Coal Train

Burning fossil fuels is the biggest geoengineering action humans have ever made. Our efforts to restore our climate depend upon reversing this inadvertent geoengineering with emissions reductions, atmospheric greenhouse gas removal, and temporary emergency cooling. It is this last action of temporary emergency cooling that is contentious. Directly cooling our atmosphere with strategies that we have been employing, albeit unintentionally, for 200 years via cooling aerosols emitted from burning fossil fuels alongside of the warming pollutants, is the geoengineering that has our climate culture in an uproar.  Deploying cooling aerosols to fix the damage from humans fossil fuel geoengineering is not the geoengineering that is dangerous. It is the emergency solution to reverse the dangerous geoengineering our culture has created by burning fossil fuels and more, whose warming has created natural systems degradation that does not stop unless we cool our climate back to within the evolutionary boundaries of our systems, to eliminate the foregone irreversible feedback emissions from natural systems that will dwarf humankind’s if we fail to restore.

It is very important to understand that our current climate culture of eliminating emissions only affects future warming, it cannot stop the degradation from current warming because it does not remove the warming that caused the degradation to begin.