[chriskanan]

While things look gloomy, that pretty much ignores geoengineering as a possibility. Chapter Four of the IPCC report [0] discusses things that could be done to offset or slow down this process. Besides renewable/nuclear energy and getting rid of cattle (methane emissions), it discusses geoengineering methods to actively compensate for what we have done to the environment. One of the more interesting and cost effective ideas is stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI):

"There is high agreement that cost of stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) (not taking into account indirect and social costs, research and development costs and monitoring expenses) may be in the range of 1–10 billion USD yr–1 for injection of 1–5 MtS to achieve cooling of 1–2 W m–2 (Robock et al., 2009; McClellan et al., 2012; Ryaboshapko and Revokatova, 2015; Moriyama et al., 2016), suggesting that cost-effectiveness may be high if side-effects are low or neglected (McClellan et al., 2012)." [0]

Some of the other options are outlined in Table 4.7 of the report. Given that these are not that expensive and could radically reduce temperature, I think we should be doing a lot more to research both the intended and unintended consequences. I strongly think some entity is going to try some of them, and some have already been done by folks: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/19/science/earth/iron-dumpin...

If you are interested in mitigating climate change, I encourage you to read through chapter 4 of the IPCC report which covers many of the possible methods.

[0] Chapter 4 of the IPCC report; http://report.ipcc.ch/sr15/pdf/sr15_chapter4.pdf