I think that we should cast the widest net for possible solutions, but there does come a point where they need to be winnowed down to which solutions will have the greatest effect (without bad side effects) with the least time and material resources. It'll still have to be multiple solutions on multiple fronts, though. Planting trees should be an easy win where the ecology currently supports growing them without too much maintenance work, but some areas would require massive effort to revitalize. Nuance like that is important, and so I encourage everyone to take things a step further mentally each time you engage with these topics. Do some napkin math, read some studies, etc. The more people that do that, the more we can create working knowledge and solutions instead of just taking pot shots at various proposals.
Some of that work about possible solutions has been done by Paul Hawken. His Project Drawdown book is at least an organized and reasoned list of 100 possibilities. I attended a talk about one of them - marine permaculture arrays.
This is a body of working knowledge developed over the past thirteen years, with new inventions being developed and deployed for growing kelp in the open ocean. What's proven is the ability of wave, solar, wind powered pumps to upwell cold water hundred of meters beneath the ocean surface, and irrigate kelp, doubling the growth rate. This is important because 93% of global warming goes into the surface layers of the ocean, cutting of circulation of nutrients needed by life.
What's proven is that seaweeds and kelps can sequester more carbon per square meter per year than the tropical rainforest. The idea is put submerged, autonomous satellite-assisted kelp platforms in the open ocean at scale, to farm for food/feed/fertilizer/fish or just sink
the kelp into the depths to sequester the carbon for hundreds of years. (per UN research)
There is now a kelp coin, which might someday play a role in emerging carbon sequestration markets. At the moment, it is a fundraiser, crowd- funding style to help raise capital to get these to hectare scale.
https://www.climatefoundation.org/kelp-coin.html This kelp coin is new, just a couple of weeks out.
It might take a decade or more to get to a gigaton of carbon sequestration. But it is also about food security and ecosystem regeneration. If you like short videos for information, try https://www.climatefoundation.org/2040-make-a-change.html
No. There are nearly 8 billion people on this planet. Figure it out.
This is a complex problem. Almost all solutions are worth trying. Most of them are going to be required. There does not need to be a winnowing of solutions. We just need to fucking start rolling them out.
I'm so over the argument that something won't be good enough.
No fucking shit.
Nothing is going to be good enough, nothing is going to be potent enough to solve how monumentally we screwed the environment up.
I don't think it's a given we can reverse or even stop climate change. There are many positive feedback loops going on right now.
AFAIK neither the Paris accords or any climate management proposals entertain the idea of stopping climate change.
Edit: positive feedback loops are things like the melting ice caps. Less sunlight is reflected back to space by the white ice which means more is absorbed by the dark sea. This causes the earth to warm and more of the ice caps to melt....
In climate science there is something called the tipping point. This is when mechanisms like positive feedback will make drastic climate change inevitable (with current technology).
When the tipping point will happen is up for debate. IMO the idea that we have already passed the tipping point is also up for debate.
