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Realistic Cynicism In Climate Science:
Apparent paradox: the more scientists worry about “climate change”, the less they believe in geoengineering. They also are more inclined to geoengineering when the impact gets personal. It actually makes rational sense.
People who are more realistic see the doom of the GreenHouse Gas (GHG) crisis: all time high CO2 production, all time high coal burning, the activation of tipping points, such as collapsing ice shelves, acceleration of ice streams, generalized burning of forests, peat and even permafrost combusting under the snow through winter, oceanic dead zones, 6th mass extinction, etc. They also observe that we are on target for a further rise of many degrees Celsius by 2100 in the polar regions, where global heating has the most impact. And they see the silliness of massive efforts in fake solutions such as making more than 100 million cars a year running on huge (half a ton) batteries... or turning human food into fuel for combustion.
The same realistic mood shows to cogent and honest climate scientists that there is no plausible geoengineering solution which could be deployed in the next few decades. It's all rationally coherent.
But then when they are told that sea level rise, or drought, or floods, or storm, or massive fires and vegetation dying out, will become catastrophic in their neighborhood, the same people get desperate and ready to use anything. This “suggests that the climate experts’ support for geoengineering will increase over time, as more regions are adversely affected and more experts observe or expect damages in their home country.”
However that would be a moral and intellectual failure, at least in the case of solar geoengineering. Only outright removing CO2 from the atmosphere is acceptable (but we don’t have the tech on the mass scale necessary; we will, only when we have thermonuclear fusion reactors, by just freezing the CO2 out and stuffing it in basalt).