How many years do we have to fix this then? Alternatively, at what point will activists start saying we passed the point of no fix and give up their activism?
Honestly dude, rise above the cynicism (if that's how you meant to come across). You're a goddamn adult, and a well-educated engineer at that. Your current standard of living is at risk because of climate change (also millions of lives in poorer countries, but whatever). Spend 10 seconds on a Google search. "Activists" don't owe you any answers.
Never forget, despite what the sensationalists will tell you, climate change is very much fixable. Clean energy and better land management can and will get us there – and eventually, maybe in 200 years, we'll sequester enough carbon to get back to 350ppm. The question is about what happens in the meantime: if we act fast, we'll only get decades of food insecurity, war, and displacement, mostly in poorer countries [2]. If we delay further, we'll simply see much worse, and at home as well. But the "point of no return" rhetoric is nonsense and does nothing but paralyze people.
By the way, one of the easiest and fastest ways to catalyze at-scale solutions would be a revenue-neutral carbon tax at the source, effectively internalizing the social costs of climate change and letting the free market do its thing. (Look up "fee and dividend"; lots of folks are working on this already.)
[1] unless we hit some really unlucky runaway feedback loop, which is possible.
[2] plus the disease epidemics and terrorism that come along with it – we don't live on an island.
You're the one writing phrases like "we don't have decades to fix this". How is one supposed to interpret that as anything but "point of no return" rhetoric, especially in light of that rhetoric actually being used with some frequency for the last few decades? I agree it's not helpful rhetoric, so maybe I should have aimed my comment at alarmists who use the rhetoric but who haven't fully embraced that it's too late, instead of the more general activists.
I'm fully on-board with planetary engineering projects. Those require engineering work and capital more than activism, though.
Do you want to make a prediction on the accuracy of whatever climate model you like (we can use the one you linked if you prefer) for what the temperature increase will be in 2 years, 7 years, and 12 years? We can record it at https://predictionbook.com/
Climate change is mostly no binary event. There is the risk of runaway effects, and possible extinction (though unlikely) but luckily we haven't hit those yet.
The political 2 degree goal is damage control. Climate models are complex and impacts harder to predict the more you divert from the current situation.
At 2 degrees the costs to society (social costs of carbon) far outweigh the mitigation costs.
To hit the 2 degree target we have to act swiftly "we don't have decades to fix this" we are not (yet) at a "point of no return"
As green house gases are currently an externality, there will be no capital without activism.
I am too young to look back decades, but my understanding was that the "we don't have decades to fix this" guys in the 80s and 90s were more about running out of oil(and that turned out to be no problem as rising prices make more expensive extraction feasible) and that climate change as a concern only really started in the 90s (even though known long before that). And there are already damages that could have been prevented by acting swiftly in the 90s. We could have reached e.g. a 1.5 degree target. So the "we don't have decades to fix this" rethoric is fitting as ever.
I got to that point 3-4 years ago, personally. Even if it were economically and technically possible to get our act together, it has become entirely clear that the political system is incapable of acting quickly enough.
