“Bottom line: … only human action to slash carbon pollution can stop it.”
No! No, no, no! We are not stuck on “only” slashing carbon pollution! We are stuck on that only because greens like Joe Romm are hostile to actively stopping global warming. The method exists to do that almost immediately, and a lot of people know about it — by injecting aerosols into the stratosphere (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_injection_(climate_engineering))
Here’s the scenario, people. We aren’t going to stop putting carbon in the atmosphere any time soon, and planetary temperatures are going to rise for a good long time after we finally manage to stop. So are we going to sit there and watch the thermometer rise? Just how passive can we afford to be?
Please folks, consider it. Just consider it. If the heat problem is so very terrible (and I agree it is), and if almost no one actually thinks we can stop adding GHGs to the atmosphere for the foreseeable future, then the only sensible approach is to actually stop global warming now. And stratospheric injection of aerosols can stop it almost immediately. Not forever. Not as a permanent solution. But it can easily, and cheaply, dial back global temperatures a degree — more if you wish. And if you stop injecting the aerosols, they simply fall out of the atmosphere in a year or two. It can buy us time to complete the project of going carbonless, but the Joe Romms of the world refuse to even consider it as an option. If they are successful, they will doom us to a much hotter world than we have to have.
So, yes, consider the possibility of actively dialing down the thermostat.