Earth's clouds are shrinking, boosting global warming

We could solve this problem in a few years with technology if we really wanted to.

Not without pain, nope. Reality is the world’s rich are the culprits. If they stop consuming problem solved. No amount of angry downvotes will change this basic fact.

People will learn to live modestly, voluntarily or by force.

I don't necessarily agree with GP's comment but they do have a valid point.

> We could solve this problem in a few years with technology if we really wanted to.

Everybody wants to solve the problem with technology. What if, the solution is just plain old hard work like planting trees, conservation, better recycling, better laws that help in saving ecosystem. But who would do that. So let's keep on creating problems with technology and then solve them with more technology.

What technology specifically has caused the clouds to shrink?

I'm not disagreeing, but we don't even need technology, all we need is the political will to truly stop subsidising fossil-based energy.

In the just over a minute it took me to read your comment and write this reply, the fossil industry received _another_ USD 14 Million: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/oct/06/fossil-f...

Humanity has tendency to do things wrong and then decades later realize that what we were doing was awful to the planet.

Net zero will come. Whether by collapse or by us shaving the wasteful excess. Excess being the leeches who don't pay taxes or follow rules.

The issue isn’t taxes. The world’s rich (top 25%) pay virtually all the taxes already but contribute to also virtually all the emissions.

You are right though, there will be a correction.

Anything that facilitates or requires extracting carbon from the ground: Coal plants, petrol engines, cars, airplanes, mass production, modern agriculture processes.

The only way to stop global warming is to stop extracting carbon from the ground, where it's stored. After that we can think about capturing carbon. But first if all we need to stop pumping it into the atmosphere at a faster rate than the earth can absorb it (about 40% is absorbed at the moment, 60% of all human carbon use is added to the atmosphere).

Sorry, but did you read the question or the article at all?

Yes, what do you mean? The biggest climate effect at the moment is human carbon use, which is changing weather patterns, and the cause of the cloud shrinkage is changing weather patterns => cloud shrinkage is driven, to some degree (I would guess strongly, but let's be careful, so some degree) by human carbon extraction.

If we immediately stopped all CO2 and methane emissions, the problem wouldn't be solved. There's still more warming that's going to happen as a result of the past emissions.

True. The warming we see today is from emissions years ago. The inertia is real.

But even if we would spend only the explicit subsidies we would have a trillion dollar each and every year to spend on things like carbon capture and other mitigations which are not dangerous large-scale geoengineering projects like cloud seeding.

Just to be clear though: "the world's rich" here doesn't mean "billionaire CEOs" that a lot of people think of. It means the average American and European.

Yup