There's another feedback mechanism too. Firestorm related to drought.
Geo-engineering may seem megamaniacal, but it maybe the only alternative now. Cloud creating wave/wind powered floating platforms that send a fine mist of seawater up into the astmosphere to increase cloud reflectivity and rain/snowfall seems to be possible and less drastic than other schemes. Use them for generating electricity too and GHG from power generation could be eliminated.
These devices in polar regions could increase snow pack on the ice caps, preserving their reflectivity. It could also increase snowfall on tundra, stopping the methane release. The ice preservation on the polar regions might just keep the seafloor methane hydrate cooler too, curtailing that release.
Extra clouds off of the western north american coast could increase snowfall in the rockies and save glaciers. These cloud machines in the ME and off of Africa could green up deserts. When a western firestorm needs rain, the cloud seeding machines could provide.
As in WW II, we have waited too long to act. Now it's a world war aghainst GHG climate change. Think of run away climate change as the invasion of Poland. Exponential GHG increase may already be here. That is what is frustrating though, we can't get an honest answer exactly where we are, along the exponential curve, from the scientific community.
Conventional wisdom and political correctness is stalling an honest accounting. Unlike General Shinseki, who told the truth about the Iraq invasion, before the fact and was fired for it, we have no prominent scientists willing to risk/kill their careers by specifying the dire truth about feedback mechanisms and exponential GHG climate disaster.
I think the verdict is in. We need massive cloud seeding to avert or reverse the climate tipping point. And we still have people talking seriously about peak oil? Amazing!
"...what counts as 'geo-engineering'"
A massive shift to biodigestion of waste and organic fertilizer on a global scale would be geo-engineering. Closing down fossil power generation and transportation worldwide would be geo-engineering.
Doing it piecemeal nation by nation wouldn't.
A vast fleet of floating wave/wind energy platforms that spray seawater into the atmosphere would be geo-engineering if it were deployed on a global scale. They would have to be positioned and controlled to enhance cloud formation and precipitation, but carefully so as not to produce massive flooding, ice storms, and so forth.
Could the allied climate fighting powers, Europe and North America, ramp up mass production to create a large enough fleet? Ot would be like WW II ship production. A truism of capitalism, started by Marx, is that every few decades it seems to need a war to destroy excess production.
This would be an alternative depression cure to war. Send the excess production out on the ocean, exiting the normal economy, to cure the climate. Instead of destroying war material and human lives. Seems sensible to me.
