The memes of the climate

Geo-engineering is a rabbit hole we do not want to dive into. We have the ability and knowledge to fight climate change right now, the only thing we don't have is the political willpower. Geo-engineering is a distraction, please don't give it the time of day.

doesn’t this mean that geoengineering is also effective at giving us extra time?

I have zero faith in governments nor societal leaders actually maintaining any geoengineering efforts consistently which is what would be required. Any time geoengineering buys would be squandered by inaction. I do not expect any significant action to occur until it immediately threatens businesses and governments in ways that cannot be ignored by even the most head-in-the-sand deniers

If we geoengineer, it will be half-assed, and the moment the scope shrinks (as funding naturally grows and shrinks depending on who's setting budgets for administrations) every bit of climate change effect that we held off will come crashing down far more rapidly than the slow crawl we've been experiencing for the past century or so

We’d start using safer gases that have the same cooling effect

If I, as a rando on the internet we're to guess, the most cost effective tactic would be very large pumps firing ocean water into the air either to evaporate naturally or artificially evaporated to create more clouds. Clouds reflect sunlight and artificially creating more would slow ocean warning, and therefore slow global climate change. I'm certain the salt and other crap in the water would have difficult to predict downstream effects, at best creating more rain, at worst salting the rainforests

I don't think the issue is whether it's effective in isolation (clearly we can alter the environment), it's the fact that it's likely to be used as a shitty band aid to continue emitting carbon and it's likely to have unforseen consequences. We need to stop burning fossil fuels, all of them, immediately.

But doesn’t this mean that geoengineering is also effective at giving us extra time? We’d start using safer gases that have the same cooling effect while we try and go carbon negative worldwide

Personally, I think that'd actually have an overall negative effect. Governments and corporations desperately don't want to do anything about climate change, and giving them more time with cooler temperatures will (my opinion) just allow the world to further delay doing anything about it, allowing them to bake in even worse temps if they ever had to stop geoengineering for whatever reason.

This is a really morbid take, but all these big heatwaves, radical weather, and rise in weather related deaths cannot be ignored, and that's unfortunately damn useful. It makes it harder to be a climate denier/skeptic, makes people more angry when nothing is being done about curbing emissions (hopefully leading to more climate protests), and really forces society to place a skeptical eye at all the new fossil fuels being brought online around the world, all because they can personally feel it.

If it could be made to be business as usual, I think we'd see the "Gosh darn it guys, we reaaaallly should do something about all this. Eventually." mentality just continue until it once again becomes too hot physically to ignore.