1) Hot: shoot a tiny amount of sulfur dioxide into the arctic atmosphere, planet cools. See also #3.
2) Crowded: current upward global health trends will halt population growth naturally, and more people isn't necessarily bad anyway. Malthus was wrong to just consider resource consumption and ignore the benefits people provide to society. When you only have 100 people, they all have to look for food full time. When you have 7 billion, you get to siphon some off as scientific researchers and medical professionals, who pay back to others far more than they eat. (Lowly gas station attendants likely pay back more value than the raw resource cost it takes to sustain them too, but let's start with the low hanging fruit...)
3) Fuel: Solar's price is halving exponentially.
3b) Water: We're not really running out of low salinity water; we couldn't drain any of the world's large lakes if we tried. It's just a purification or transport issue. Limitless energy solves both.
Most importantly: technology is going to be so cool!
* Caveat, Caldeira doesn't advocate the sulfur dioxide solution as a first stop for combating global warming, his research just confirms it would be worth using as a backstop.
I don't understand this faith in technology. We aren't any closer to going to another planet today than we were 50 years ago. Medicine has extended the natural limits of a human life a scant four years in the last century. Electric vehicles have been around for a century and still haven't gotten over the tipping point.
In the time scale we're talking about for global warming, three to four decades, it is unlikely that we'll see any technological innovations that fundamentally change the math. Climate change is about as far into the future as the invention of C and Smalltalk are in the past.
1) Hot: shoot a tiny amount of sulfur dioxide into the arctic atmosphere, planet cools. See also #3.
2) Crowded: current upward global health trends will halt population growth naturally, and more people isn't necessarily bad anyway. Malthus was wrong to just consider resource consumption and ignore the benefits people provide to society. When you only have 100 people, they all have to look for food full time. When you have 7 billion, you get to siphon some off as scientific researchers and medical professionals, who pay back to others far more than they eat. (Lowly gas station attendants likely pay back more value than the raw resource cost it takes to sustain them too, but let's start with the low hanging fruit...)
3) Fuel: Solar's price is halving exponentially. 3b) Water: We're not really running out of low salinity water; we couldn't drain any of the world's large lakes if we tried. It's just a purification or transport issue. Limitless energy solves both.
Most importantly: technology is going to be so cool!
Heralds of optimism / references:
1) Caldeira.* http://www.wired.com/science/planetearth/magazine/16-07/ff_g...
2) Rosling. http://www.gapminder.org/videos/what-stops-population-growth...
3) Kurzweil. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfbOyw3CT6A 3b) Kamen. http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/03/colbert-and-kam/
* Caveat, Caldeira doesn't advocate the sulfur dioxide solution as a first stop for combating global warming, his research just confirms it would be worth using as a backstop.