One of the biggest arguments that keeps being made by many people is that even if climate change is true it’s going to cost far too much to do anything about it.
This is patently absurd. Yes, adapting to global warming and mitigating the worst of the impacts by cutting carbon emissions significantly now will be expensive, possibly more expensive than anything else done in peacetime.
However this is precisely the point: can you think of any countries leader, in history who on being attacked by a neighbour has looked at their finances and said we can’t afford it let’s just give in? Of course not, you borrow whatever you can to defend yourself. The impact of global warming is likely to be far more extreme than that of a country being taken over by another one.
Life as we know it will literally be over, the ability to do many, many things without improving our carbon emissions will be gone. Indeed large parts of the world will become unsustainable to human life, deserts will grow, many rain forests will collapse.
While it is true that adapting to climate change will be very expensive, many companies may go out of business or will have the substantially change how they work, without significant change we’re going to make large parts of planet Earth incapable of sustaining human life.
Scientists have shown that essentially the question is this do we wish to spend many billions of pounds mitigating climate change now or many trillions of pounds mitigating climate change in 20 years time ( if we’re lucky).
Geoengineering has been suggested as a means to deal with global warming. It is true that geoengineering may assist in this effort, however this cannot work on its own, we must substantially cut our carbon emissions as well.
Rapid cuts made mean we do not have to engage in highly expensive geoengineering, particularly given that we do not know the side effects of many forms of geoengineering and they may end up exacerbating global warming when tried.