Let’s go with the premise that Earth is warming to the detriment of human societies. Let’s further accept that human activities, producing various greenhouse gases, etc., caused this. There are then three possible courses of action: do nothing (always an option), change our behavior, or engineer our way out of it. (The obvious fourth possibility — run away to another habitat — is not yet feasible.)
A large part of us are doing exactly nothing. We kept on driving SUVs, eating beef, turning up heat, drinking bottle water, etc. Why or how can this be changed are not the topic here. It is factual.
Some of us, called socialists here, are changing our behavior: turning off lights, buying green products, urging friends to follow-suit, or shouting at corporations and countries to behave responsibly. The iconoclastic Mr. Al Gore won a Nobel prize doing so.
Strangely, the third group, geo-engineers, is clashing with the second. I had a science-fictional idea and others will like to pump sulfur dioxide into the high atmosphere with a long garden hose. Should human beings be allowed to engineer themselves out of this? Al Gore, and his fellow socialists, insisted that social behavior change is the only solution. We human engineered ourselves into this. If allowed, we will inevitably make a bigger mess that will lead to perish. Gosh, one group proposed sending millions of reflectors into the orbit to reflect away Sun light. Stop those crazy scientists and engineers. Just change your behavior and the world will nurse itself back.
Homo Sapiens survived these 200,000 years of existence by altering the world to suit themselves. Many parts of this world have been changed beyond recognition or even uninhabitable. But admit it, we would rather kill each others than change our ways of life.
Let’s unroll the garden hose. It costs less than the stimulus package, much less.