[Sporktacular]

Spot on. There's not a lot of evidence climate engineering can be done quickly, to scale and with known and acceptable side effects. People are desperately clawing for any excuse to focus on the positive so they can return to an apathetic existence. Lots of trees, lots of regulations and fines, lots of investment in less damaging technologies, lots of stuff that we know works.

[BaseballPhysics]

To be clear, there absolutely is evidence climate engineering can be done quickly: we may have ready done it by moving to and then from sulphur bearing marine fuels over the course of a couple decades:

https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-low-sulphur-shippin...

[Sporktacular]

I've hear of the shipping cloud trails. How's this going to be employed at scale without creating other massive problems?

[BaseballPhysics]

Wikipedia has a pretty extensive article on the topic, as usual:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_injectio...

Short version: Probably aircraft, but anything that can get aloft and dump aerosols (e.g. SO2) into the upper atmosphere.

The scary thing is it's all quite achievable and isn't even that expensive or complex.

Regarding the issue of speed, the wikipedia article even notes one of the benefits as:

> Speed: A common argument is that stratospheric aerosol injection can take place quickly, and would be able to buy time for carbon sequestration projects such as carbon dioxide air capture to be implemented and start acting over decades and centuries.

And ironically, we don't even have to worry that much about side-effects since the effects of atmospheric aerosols are relatively temporary.

But, again: a) doesn't help with ocean acidification, which threatens entire foodchains, and b) gives an easy out to not do the hard and necessary work of cutting down on CO2 emissions.

That said, at this point, I would make a very sizable bet that a major country or countries will engage in some type of geoengineering within the next, oh... 10 years at the outside? The dangers of allowing global warming to continue to run away are just too high for some nation to not do it, prove it, and pave the way for others to follow.

[flir]

> with known and acceptable side effects

I bet there's some unknown and undesirable ones, too. Law of unintended consequences on a planetary scale.