[oberstein]

When you have treated all symptoms and stopped them from arising again, the disease is effectively cured even if you still carry it. The final solution will be complete mastery over our planetary weather, it's better we do that sooner than later. Tsunami and earthquake deaths total far above terrorism deaths, we only need funding to fight terrorism to the extent that they get in the way of building to that final solution. Even if we "fix" the climate change disease (say perhaps by wiping out industrial-era and beyond humanity, the disease?) those other natural phenomena will still be killing many.

[jbrande]

You are vastly, VASTLY, overestimating our understanding of the biology, chemistry, geology, & incredibly complex web of interdependencies and relationships that make up the environment we live in.

Much simpler to solve at the source (whatever actions are directly causing the damage) than the falacy of thinking we understand and have accounted for every possible permutation of events that will cascade after dumping material A into resource B. We don't even know what we don't know but this is the end game and mistakes here don't get do overs.

The next step in your logic is our 'traditional' response at this point: drop in another chemical/process that is supposed to 'fix' whatever mess up we did before. Haven't we learned from that yet, Deepwater Horizon was just the most recent example.

[oberstein]

No, I recognize it's a hard problem, that's why we should be devoting significant resources to doing things now.

I get the point about unintended consequences with cascading problems (and cascading solutions to the new problems) (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2743879) but the odds of screwing up here are much less than screwing up on AGI, whose work has already significantly started and may be completed first anyway making this whole discussion moot. Geoengineering is risky, but it's not as risky as other things, including inaction, which as the status quo guarantees loss of thousands of lives. Even if the climate change alarmists' greatest fears come true we still easily have 50 years to try things on smaller scales before time is up. Anyway I think it's a lot more feasible for a strong nation to lead a technological solution than to convince all strong nations to curb their development. Call it a plan B if you must, but at some point I expect climate change alarmists are going to say something like "China and Russia and India aren't playing ball hard enough, their emissions are still causing global warming that will end humanity in x years unless they immediately reduce to the levels of the USA and the EU whose combined efforts bought us y years but it's still not enough, so it's time for war to make them."