Change ourselves or the climate? Neither.

Starting assumption: The Earth's atmosphere is getting warmer, due to humans or otherwise.  In other words, global warming is real.

Understandably, the increase of temperatures around the world is going to cause some major problems.  Predictions offer a smorgasboard of disasters including: droughts, monsoons, hurricanes and typhoons, earthquakes and landslides, tsunamis and high tides! (Disasters are less scary when spoken in rhyme).  As it currently stands there are two "solutions" being offered: Social change, and geo-engineering.

Advocates of social change have a primary enemy in carbon and human culture (close bedfellows since the agricultural revolution).  Their solution to global warming is to eliminate greenhouse gases by convincing people to use fewer CO2 producing products, and to make the products that do so, more efficient.  These people are generally your stereotypical environmentalists, hipsters, and other similar activists coming out of liberal-arts schools (like mine).  On the other hand, you have the proponents of geo-engineering, who are your stereotypical scientists, mathematicians, and other similar "experts" who are coming out of technically proficient schools (such as MIT).  They espouse the idea that global warming can be defeated with direct action, such as seeding the sky with reflective particles or salting the oceans to prevent the gulf-stream from collapsing.  Both groups are well supported by evidence and predictive models, and in many cases they agree that both courses of action should be pursued.

Yet both groups have no idea how to go about realizing their goals, since their goals are so unrealistic and idealized.  Does anyone really think that we can convince not only gas-happy America, but developing nations that heavily rely on coal to change their behavior regarding fossil fuels?  Does anyone really want to invest in a massive engineering project that is not certain to work, doesn't address all the climate issues, and may actually cause other problems on top of the climate?  Both of these efforts require massive amount of money, long political campaigns, and can't be too heavily compromised or diluted for fear of the solutions losing their effectiveness.  Furthermore, even if these both could be implemented, the problem would not go away at all.  We have now dumped enough into the atmosphere that a number of feedback-loops have been created in numerous places around the world.  For example: Millenia old perma-frost is beginning to melt, releasing tons of greenhouse gasses. We can't engineer perma-frost not to melt, and we can't guilt trip it into remaining frozen, so what do we do?

My answer: Do nothing....for now.  We have to come to the realization that the world IS going to get warmer, no matter what.  Even the most ideal predictions regarding successful social or engineered changes only slow down the progress of global warming.  But when I say do nothing, I don't mean give up or despair.  One of the major issues with reporting on global warming is the alarmism which so conveniently raises viewer counts for the various networks and publications involved.  It isn't interesting if it can't kill you.  Yet global warming is not a universally negative change.  When a climate changes for the worse in one place, it could just as easily be changing for the better elsewhere.  Increased temperatures are already causing record vegetation growth in many places around the world, and some developing nations being held back by drought or famine may finally get a break.  In all likelihood the majority of changes will be for the worse, but the main idea is not to be alarmist, but rather realistic and practical about our response.  Pretending we are doing something for anything but our wallets when we buy a Prius or an efficient AC is not going to help the planet.

So do nothing, until we find something effective to do.  I don't think that any amount of work on the two solutions I described is going to prevent the eventual rise of sea levels.  Don't spend all our money on ad campaigns for green products, instead spend that money on building sea walls.  Don't spend all our money on trying to prevent the gulf-stream from collapsing, instead spend that money on developing urban agriculture and vertical farms.  Don't spend all our money on...well we aren't spending any money on climate change in developing nations, but we should be spending money on building shelters and colonies for the environmental refugees that are sure to come.  Do you see the trend here?  Instead of trying to stop the problem, we should do our best to mitigate its effects.

An interesting parallel to this problem is the War on Drugs.  A number of extremely dangerous drugs are legal to use because we are used to them (alcohol, nicotine, overprescription of pharmaceuticals ), and a number of not nearly as dangerous drugs are illegal because of old prejudices and interest groups (marijuana).  We spend millions of dollars on trying to stop people from selling/smoking weed, when we know people are going to keep doing it no matter what.  So just like post-prohibition, we should legalize and regulate the substance, so that we stop wasting so much money (and start making money off of taxes), and start educating people better to prevent abuse and addiction.  It worked for alcohol, it would work for weed, and it is our only choice for the environment, because its too late or too impossible to do anything else.