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You're much more likely to see famine, mass migration, and global war than any of those things. The only engineering problem currently worthy of a moonshot-lev

You're much more likely to see famine, mass migration, and global war than any of those things. The only engineering problem currently worthy of a moonshot-level effort is putting all the carbon back into the ground. If we don't do that, none of those other things you mentioned are going to happen.

Pfhreak 10y ago
I didn't mean to suggest that we should do those things to the exclusion of solving the problems we have at home. Yes, we absolutely need to address the way that we manage our own planet, but my hope is that by addressing one we help further the other.
JBReefer 10y ago
Society is capable of doing more than one thing at a time.
jorgecastillo 10y ago
It is insane how some people believe technology will fix everything. As you say, it will most likely be business as usual until industrial civilization collapses.
- nbarbettini 10y ago
  Technology definitely can't fix everything. However, most of the problems we had 1,000, 500, 100, and 50 years ago have been fixed or severely mitigated by technology. While collapse is a possibility, I don't think it's an eventuality.
- duozerk 10y ago
  Given the extreme scale of the climate change issue and the lack of any significant action for decades - a lack of action that is, mostly, still a fact - one could argue that technology (massive scale geoengineering) is the only option left to deal with it. Maybe that wasn't the case 30 years ago, but it likely is now. We would never have been able to mess up the atmosphere so much without industrial technology and now it is likely in my opinion that we will never be able to fix it without that same level of technology. At least if we want to avoid megadeaths-scale disaster (and even then, it's a very long shot and I doubt we will manage it).
dougmany 10y ago
I think putting carbon in the ground is the wrong approach. We need to take it out the the air, yes. But then we should build things out of it. Replace steel and concrete with carbon. Imagine a rocket made out of 90% air harvested materials.
- honkhonkpants 10y ago
  It doesn't make a difference to the amount of energy required. The scale of the problem is the integral of all human energy consumption over all time. We need to reverse it, and the reverse process will require much more energy than was released by the forward process, and we need to do in a few years what was done over 200 years. Whether we put it into the ground or into carbon ingots is immaterial.

Pfhreak 10y ago

I didn't mean to suggest that we should do those things to the exclusion of solving the problems we have at home. Yes, we absolutely need to address the way that we manage our own planet, but my hope is that by addressing one we help further the other.

JBReefer 10y ago

Society is capable of doing more than one thing at a time.

jorgecastillo 10y ago

It is insane how some people believe technology will fix everything. As you say, it will most likely be business as usual until industrial civilization collapses.

nbarbettini 10y ago
Technology definitely can't fix everything. However, most of the problems we had 1,000, 500, 100, and 50 years ago have been fixed or severely mitigated by technology. While collapse is a possibility, I don't think it's an eventuality.
duozerk 10y ago
Given the extreme scale of the climate change issue and the lack of any significant action for decades - a lack of action that is, mostly, still a fact - one could argue that technology (massive scale geoengineering) is the only option left to deal with it. Maybe that wasn't the case 30 years ago, but it likely is now. We would never have been able to mess up the atmosphere so much without industrial technology and now it is likely in my opinion that we will never be able to fix it without that same level of technology. At least if we want to avoid megadeaths-scale disaster (and even then, it's a very long shot and I doubt we will manage it).

dougmany 10y ago

I think putting carbon in the ground is the wrong approach. We need to take it out the the air, yes. But then we should build things out of it. Replace steel and concrete with carbon. Imagine a rocket made out of 90% air harvested materials.

honkhonkpants 10y ago
It doesn't make a difference to the amount of energy required. The scale of the problem is the integral of all human energy consumption over all time. We need to reverse it, and the reverse process will require much more energy than was released by the forward process, and we need to do in a few years what was done over 200 years. Whether we put it into the ground or into carbon ingots is immaterial.