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We are talking about the behavior of a species which repeatedly hunts extremely valuable prey species to economic extinction, builds houses and raises children on the slopes of smoldering volcanoes, etc. And displays neigh-zero regret - let alone long-term learning - when such antics go horribly wrong.

No way in hell will Homo Sapiens change its behavior (at anything resembling a useful scale) based tiny-looking shifts in a few climate statistics. Nor harmless-looking events on a distant and neigh-uninhabited continent.

A better question: How fast could Mr. Musk's fleet of Starships deploy enough giga-scale solar shades to reduce Earth's total insolation by (say) 5%?

1 comments

This is too defeatist and doesn’t acknowledge the progress already made.

Being too needlessly cynical about what is possible is also dangerous. Basically you are forming a coalition with deniers and stand in the way of meaningful progress.

I agree that the challenges are immense and (as is pretty clear to everyone, I think) adapting to the changes will always be part of it. Does not mean that making progress on prevention is meaningless.

Let the people who do not want those preventive changes work on adaption alternatives.

Well...I see "keep the Earth at least (say) 80% as habitable as it currently is" as an "absolute must-do" engineering requirement. Praising progress already made, proclaiming faith in humanity's potential to unify toward that goal, etc. - those are social niceties & tactics. Extremely useful in advancing one's own social status within certain segments of the population. Not so useful in actually meeting the must-do requirement.

Certainly my own experience with big, tough "must-do" projects is that there's damned little overlap between the folks who jump up to do 95% of the posturing and talking, and the folks who show up and do 95% of that actual hard work needed to succeed. And that second crowd has fairly underwhelming respect for most of the first crowd.