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by candiddevmike 416 days ago
Too little, too late. We should've been switching to solar in the 80s. Even if we could switch to be carbon free tomorrow, the amount of CO2 already in the atmosphere is predicted to cause breadbasket collapses within the next 20 years.

If it makes folks feel better, there's a good chance you probably had no control/influence over this outcome if you were born after 1980.

https://www.sciencealert.com/researchers-weve-underestimated...

4 comments

We were trying to switch to solar in the 80s, but it was infeasible. The technology just wasn't there. Now it is and we're adopting it en masse.
We will spray the atmosphere to buy more time.

People will haggle over it because of the unknowns, but when imminent social chaos becomes obvious, we'll be forced to pull the trigger on it.

It's not hopeless. The risk of crop failures may be higher than it would be if we were going to experience less warming, but having a bad harvest year isn't existential. We'll work to mitigate things.
This is why I think we need to roll the dice on geoengineering. We can try to tilt the odds in our favor, but it's still a crapshoot. From what I've read, iron fertilization would be one of the better paths to go. A potentially better path would be the creation of synthetic whale poop.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/scientists-are-cra...