We really do have solutions. And they would work — some are no-brainers, and are not too expensive either — considering the alternatives. I’ll tell you the problem right now:

We could begin deploying land-based mirrors today, only there is nobody to approve the project or to finance it. But there are hordes of people ready to shut us down immediately. Angrily. Saying we could destabilize the weather or climate irreparably.

(Is that true, are they right?)

Well, yeah, in a way. They could be right and I could be wrong. It’s a genuine mess because our human cognitive biases make us lie to ourselves and to each other. A true mess. How dare we take such risks at a time like this, when the world is dying from fires and floods and plagues. Isn’t that right? We should just step back. (Watch out! Don’t step back into that volcano.)

Oh, I should explain the misinformation remark in the title first, shouldn’t I.
I can’t deny that I’ll be misinforming you, but I’m up against a general negativity bias as far as deployment of these technologies, and I’ll be fighting your negativity bias as I suggest taking a few risks in the course of reversing global warming.

It’s misinformation to claim with certainty that mirrors would do the job. It’s also misinformation to fail to give the caveats — that I could make things worse with my efforts. That could happen.

I’m going to give you links to some excellent articles that explain the different kinds of biases, and hopefully help you see right now why everything is so fucked up about fixing global warming and also about stopping this coronavirus epidemic.

So let’s do those articles first. If you could spend a little time reading up on these biases that we inherited through the cruel process of natural selection, a lot of weirdnesses in our societies will begin to make better sense.

This first one is from one of ours, on Medium:

This one tells us how mother nature tricked us into making three mistakes:

This one explains why I’m thinking I can sell you my misinformation and that I can’t possibly be wrong and also why I have no doubts about your faith in me:

General Conclusions

It’s pretty obvious that big oil and big agriculture, and big fishing, cattle farming, mining and manufacturing, large-scale transport et cetera have had the energy and money to deplete Earth’s resources and pollute entire oceans and the land and air as well. Well I guess now we could add that they’ve overcrowded the orbits up in the vacuum of space with aerospace junk and active satellites.

When the governments of each nation individually and collectively decide to listen to The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), who are assessing the science related to climate change, maybe, maybe then, the extractive and polluting industries will be forced to stop or cut back. Then perhaps they could be taxed to help pay for remediation.

There isn’t much time. The changes would have to begin happening now, and the first wave of changes (and reduced CO2 output) would need to be underway in the next 4 years. Certain environmental problems are beyond remediation, and some will even increase over the next decades and in some cases centuries — things like sea-level rise that can’t be reversed.

It is possible that nothing will change. It wouldn’t surprise me. Everything depends on how the bulk of humanity responds as things get worse.

I’m not optimistic, and I have grown weary from hearing my own rhetoric.

Still, global warming could be reversed. There are certain interests out there who know this to be true. They don’t want reversal, because they get wealthier every day because of the status quo. They’re the ones who would start screaming about unintended consequences should we start cooling things down.