Human ingenuity is quite good at delivering enormous amounts of energy over a very short time. Nature deploys merely huge energies, but does so for very long periods. She wins, every single time.
We created dams, removed marshes, harnassed hydraulic power, etc - feats unbelievable hundreds of years before. And before us, Romans did also uncredible feats - such as the aqueducts. We keep on improving. Nature more or less remains the same. The end result seems quite clear to me.
The human race has something nature lacks : a mind, which comes with a will and the capacity to understand.
If we haven't bothered to fix something yet, maybe it's because the problem is not so important. But I'm sure that if it tilts in the other way, we can find solutions - or wait until we have the technology to achieve it.
> If we haven't bothered to fix something yet, maybe it's because the problem is not so important.
This is rather callous. The catastrophic tsunami in Japan was a problem of some importance, yet with all our art we could barely predict its arrival, much less affect it.
Your first sentence makes a good point - the 'three rights.' So, can you name an example where the directed application of energy has affected - in a predictable fashion - some natural process of the scale of a hurricane? Earthquakes, climate change, tsunami, storms... Not much of a track record as far as I can see. (Cloud seeding, perhaps? Hardly predictable.)
I think your faith in humanity's power is premature at best, more likely misplaced.
> Nature more or less remains the same. The end result seems quite clear to me.
> ...or wait until we have the technology to achieve it.
Nature might well remain the same, but it's still hardly within our comprehension. The end result you're talking about, that mastery of nature, would appear to be many thousands of years in the future if we ever achieve it.
But as our construction techniques improve, maintainance cost are reduced (or alternatively reconstruction costs are reduced - it's all a tradeoff)
Also, look at what happened as a consequence of the tsunamis - we are getting better at monitoring them.
We will also certainly get a better understanding on how they behave, and maybe how to mitigate them (IIRC wavefronts of opposing frequency cancel out- maybe someday we'll be able to do something like that)
It all takes time- if only to develop understanding on what to do, what to avoid, and technology on how to actually do something.
I'm not denying the fact that we are not able to fix the weather - yet. But in the long run, we will.
It certainly is premature to put much faith in that, yet look at the ideas for geoengineering- it's very inspiring.
I don't want to be overtly optimistic - humans are great - but we also have flaws, mostly social. There are indeed very concerning in the short run - especially in the west and in Europe, where something is going wrong (less interest in science, less willpower, lesser will to live?). But the world is a big place, and if the current powerhouses stop innovating, someone else will take the lead. It doesn't really matters who does.
So in the long run, I'm sure the human race will win against nature (as in total win - incluing whole brain emulation), if we just manage to not destroy ourselves due to existential risks in the process.
These are IMHO the only real obstacles to acheiving that.
One might argue that there's defeat inherent in the idea of conflict with nature. We are a part of it, after all. Perhaps cooperation and understanding are the real path? We don't bomb the tsunami into oblivion, but learn to watch for it and get out of the way when it comes. There are many examples of this philosophy of 'going with the grain': buildings which use ground-source heat pumps, unforced convection and solar panels for HVAC & hot water; kite-driven cargo ships, and so on. The tree that yields survives the storm.
I'm sorry to say that I don't find geoengineering inspiring at all. I find it terrifying. We do not understand the mechanisms at work in global climate at all, yet we're presuming to try and pull the levers to create an outcome years hence. Have these people never heard about chaos, about sensitivity to initial starting conditions? It's exceptionally dangerous.
Most of us look down on 'cargo cult' programmers, people who copy and paste stuff from the web into an editor with no idea how it works, bashing away until it compiles. That's what geoengineering is. To extend the metaphor, we don't have the first clue about the world's API, even what language it's written in, whether it's functional, object oriented or what have you[1]. We're trying to change the value of a few public ivars in the hope that something will happen.
The consequences though! It's not just a compile error: we have some greedy, pig-headed salesman dumping kilotonnes of heavy metal into a rich ocean ecosystem so he can sell some phantom bits of paper to industrial polluters.
I'm coming across like some Sierra Club hardliner here. It's not right, because I'm not, I'm a proper capitalist and I love a supercharged V8 more than I like cigars and steak. I really do hate arrogance though, and I'm a big fan of the precautionary principle.
[1](Everyone knows it's actually in Lisp.)
I do not have an answer, just a gut feeling that both can be done at the same time.
Or about the tens of thousands of nukes, that can strip the poles of ice caps if properly deployed and again completely change the climate.
Or the probably achievable proposed projects of building solar mirrors or seeding the south oceans with iron.
One can look at the amount of energy humankind was commanding 300 years ago and now, and than extrapolate that to the next 300 years. That power would be enough to move stars around, not talking about a single planet surface fluctuations in gas pressure.