"It's worse than we thought." Sound familiar?

[joshcryer]

90. As far as my prediction, it's going to be geoengineering.

But we won't do the geoengineering until it gets so bad that a lot of people die and a lot of capital is lost. A couple of Sandy's isn't something that even the US can deal with.

You don't start geoengineering without the entire planet on board, and you won't get the entire planet on board without the effects of climate change being significant enough to convince those in power that it's necessary. Given that, even with the greatest arctic sea ice melt (and land ice melt) in human history (this includes analysis from sediments, proving that the sea ice was fine even during the Medieval Warming Period), we still haven't done much, it's going to take a long time before we, politically, do something about it.

A lot of developing countries are still trying to build up and the developed countries will not sacrifice their profit for the sake of developing countries.

You can read about geoengineering here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoengineering

There are many ways to go about it from removing CO2 from the atmosphere (energy intensive) to painting roofs or roads (negligible effects, highly expensive). The cheapest and most effective means would be to utilize stratospheric sulfate aerosols. These aerosols typically come from volcanoes and we have observed cooling effects from massive volcanic eruptions (either directly or indirectly through the geologic record). If we engineer them and spray them into the high atmosphere we can achieve the same cooling effect. It should be relatively cheap compared to the other methods.

There's a big problem with this though. First you have to have it nailed down just how much aerosols are needed, and that will require intensive surveys to test the radiative forcing caused by CO2 (and other greenhouse gases). That's done by launching a probe to do the analysis. That won't happen until the end of this decade at the minimum: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLARREO

And of course, one cannot ignore the possibility that we overshoot geoengineering and wind up taking the planet into a global ice age: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowball_Earth

An overshoot into a Snow Ball could happen if we don't do the CLARREO-style studies and approach geoengineering from a purely scientific standpoint. ie, if we just start throwing aerosols up and just see what happens, we could easily mess that up, in a really bad way (what happens if a super-volcano; I know unlikely; hits at the same time we're messing around?).

As far as the optimistic view, I think that ultimately we'll move to more self-sufficient cities, vertical farming, and the like: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_farming

Human waste (outside of most perspiration and exhalation) will be recycled back into the system to be made into feed stocks to grow plants, so it'd be a closed loop life support system, for the most part: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_ecological_system

I could go on for a long time here about the various technologies, space based solar power, etc, but I'm sure I've got you on the right track to see where my position is. I still maintain that there exist in my mind the possibility that the coming die off may be worse than I think it will be (I think it will be less than a few billion). If it's worse the scenarios start to get tighter. Global depression as bigger storms cause more damage and food shortages arise. A shell oil crunch where new reserves get increasingly harder to get. Civil if not international wars over resources. Mass migrations due to sea level rise, etc. The worse the die off is the harder the recovery.

And of course, a massive increase in temperature would necessitate massive adaption by humans, and to go into that would be complex. We'd have to probably move underground. Human population would be extremely reduced. The possibility to retain technology at that point will be very difficult, you'd have to have all your industry in a Matrix-style underground facility of sorts. Not impossible, just hard, especially with the geopolitical issues that would arise from said temperature increase.