[rcxdude]

The carbon being put into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels wasn't part of the ecosystem for millions of years. Simply moving it around the cycle isn't really going to solve the excess (though whether the air is the best place to try to remove it from the cycle is an important question).

[hosh]

Pollution, desertification, ocean acidification, habitat destruction are as great, if not greater concerns, and yet here we are, picking a single metric as if changing that alone will solve everything.

[rcxdude]

Well, a lot of those are being driven in large part by climate change. I don't think I was saying that reducing CO2 back to pre-industrial would solve all environmental problems, just that reducing it is an important part to improving a lot of them.

[hosh]

Pollution is not driven by climate change. It is driven by our industrial processes that includes fossil fuels. It also includes the processes that goes into high-tech materials. We don’t have forever chemicals and microplastics because of climate change.

Desertification has to do with ecosystems degenerating. While there are regions that are desertifying because of changes in percipitation patterns, our industrial scale agriculture and feedlots are depleting the soil in a way that is leading to desertification, even without changes in climate patterns. We kill soil with fertilizers and pesticide. We got rid of beavers, and the way they reroute rivers and watershed to spread out water, making the land less resilient. We pipe water to grow things in areas we probably shouldn’t. The Great Dust Bowl was not a result of climate change.

Ocean acidification is a result of the ocean absorbing more atmospheric CO2 as a consequence of burning fossil fuels. It has affects on the health of marine ecosystems. It is not a consequence of climate change.