Comment Re:I am skeptical (Score 1) 174
Very astute. One of the aspects of the issue that has bothered me is that politics have solidly collided with science. It's not just the obvious issue of denial that bothers me. The issue is solidly sandwiched between denial and the environmentalist activists who suffer from confirmation bias and outright alarmism; who seem to have a worldview is centers around humans being inherently bad and can only serve to damage the world. Not only that, but that the world is pristine and unchanging, like they want to reunite Pangea (to borrow the bumper sticker phrase). They want everything, and they want it yesterday. There is so often resistance of moving to less harmful energy sources as an intermediary step (e.g. from coal to natural gas or nuclear power generation) because it's not exactly what they want right now (which seems to be a world powered only by solar & wind). Taking it a step further, for those people, it seems like even the subject of geoengineering as one of possibly many ways to mitigate or manage climate change is just plain distasteful...not to mention academic research. I guess that what I'm saying is that the science behind the issue is a small fraction of the whole issue as a social and political beast.
With regard to the throwing a bunch of water (or sulfuric acid) into clouds to fix everything, you are right. When we face complex problems involving deeply complex systems, it's nice to believe in simple solutions. However, I have a bridge to sell those who believe that we can fix this if we just do X.
While much of the IPCC is on-point, that is more on the academic end of the spectrum than where most of the discussion (and action) lies. The cultural change (and change of discussion into something more like what you're suggesting) is what leads to political and even industrial action. It's not just this issue where academia is so far ahead of the rest of the world. Asking anyone to be patient about this issue seems silly, because it's so emotional for many people (and challenges others' world view). In general, as humans, we're better at adapting to a changing world than planning for a changing world - especially when we consider the time-frames. What I'm saying is that we will have to change, whether we like it or not, but it will be in response to the world changing around us...not in response to experts telling us that it's going to change.