Earth Approaching Tipping Point Say Scientists

And how is declaring "engineering solutions will be found" not just simply passing the buck to the future?

Well, of course, it has to be in the future, because we've so resolutely refused to solve the problems in the past.;-)

But various others have pointed out that the "engineering solutions" may not be very far in the future, if we want to implement them. One of the consequences of the accumulated evidence that the recent climate changes are primarily due to human activity is that we know that we're capable of pushing the world' climate around, and we know how we've been doing it. So from an engineering viewpoint, pushing it in a different direction (e.g., stability or slower change) is within our capabilities. Granted, the "Further Research is Needed" mantra applies, but we know enough to take effective action now if we want to.

The major questions aren't scientific or technical; they're economic, political and religious. That is, it doesn't do much good to convince the engineers that there's a problem that they can fix. They already know about it (and are looking for funding;-). We also have to get the go-ahead from the leaders of our governments and major corporations.

The outlook isn't necessarily good. We do have documentation about various major disasters throughout human history, including many that were caused by humans who understood that they were causing a disaster. History says that humans often don't act on such knowledge, even when their society is collapsing around them.

We saw a good small-scale example of this back in 2005. Before Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, the US Government ran a simulation study of such events. Google "Hurricane Pam" to read all about it. Katrina was pretty similar to Pam. The US Army Corps of Engineers produced a thorough report on the physical infrastructure of the Mississippi Delta, which listed all the places where the levees would later break during Katrina, plus estimates of the maintenance required to fix the problems. Congress turned down the applications for funding. Everyone involved knew that it was just a matter of time until the disaster hit, but the government didn't fund the maintenance, and the disaster followed the engineers' prediction practically to the letter.

This is a local example of the sort of disasters that our political systems have historically perpetrated with full knowledge beforehand. It looks like the climate-change story is a repeat performance. Some of the scientists involved decided to try to publicise it a couple of decades back, on the grounds that it was a growing problem that we could probably fix if we want to. But history says that we probably won't do anything about it, although we know how to.

(If you want a bigger example, look up the history of ozone depletion. That's actually a fairly good example of partial success. The depletion is known to be almost entirely due to chemical compounds added to the atmosphere by human activity. Our dumping of those compounds has been radically decreased, and the depletion has nearly leveled off, though it hasn't been reversed. But it is an interesting example of human governments cooperating on a global level to deal with a global problem. So there's some hope. We don't always fail when facing such large-scale problems.;-)

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