Your "other option" means certain disaster, sooner.
We already know what to do: build out renewables. Tax and otherwise cut burning fossil fuels. Renewables are already radically cheaper than any energy source ever devised, so the faster they are built out, the cheaper it gets.
Anything else is a dangerous distraction. Any big enough distraction is disastrous.
> Your "other option" means certain disaster, sooner.
I see no evidence or reason to believe this at all, let alone with such extreme certitude. Shouldn't we try harder to have a realistic scientific assessment?
> We already know what to do
But it's not happening and it isn't going to happen. That means your plan doesn't work. That means that, however well-intentioned you are, your plan is do nothing and fry the planet.
It is happening, just not fast enough. Renewables are already cheaper than anything else. Building out more saves money. Only social inertia slows it. Distraction adds to inertia.
Doing things to increase inertia makes things worse. Distracting people with pies in skies makes things worse.
The planet fries, regardless, if CO2 is not brought down. Fooling around with anything that does not brings catastrophe nearer.
> Only social inertia slows it. Distraction adds to inertia.
I don't buy the armchair social psychology here. People think they are much, much better at predicting how the population will react to things than they actually are. This led to a lot of terrible decisions during the pandemic, like telling people masks don't work on the baseless folk theory that wearing masks would cause people to take more risks. That theory, by the way, was very similar to the one you're advancing with such certitude.
We are moving too slowly to avert potentially catastrophic climate change. The armchair theory that, somehow, not buying more time with geoengineering will somehow... I don't know, somehow cause people to be more focused and move faster?... is barely believable even as a folk theory, but on top of that, is very clearly not coming to pass. Look around at what's happening in the world.
You're just layering folk theory upon folk theory with baseless, utter confidence. This is not the sort of problem we can just bluff our way through with gut feelings. We need to consider the options in a comprehensive, systematic, thoughtful, scientific fashion.
Repeated baseless assertion is an irresponsible way to deal with a complex global crisis.
The planet is not a morality play where we simply demand that people be virtuous and things work out. We have to actually think things through and come up with a realistic plan considering the realities on the ground and human nature.
> Distracting from that effort makes things worse.
I see no evidence or reason to believe that an effort to reduce solar irradiance distracts from the control of greenhouse gases on a civilizational scale.
Civilizations are always doing tons of different things. Most of those things aren't competing with one another for people or resources. They're just happening simultaneously.
We can walk and chew gum at the same time.
And don't you want to know how difficult this will be before immediately shutting it down? Isn't that a critical consideration?
> I see no evidence or reason to believe that an effort to reduce solar irradiance distracts from the control of greenhouse gases on a civilizational scale.
Then you are not paying attention.
We need to shut these liars down and stop thinking that we can make huge changes to complex systems that we do not understand and have predictable results, let alone good results
What gives you the epistemic right to dismiss a proposal not on its scientific merits, but on some assumption about the certain moral evil of the people who said it?
To assert that it is possible using engineering to have predictable control over a system that we only have the barest understanding of (Earth's geophysical systems) is a straight up lie.
By that logic, there is no point in doing anything at all. Who knows whether we can avoid burning by stopping CO2 emissions? It's all too complex!
You can't separate the scientists whose models told you to reduce CO2 and the scientists who propose reducing solar irradiance with bubble shades. They're all using the same equations to predict what will happen.
Oh, so let me try to follow your lead and lets imagine that it's not going to bend anytime soon... How about we start thinking in terms of big scale disaster preparation in stead of inventing pseudo solutions? In the past underground dwellings have been popular, I imagine these will be more resilient to heat... as for flooding, not so much... so how about we do some calculations on how to become less vulnerable to flooding, etc? Just saying...
IMHO, it's very easy to jump the tech fetish bandwaggon but all the ingenious inventions likely may turn out to matter less than little when nature applies force...
We already know what to do: build out renewables. Tax and otherwise cut burning fossil fuels. Renewables are already radically cheaper than any energy source ever devised, so the faster they are built out, the cheaper it gets.
Anything else is a dangerous distraction. Any big enough distraction is disastrous.