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The whole point is that it's not about me being anything, it's about a pretty objective cost-benefit analysis. I agree that there are big unknowns but I don't

• graeme 8y ago
  We have the option of trying to limit or reverse the changes we've made to our biosphere. If we instead mitigate the main symptom via dimming the sun, we're likely to simply burn all the carbon we can find. But that still leaves us with the other symptoms (ocean acidification) and unknown side effects. So it's not a cost benefit analysis, because it only looks at the known costs. Here the known downside of an acid ocean and the unknown cost of side effects dwarf the actually calculable financial costs. If we could run a thousand earth simulations we could speak of cost benefit analysis. But we just have one, and we know the conditions we grew our civilization in. We may well have to do sun shading regardless, but we shouldn't call it a mere ten billion. Edit: I guess to more properly respond to your original point: things may get very bad even if we do sunshades. Just via other mechanisms. Having the option will likely encourage a much higher co2 level than without sunshades.