Ocean acidification is small fries compared to how much impact thermal effects have. Just about every area of concern when it comes to climate change - heat waves and extreme weather events, agricultural impacts, sea level rise - comes from thermal imbalance alone.
Yes, it's "not even close".
Can you "reduce output" globally, to negative values, within the next 5 years?
Because that's what's required to match the predicted effects of doing stratospheric aerosol injection at scale.
Currently, the temperature is still "chasing down" the sheer amount of CO2 that was emitted over time. Even the completely unrealistic scenario of reducing emissions to zero instantly would cause climate change to continue for a while.
Geoengineering offers a range of sharp, cost-effective interventions that can knock the temperature down more quickly and more directly.
you just restated what you already said in response to the question, "do you know what you're talking about?"
i'm not judging either way, i'm not a climate scientist and i have no opinion on the importance of ocean acidification, i just find it obnoxious when someone's asked to defend their position and they just say it again, but _harder_.
Unfortunately, I do know what I'm talking about. Which is where my sheer hatred for environmental activists is coming from.
The top 3 enemies of doing something about climate change are: fossil fuel megacorp PR and lobbying efforts (no surprise), mainstream media (little to no surprise) and environmental activists (fucking why).
I agree that we need to have a conversation about geo engineering. And I've been staying up to date with the sulphur regulation thing. That being said what do you think of the position that we should avoid temporary solutions to global warming in order to drive a sense of urgency? You could make the argument that we want the slope of temperature change to be as high as possible in the near term to drive political action. Again I have no doubt that geo engineering will become the only viable solution. But right now a significant % of tbe population doesnt even believe in climate change and wouldnt support any action taken. So maybe they need to be convinced - and so far education hasn't convinced them so maybe 5 degrees fahrenheit will.
I do not think that "climate change accelerationism" is a defensible position.
We are fighting climate change not to feel good about ourselves, but to prevent those higher-degree impacts from happening in the first place.
What's worse is that climate change has a considerable momentum. If you resolve to hit +2C before taking climate action, then even stopping all GHG emissions instantly would leave you with another ~+1C that would trickle in over time. In reality, there is no fucking way to obliterate all GHG emissions overnight.
Geoengineering solves a lot, but it doesn't delete all of the problems outright. Unless you commit to some truly unhinged methods. Which might not be the worst idea, really - but then every problem we have with making geoengineering happen apples at least tenfold.
Yeah I was mostly playing Devil's advocate. This sulphur cloud thing has been driving me nuts for over a year so I've entertained the accelerationist concept to save my sanity. It's incredible that it's not talked about more and yes it does call into question the rationality of many climate activists. At the end of the day I don't think the monkey brain evolved to handle this type of decision making.
Wouldn’t it be wise to reduce our output, rather than pump something else into the atmosphere?