Indeed clouds have been a problem for a while, but I think that the magnitude of their influence has been reasonably bounded—-but of course even if you have feedbacks to keep dT at zero, if clouds change enough to make up this difference that could conceivably screw up weather for agriculture.
OK, it’s better now to talk about mitigation.
I think wind and solar are fabulous but they will not be anywhere nearly quantitatively significant enough to make a dent in coal for at least a century. And we have to deal with coal now. Coal is baseline power, just like nukes.
The largest wind plant in the world I think is 160 MW or so, and that’s offshore (where winds are stronger) in Europe. A typical nuclear plant is now 2000-3000 MW, coal maybe 1500-2000 MW. Individual reactors are now up to 1200-1600 MW. It looks like hundreds of new coal plants are going to be built in the next 4 years. Now do you see the scale of the problem? We need hundreds of nuclear plants as soon as possible to try to preclude coal and eventualy shut it down.
In real reality, opposing nuclear means supporting coal, and that is climate catastrophe. Gas and oil will soon be too expensive anyway.
Fortunately, the critical paths for wind, solar and nuclear don’t really intersect and I favor maximum effort being applied to all of them (and engineered geothermal) to the limit of logistical reality.
I think localized photovoltaic solar is going to remain financially insignificant to utilities (and hence quantitatively insignificant in power replacement) for 20 to 50 years.
Wind is much more practical than solar and much more significant in generating capacity, and it is now a serious commerical industry, at last. Even still, and with recent large wind farm expansion, wind is about at 0.04% of US generating capacity. Coal is about 50%, gas and nuclear about 15-20%.
The laws of physics are unfortunately what they are; it would be great if safe and easy and cheap solar and wind would be able to do it, but they won’t.
My opinion: we need serious nuclear fission for about 200 years. By then, we may be able to retire it.
