[gmuslera]

The safest path is undo what we did, somewhat stop adding more fossil carbon to the system, and capture the excess that we added since preindustrial times, and then some extra to unwind what some positive feedback loops added by their own. It it looks hard, impractical, expensive and a lot of more ugly words, but it goes right to try to push the system to the previous stable state.

Other “solutions” try to short term deal with one perceived problem without taking into account how the whole system is changing and how our “solution” will change it even more. With very complex systems shortsighted and not holistic approaches could bring to the table far more problems, some of which we may not have a way to deal with.

[silverquiet]

Unburning (my spellcheck marks that as a misspelling which says something even on its own) all the fossil fuels that gave rise to the industrial age we now reside in is I suppose possible in theory, but it would require a nearly limitless source of energy, and even if such a breakthrough occurred, I can't help but feel that all the energy would be directed towards ever more elaborate crypto-mining setups or AI chatbots.

The half-ass solution will be to dim the sky which I suppose will buy some time; enough to see me out I hope.

[analognoise]

I love how humanity is like “should we dim the sky, or give up trucks?” and we’re going to pick dimming the sky.

On the one hand we’re an awesome species; we’re also totally ridiculous. It’s tough to wrap your head around the duality.

[silverquiet]

"If you got it, a truck brought it" is a pretty common sentiment in the transport industry because it's quite true, especially in the US. The thing is, between the economy/built world we've created and the effects on the climate, we've pretty much created a no-win scenario for humanity. Sorry kids.

[hnaccount_rng]

Yeah, I completely agree. But.. keep in mind: the idea that we _shouldn’t_ do geoengineering.. that ship has sailed at least a couple of decades now. Yes, dimming the sky is a more direct measure than the geoengineering we did so far. But I’m not even sure it’s less predictable than our first attempt

[gmuslera]

Letting the patient worsen his health by doing nothing, try to improve things slowly in something rational but that by now it may take longer for him to survive or giving him this potential snake oil that you don't know if it will kill him in the short term?

So far climate and related things in this complex system is full of surprises, even for experts. We are finding out that something seemingly innocent that had a clear positive impact by one metric worsened a lot of other things. I don't know if I could call engineering something with so much uncertainties on the outcome.