[leinadho]

I like your attitude, and would love to hear more about why you think this. It doesn't seem obvious to me that it's something we'll actually "solve" while maintaining our current population/civilization, but maybe I just read too many doom and gloom articles?

[gfodor]

I'm looking at this as if I am a historian from the future. From first principles, humanity has the pre-requisites in my mind to solve the problem. This doesn't mean it will be easy or obvious in predicting exactly how it is done. It's just much more likely to me that we solve it over the next several decades than not. We may take a hit along the way. Fusion energy seems relatively imminent, the economics for solar are in a positive feedback loop, and X Prizes for carbon capture are well underway. If we just get practically limitless clean energy (possible given the existence proof of stars) and figure out a way to relocate the carbon in the air at scale ("just" moving a lot of atoms) we have a lot of slack to resolve things. Again: this is just first principles analysis, not a claim it will be easy or that we won't see major consequences along the way.

The things that keep me up at night are not climate change, but runaway feedback loops that yield existential civilizational risk on the order of weeks not decades. For example, a COVID-like R0 virus that is highly fatal but spreads asymptomatically for months before killing hosts. Engineering and deploying such a virus seems plausible for a psychopathic individual over the next several decades. Basically anything where a lone actor can unleash a chain reaction to take out civilization are things we should be very concerned about, since they are total random variables. Getting various hedges in place like physical boundaries between cohesive populations (eg, a Martian colony) seem important to clear before one of these tripwires are hit.