The Architecture for Cooling Earth Is Finally Taking Shape
First published at Inevitable & Obvious by Paul Gambill on September 30, 2025
By my estimate, fewer than a thousand people globally are working on cooling interventions. I spent four days at New York Climate Week watching a subset of them get organized, and the scale mismatch kept hitting me. The shopping mall near my home in Seattle employs more people than the entire global workforce figuring out how to stabilize Earth’s temperature.
That gap between what needs doing and who’s doing it is overwhelming. It makes me feel small and scared and excited all at once. Seven months into exploring cooling interventions, I wasn’t at Climate Week looking for proof they’re necessary. My timeline collapse moment—when the math caught up with me—took care of that. I went to see if this impossibly small community was building the coordination infrastructure needed to actually deploy these tools before physics forces our hand.
What I found was both sobering and genuinely encouraging. For the first time, this tiny community is building the architecture to work as a coordinated force rather than scattered efforts. And we’re going to need every bit of that coordination.
