If it was possible I would put quite some money on that geo engineering (like stratospheric aerosol injection) will be seriously discussed on a UN level within ten years. Climate change seems only to speed up and co2 emissions are still rising. At one point there is simply no alternative.
I also think that this is what will happen (not only discussed) but unless we master fusion it’s practically just fixing a symptom and we’d have to do that for quite a while and the oceans will probably become too acidic.
Fusion would solve a lot, but even if we invent room-temperature superconductors today, it would still take so much time to roll fusion out on a big scale and replace oil infrastructure with electric infrastructure.
I tend to be very pessimistic about climate change, but I hope I’m wrong.
Greta Thunberg talks about it in her book - if the bathtub is overflowing in your house and water is spilling across the floor everywhere, step 1 for most people is to turn off the water. Yes sure it is fine to look for towels and buckets to try to contain the damage (and I don’t even disagree with you that it’ll be needed), but that also assumes that they’ll work and there will be political support to deploy them at scale, instead of mustering up the political support to turn the fucking taps down since at this point that’s clearly needed and is relatively speaking much much easier.
I was more stating what I think will happen rather than wat we should be doing.
In terms of pure physics it is ofc easier to turn off the metaphorical tap, but in terms of power and politics we seem unable to transition to renewables. And I’m afraid once we switch on the geo-engineering button we still won’t transition. Only once oil is priced out of the market completely, be it fusion or abundant solar and wind (with energy storage), will we make the transition. But again I might be too pessimistic.
If it was possible I would put quite some money on that geo engineering (like stratospheric aerosol injection) will be seriously discussed on a UN level within ten years. Climate change seems only to speed up and co2 emissions are still rising. At one point there is simply no alternative.
I also think that this is what will happen (not only discussed) but unless we master fusion it’s practically just fixing a symptom and we’d have to do that for quite a while and the oceans will probably become too acidic.
Fusion would solve a lot, but even if we invent room-temperature superconductors today, it would still take so much time to roll fusion out on a big scale and replace oil infrastructure with electric infrastructure.
I tend to be very pessimistic about climate change, but I hope I’m wrong.
Greta Thunberg talks about it in her book - if the bathtub is overflowing in your house and water is spilling across the floor everywhere, step 1 for most people is to turn off the water. Yes sure it is fine to look for towels and buckets to try to contain the damage (and I don’t even disagree with you that it’ll be needed), but that also assumes that they’ll work and there will be political support to deploy them at scale, instead of mustering up the political support to turn the fucking taps down since at this point that’s clearly needed and is relatively speaking much much easier.
I was more stating what I think will happen rather than wat we should be doing.
In terms of pure physics it is ofc easier to turn off the metaphorical tap, but in terms of power and politics we seem unable to transition to renewables. And I’m afraid once we switch on the geo-engineering button we still won’t transition. Only once oil is priced out of the market completely, be it fusion or abundant solar and wind (with energy storage), will we make the transition. But again I might be too pessimistic.