The delay you mention is only the case if you do not presume humans can intervene with counterforces. Yes, we are not Gods, but I think any analysis which does not incorporate the various tech curves that are going vertical right now are falling into the "future is like the past" fallacy. I think that if we got the first set of miracles you hypothesize, we wouldn't just sit on our hands as the 40 year delay unfolds. We'll keep working the problem, and leverage would increase over time to close the gap.
No matter what we do, the delay is inevitable, but the time is variable. A lot of PR optimistically claims we won't have to wait more than 20 years, but from what I understand it's more like 40-50 in the scientific literature, and up to 100-200 years with worst case estimates. I'm not an atmospheric physicist, however.
> When you emit carbon dioxide, the climate stays altered for a long time," says Solomon Hsiang, a climate scientist who is the co-director at the Climate Impact Lab at the University of California, Berkeley. "And so we kind of have to deal with that baggage no matter what."
> Today's adults will be dealing with climate-driven extreme weather for decades to come. But if countries transform their economies to cut heat-trapping emissions sharply, today's kindergartners could inherit a safer world when they reach middle age.
> "It's kind of like you're driving a giant train that's very heavy. You slam on the brakes. The train keeps going for a while," Hsiang explains. "There's some amount of heating that we would continue to experience," even with dramatic cuts to greenhouse gas emissions. It will take decades for forests, oceans and other natural systems to soak up all the excess greenhouse gases that have accumulated in the atmosphere.
The train analogy reveals the bad mental model. Thinking we cannot apply a counterforce to the "train" only comes from assuming it's too hard to do so. If we had infinite technological capabilities, we could remove all the excess carbon from the atmosphere relatively quickly. There's nothing, based on physics, preventing this possibility. That doesn't mean it's easy or knowable how it can be done, only that it could be done given sufficient technological means. Which we'll surely be incentivized to develop vs just sitting around and waiting for nature to take its course.
Go back and read predictions about the future from a century ago that failed to imagine simple things we take for granted today like telecomms or high speed travel. They're hilarious in grasping with bad analogies to come to strong conclusions like this. This doesn't mean the person is wrong, just that we ought to not take their beliefs as being factual, particularly if we can identify they've failed to try to incorporate technological breakouts grounded in known physics and our expected collective incentives.
