casual reminder that while pollution and global warming are very much real things that must be dealt with, there are in fact many successful projects that are doing things like direct carbon capture devices similar to ones used to recycle air in space ships but doing it on an industrial scale. and. as an added bonus, they make stuff out of the carbon.
probably my second favorite environment project that has risk factors is cloud seeding. there's at least one project that seeds clouds by vaporizing seawater. apparently they seeding enough cloud cover to keep the temperature in an endangered reef at a survivable level. for now, at least.
environmentally, humanity is going to be okay. culturally, however...
Also remember that there’s always the option of wrapping huge chunks of the world in aluminum foil.
Why yes, I am high, but I’m also totally serious. We have enough aluminum on Earth to baked potato the planet three times over. Obviously this would be a bad idea. But if we were to build large fields in strategic locations to reflect sunlight back we could actually start dropping the temperature.
Then add fleets of balloons that keep the poles in shade for the half of the year they get sun so they stay colder and freeze more and help reduce how much sublime we’re getting (maintenance gets done during the six months where that pole is in darkness.)
Then let’s use all of our waste sawdust to build fleets of pykrete (ice+sawdust) ships and set them out in the ocean with decks covered in even more foil. They can easily be massive and pykrete takes years to melt, meaning they’ll be helping cool even more of the ocean. Hollow them out and surround them with plastic capture devices to help clean up the ocean while they float.
That plus cloud seeding above plus several more things could all buy us enough time to either get perfect carbon capture, genetically engineer plants that absorb a ton of greenhouse gases, or go for the ultimate plan: just put a bunch of space mirrors at the earth/sun L2 point and decrease how much light reaches Earth overall.
These are all doable with modern technology, save the last three long term fixes, which are not impossible the tech just doesn’t exist fully yet. We’d need to work at scales we as a species have never attempted before, but survival is a powerful motivator
Humanity is not doomed.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t care, or we shouldn’t fight. That doesn’t mean the climate ahead won’t be brutal and rough. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to fix the world now. None of this is an excuse for inaction, because we will still lose things and people if we wait until these are our best options.
But if you dread the future, know that we have options of last resort. They’re silly and weird and massive, but they would all work and that means we have a future. The future may involved an Earth that looks like poorly wrapped leftovers, but it exists.