from steel and concrete production, agriculture, everything. And then we need to start pulling massive amounts of excess CO2 back out of the atmosphere. Going to the moon was trivial by comparison; without a breakthrough in cheap fusion or something we're not likely to achieve all this.
SRM isn't a solution but it could buy us a little time, before higher temperatures get the planet releasing gigatons of CO2 and methane without any further help from us.
Maybe the key to not face the scrutiny of non-interventionists is to mask the intervention as an unrelated commercial venture, in which case it should be pretty much good to go.
What's so confusing? By the nature of being intentional, an intentional intervention can be stopped before it does harm.
It's weird logic to think caution should be thrown to the wind because some bad unintentional things weren't prevented.
No treaty prohibiting the emission of 36 billion tons of CO2 every year though.
It's the question we didn't ask about burning fossil fuels. We got our answer the hard way. Have we learned from that?
The cost of not doing might be high. The cost of trying to further manipulate the atmospheric "market" might be worse. Then what?
Cloud seeding is definitely a well practiced thing by now, but it's unclear what the short and long term effects are if we do it at a significant (continent or hemispheric) scale.
I'd love for it to work out and for humanity to actually deflect the looming impacts of climate change.