uwharrie:
a concept popped into my mind at how intentional atmospheric particulate emission (think of a man-made equivalent to a volcano constantly emitting reflective particles into the atmosphere) would be a possibility

uw, there are MANY proposals for "geoengineering" that could counter global warming trends. In an appeal to authority, I will cite sitn.hms.harvard.edu - Reversing climate change with geoengineering reviewing some of these. There advantage is they are insanely less expensive than "stopping using fossil fuels" and probably more reliable in their effect to boot.

You might be very interested in Neal Stephenson's 2021 novel called Termination Shock. The "man-made equivalent to a volcano" features heavily in this story.

There are many who don't seem to like the idea of geoengineering. Their best objection seems to be something like this:

We got in trouble because we made changes to the planet whose effect we did not understand or anticipate. Making additional changes to the planet to counter these first changes may also be subject to "unintended concsequences" that we do not currently understand or anticipate, so a program of just reversing the changes we already made seems more likely to succeed at solving the problem.

The answers to this objection seem to me to be

1) The geoengineering approaches are wildly less expensive ( 1/1000th the cost?) of reversing CO2 emissions, and they are things that can easily be turned on and then turned off or fine-tuned as their effects become better understood

2) It actually appears that the geo-engineering approaches are more likely to produce controllable cooling than reversing CO2 emissions

3) The idea that without global totalitarianism we might get developing countries to give up their development by cooperating in a CO2 emission reversal may be as unrealistic as the idea that communism will lead to an improvement in the lives of vast swathes of humanity. That is, a simple hypothesis that looks good if you don't think about it too hard, but is actually gigantically unlikely to work out the way it looks without your glasses on.

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Anyway, the Stephenson book is amazingly cool and fun and even informative, if you like that kind of thing!

R: