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 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.
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.