[exoverito]

I also find it interesting that climate change has taken the role of eschatology for an increasingly secular society, and I say this as an atheist. The industrial revolution acts as original sin, mother nature will give us her final judgment, we must all atone by buying climate pledge products from Amazon, etc. Western secular liberals don't realize how religious they actually are.

We've observed the immediate effects of stratospheric aerosols in living history, as with volcanic eruptions and forest fires reducing temperatures significantly. We don't know their long term effects, though most aerosols only stay suspended in the atmosphere for a limited time. CO2 is a much less powerful greenhouse gas in absolute magnitude than aerosols are anti-greenhouse gases, so we don't need long range modelling to understand they can cool the Earth in the short term.

My point is that mitigation strategies like stratospheric aerosol injection would be far more effective in the worst case climate scenarios than trying to spend many trillions on direct air capture of CO2, intermittent energy sources, grid scale batteries, punitive regulations, etc. I also find it interesting that all the elites seem to relish in the climate change narrative, they bring Greta Thunberg to admonish them, they fly their private jets to the conferences, still own their beach front properties. Revealed preferences would suggest they don't actually believe it to be that big an issue, and that it's more likely yet another scheme for increasing their power and extracting wealth from the public.