I've been saying for a long time that we'll resort to geoengineering to finagle our way out of climate change. Unfortunately I think that prediction is still spot-on.

We're clearly not going to get our shit together, things are going to start getting obviously out of control (i.e. impossible for even the most ardent coal eater to brush off as "The weather fluctuates sometimes") and governments will reach for the most knee-jerk fix available.

Then we'll really do ourselves in when suddenly we have a "fix" for CO2 emissions and we can all go back to burning oil.

I doubt we're going back to burning oil, at least not as we have been doing. But I also doubt we're going to transition away fast enough, and once we have the "fix," the transition away from it will slow.

We have exactly one place to live in the entire known universe, and we're such a shitshow that we can't help but to gamble on destroying it.

Not the atmosphere, the stratosphere. But if that cannot be undone and temps are going down more than expected, we will be in real trouble.

start?

likely referring to Stratospheric aerosol injection: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_inject...

Iirc, that was also the reason Earth plunged into a new ice age in Snowpiercer.