[Mathgod]

Originally Posted by GGG

I think everyone is moving in so many directions and all succeeding wildly better than anyone predicted 10 and 20 years ago.

If by that you mean we as a species are destroying the world's ecosystems and exacurbating climate change at record pace, then yes, "succeeding wildly".

We have already taken the worst doomsday cases of global warming off the table.

Entirely untrue.

The adoption of solar and it being cheaper and more distributed is a huge boon for development. And it’s still following Moores law.

Just because its adaptation is increasing rapidly now, doesn't mean it will keep increasing at such rates in future years/decades. There are issues with solar power such as: 1) resource availability to build the panels, 2) land availability to put the panels, 3) lack of sufficient means of storing energy when more power is being produced than the grid can use, and 4) our ability to responsibly dispose of panels once they are past their useful life.

I'm not saying we can't overcome these problems on the scale that solar is currently being deployed. But when we're talking about scaling up to the kinds of numbers needed to get to net zero, these problems suddenly become very daunting.

We also have the ability to stop the climate effects of global warming by geoengineering whenever we want to. We don’t know all of the affects but as a final option to cool the earth it’s available.

Geoengineering is supposed to be an ultra ultra ultra last resort we go to if/when we're truly stuck and simply can't afford not to do it. We do it as the least disastrous of two disastrous options (when they're all we have left).

We don't know what the consequences of geoengineering will ultimately be; the best we have are educated guesses. While they almost certainly won't be as bad as the worst climate change scenarios, they could still be tremendously harmful in ways we don't foresee beforehand.

Tech is delivering solutions in a timely manner quite nicely.

I don't think most people are seeing the incredible progress already being made because they only see what's beside them. Canada's culture is very wasteful but that's more a Canada/US thing and not happening everywhere and it's not necessarily an aspiration for other nations.

Doesn't help that all we get in the news is talk of how the earth will end 30 minutes from now. Very little talk about the progress being made.

Next time, can you avoid resorting to making a horrendous strawman? No one has ever said the earth is ending 30 minutes from now (or anything to that effect). I've never said anything like that, and no major news outlet has said anything like that either. I've already TWICE pointed out that I'm not a doomer and I reject doomerism... hopefully this is the last time I have to make that clear.

Hopefully you can understand why these kinds of strawman arguments are so frustrating to deal with, as they obfuscate the conversation and make it very hard for people to understand the actual positions and arguments that people are discussing.

As for the rest of your comment, I'd say you've got it backwards. When it comes to people of wealth and privelige, usually all you ever hear from them is all the progress being made, and almost nothing about the true nature of the mess we're in. And that's among those who even accept the science to begin with.

It's worth repeating, multiple things can be true at the same time. The progress being made toward clean energy is significant, and yes, in some contexts, could be described as tremendous. Yet, it is still insufficient.

Case in point, Saudi Arabia is hell bent on keeping Asia, Africa, and basically the entire developing world hooked on fossil fuels for many decades to come. How are solar panels going to magically solve this problem?

NSFW!

language

So maybe you can begin to understand why I'm skeptical that technological advancement is moving at a fast enough pace to get us out of this mess?