See

• Cooling the Earth: CO2, SO2, and The Sunscreen Fix by technopolitical on October 16th, 2006
  
• Making Sustainability Simple by nanne on December 11th, 2007
  
• Geoengineering: basic principles, some thoughts, some questions by a siegel on March 6th, 2008
  
• LQD: Geoengineering Ranked by nanne on November 21st, 2008
  

En un viejo país ineficiente, algo así como España entre dos guerras civiles, poseer una casa y poca hacienda y memoria ninguna. -- Gil de Biedma

No.

Based on what I have seen of the different climate models, introduction of new factors in the models will have rather different outcomes. We are dealing with equilibriums and feedback-loops and barely begun to grasp the systems boundaries. We can try to re-create known conditions (by say removing carbon dioxide from the air), but if we in the process increase other factors we do not know the effect, other then that there is in all probability limits where the new factors will cause unwanted effects.

A vote for PES is a vote for EPP! A vote for EPP is a vote for PES! Support the coalition, vote EPP-PES in 2009!

No.

But the point is that we're already doing it, accidentally.

And the rest of the point is to stop.

But Lovelock is hitching his wagon to a libertarian zeitgeistish point of view which suggests that things left alone without (government) intervention naturally return to happy equilibrium.

Which is bollocks, and should be called out as such.

No, but we don't know enough to get climate change right either: I'm comfortable with the idea that pumping loads of crap likely to increase the energy of the system into the atmosphere is probably a really, really bad idea but I could be wrong. Maybe it's all that's kept us out of a sudden ice age. I'm certainly not comfortable with the idea that any of our climate predictions are likely to be long-term accurate.

I'd like to see geoengineering limited to stuff we can reverse - like big reflectors in space to reduce the energy of the sun reaching the surface, so that we can undo what we did, but we won't be able to predict the outcome at all without putting a lot of money and effort into climate and systems science.

Not that i agree that the solution is "leaving recovery to Gaia."  There's lots of work to be done, just that we ain't got enough understanding to geo-engineer.  Especially when the first few decades of steps to take are so simple and clear.

Skennah Kowa

Somebody please do a root cause analysis of the failure of this civilization...

Part of the problem is having confidence that we know the number of roots involved and that we have identified the most significant.

As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."

Actually, a good deal is known about how to be sustainable.  

We don't want to do any of it.  

These days I am getting interested in low-tech personal survival techniques--organic gardening, closing nutrient cycles, and the like--things that can be carried out by small groups of people, on the assumption that humans may survive in North America.  

Then again we may not.  

Certainly, one way or the other, the thing we call Western civilization will disappear.  Even a decade ago I would have been looking for ways to correct our errors, but actually our errors are built in:  As we say in the computer world, they are features not bugs.  They will not be corrected, in defiance of any theoretical possibility of doing so.  

Our main scenerio is Infinite Downward Spiral--a.k.a. Easter Island.  This is the scenerio our civilization is actively trying for.  It is rooted in the obsession to continue Business As Usual, even after BAU has blatantly failed.  In this scenerio we use up today what we will need to have on hand tomorrow in an ever-going, progressive destruction of human life support.  It ends when desertification is so extreme humans can no longer muster the resources for further destruction.  Obviously, most of the population will have died off along the way.  

Despite our best efforts to destroy ourselves, we may fail at this if our political economy disintegrates in a rapid disorderly fashion.  For example, the one thing most likely to slow global warming is the collapse in oil demand that has followed hitting the wall of peak oil production.  If our economies can continue to fall apart, then global warming will be substantially mitigated.  

This example shows how disorderly (and unpredicted) collapse may render us unable to further destroy our life support and essential life systems.  Thus other scenerios besides Easter Island become possibilities.  

The Fates are kind.