I am hoping for the best; but preparing for the worst.

Por si acaso, ¿conoces nuestro grupo Reacción Climática?

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/326/5953/716.figures-only

That link refers to the calculations – granted – 72x (or 79x here) is also sometimes quoted to exclude the estatimated indirect effects of aerosol forcing. 105x is the figure for direct and indirect effects in relation to aerosols. Methane really shouldn’t be quoted over a century as it decays away so fast (yet almost everything written cites a figure around 20x which is the century figure).

I don’t disagree per se with any of it, but I believe geoengineering is – unfortunately – now part of a minimum solution to avoiding catastrophic changes. If you’re interested I’d be more than happy to go into the details of why, including references to the science involved in coming to this conclusion. That is not the same thing as being happy with the idea, or with saying it is a sufficient solution if done in isolation – it is not. At most it might buy more time to implement a solution that ought to have been comprehensively started by our parents generations (and that assuming it was ever acceptable to consume a finite resource wastefully).

Secondly, you talk about some emergency plan – but what do you really think can be implemented by the environmental movement that offers hope for a majority of the population? Well meaning as these people are effectiveness to date has been decidedly limited as far as I can see (certainly in relation to the size of the problem – I don’t want to belittle the efforts of individuals which have been far greater than their personal responsibilities proportionately in many cases).

I have an emergency plan. I have been working on it for five years now. At most it includes myself and a small group of people. I lack the resources to do any more.

I have found it absurdly difficult to persuade people in general that there is a real and imminent problem, let alone that they personally ought to do anything (at all – even little things such as lowering personal emissions or recycling…) to act to try to prevent this problem. I know of only one other person who has taken to heart my view that it is important to try to preserve a basis for civilisation for all those people as yet unborn in the future who must suffer the consequences of what we do now for countless generations. I have already confronted the fact that it is most likely not possible to come up with a solution for the bulk of the existing population, even that portion of it which is largely innocent in having caused this problem (the very poor and the young). That said I do still participate within an organisation trying to bring about a solution to the problem – I’m just not overly optimistic of the chances of success in this endeavour.

On my site this is what I am doing personally – http://helpsurviveclimatechange.com/Content/Mission/DeusJuvat.aspx – but I’d like to stress I’m not pushing it as my main focus – my main focus is on the importance of having an insurance plan for civilisation itself in the event of our ultimate failure to prevent collapse. Hopefully the rest of the site reflects that (but I should note I constructed and wrote the pages on it very rapidly and really ought to revisit and improve them).

thanks for your reply.
Concerning Geoengineering I don’t have a simple pro or contra position on Geoengineering, I think the term is misleading and overused.
My reaction to your post was lead by a number of statements on my side:

(1) You can’t think about feeding 9 billion people on the planet and at the same time minimising the human footprint on the planet to a level that would not leave us as a significant driver of all essential processes on the planet.

(2) We have and are “engineering” our environment. Probably starting from the neolithic revolution we have made an imprint on almost all “natural” systems, to an extend that nowadays there simply is no part of this planet that has not been impacted by us. By this type of “engineering” i firstly mean land use change, deforestation, steered evolution by hunting, farming, breeding, etc.

From these two points I would argue that there is no way back to times where we had no impact on the environment. Thus it can only be about controlling our interaction with the environment in a way that still enables a long-term future both for us and the planet (whereby momentarily, I would be far less concerned about the planet and its ecosystems, which have survived mass extinction events like the one we are currently causing before).

Besides shutting down some of our interventions into the environment (like greenhouse gas emissions) first of all this means that we have to intensify our effort to understand the system we are living in far better than we do right now. This means that we can’t just stop doing everything we are doing right now, but starting to do things differently (closing material circles, downscaling and diversifying production, changing from a consumerist to a circular material society, etc…). In the end to me this does not and should not sound like “degrowth” at all.. just not growth by just scaling up industrial processes, but growth by decoupling value creation from material processes.

But I am digressing..

The geoengineering point.. From my understanding Geoengineering currently is used for a wide range of proposals of technological systems that would affect the carbon cycle, the radiation balance or other parts of the climate system. I think it would be a rather bad idea only to address the radiation balance by adding aerosols, solar panels in space, or to try and stimulate biological flows of carbon, e.g. by iron fertilisation, etc.
But If it comes to simply scrapping CO2 out of the atmosphere to dump it back underground (from where we took it in the first place) it is not such a bad idea per se. Because it essentially is “just” the inversion of what we have been doing for the last 200 years or so.
Of course this type of technology has a number of possible “bad” implications: First of all, its existence could (and is) being used as an excuse not to mitigate emissions by other means, and then of course there might be side effects.. as you correctly mention. Thus I would not try to build a solution to climate change just by using atmospheric scrapping, but I can’t see why this should not build part of the “emergency” portfolio we will need if we find out that we might not only have been wrong with the arctic sea ice, but probably also with the permafrost, the amazon, the sahara, the monsoon and other tipping points.

Summarising, again, I think where we differ is a rather fundamental point:

I don’t see any sense in trying to essentially “shut down” human activities to try and not influence nature/the planet/climate.. Our “experiment” of industrial revolution has brought us beyond any possibility of going back to this state without loosing our identity of a civilisation.
Instead what we need to try to achieve is a transition towards another equilibrium with nature in which humanity takes over a significant part of “system control”. All we can hope for is that on the way, we are not causing any troubles that can’t be fixed later.. (loss of biodiversity is the biggest one), everything else could be “fixed” once we have achieved the transition.

And of course the other issue with practical solutions, that starting from a radical position (instead of leading towards a radical change) alienates many people we will need as partners in this process.

Hope this clarifies my earlier points.

Best,
Alex