Excellent research on cooling interventions exists. What's missing? Organizations willing to say temperature stabilization will likely be necessary. Here's why.
I come from a background spending seven years building Nori, where we were primarily focused on regenerative agriculture adoption, so I am absolutely an advocate for regenerative practices. That experience informs a lot of how I've come to the conclusions I wrote in this article. I see a LOT of challenges for scaling and adoption in the regenerative space, and I do not believe they are going to happen fast enough to avoid the need for some sort of intentional cooling that works more rapidly. It still needs to happen, but I'm viewing global cooling interventions as necessary to buy time for this sort of regeneration. I've written more on the barriers here: https://www.inevitableandobvious.com/p/we-wont-achieve-gigatonne-carbon
3) including a presentation from Make Sunsets' Luke Iseman (that we were early supporters of - see posts from me and Robert Tulip on the MakeSunsets blog): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLD42kz45Zk&t=641s)
4) @HPACoalition (Bluesky and Twitter/X)
5) A couple of HPAC peer reviewed academic papers that expressly and explicitly call for urgent deployment of climate cooling
(I know of only three others: Wake Smith et al. 2024, Wake Smith 2024, and Hansen et al. 2023).
Addressing the Urgent Need for Direct Climate Cooling: Rationale and Options
BTW - We have been trying in every way to get an NGO with standing or member state with standing (almost all countries of the world are International Maritime Organization (IMO) member states with standing) to submit this to the IMO"s Marine Environment Protection Committee (MEPC) for consideration (and have been encouraged to do so by the IMO's lead scientist and Secretary of the MEPC). If anyone reading this has contacts please contact me!
6) Also contact me healthyplanetaction@gmail.com if you'd like to get more involved with HPAC including joining our very active google group with over 300 members and now also a thread on Paul’s Substack article.
Thank you Paul for your excellent article that brilliantly summarizes our (humanity's) current pressing and critical existential problem of a scale never before encountered in human history, and outlines what practically needs to be done to meet this challenge and opportunity.
Folllowing up on Robert Tulip's comment, below is a short comment from me (to another thread - the "piece that Greg shared" is this Paul Gambill article - with links to documents produced by the HPAC Urgent climate cooling Response Working Group that may be of interest to you and your readers:
Hello Paul, this is an excellent article—thank you for writing it. In my experience, the Healthy Planet Action Coalition (HPAC) is the most practical organisation bringing together people who recognise and support the urgent need for cooling advocacy that you highlight here.
Scientific bodies have been far too timid and apolitical on this front. You’d be very welcome to join one of our fortnightly public Zoom calls. Herb Simmens from HPAC was at the Exeter conference and observed the same divide you mention between the tipping point community and those prioritising active cooling. His interview with Johan Rockström starkly illustrates this tension.
In my recent article published in The Hill, I proposed an Albedo Accord modelled on the Montreal Protocol, based on the observation that the Earth's Albedo Layer is collapsing—just as the ozone layer was in the 1980s. We urgently need a focused international effort to restore the 2.5% of planetary albedo lost since 2000 as the top climate priority.
Everyone who grasps the scale and speed of this problem should be working together to develop coherent advocacy strategies. This needs to include building alliances with commercial sectors most at risk from escalating heat—such as insurance, finance, agriculture, energy, and tourism—to help generate constituencies of support and catalyse coordinated action.
I'm excited you're writing about solar geoengineering! However, I worry about looking up to carbon removal as a role model for how our field develops. Might we not learn more from looking at some other industry that's been more successful while also being controversial? The growth of cryptocurrency is one of my favorite examples.
Hey Luke, thanks for the comment and I totally take your point. In terms of actual atmospheric impact, carbon removal has achieved next to nothing so far, relatively speaking.
My reflection on Nori is that we took on two tasks simultaneously: educating the market and running a commercial carbon credit business. We were extremely successful at the former (measured by the literal dozens of people who have told me they work in CDR because of Nori content plus the large scale growth of investment into the space), and obviously not successful at the latter. That's the experience driving my conviction that clear advocacy work is needed.
As for crypto, I was around at the start of that industry too (discovered and bought BTC in January 2011, and Nori was crypto-first). You're right that crypto offers lessons beyond just the financial incentives: building despite regulatory uncertainty, creating facts on the ground, developing passionate communities. Those elements could absolutely apply here.
The key difference I see is risk distribution. Crypto could "move fast and break things" because the downside was mostly financial and mostly affected participants. With cooling interventions, we're talking about potential externalities that affect everyone. That seems to demand different approaches to governance and deployment.
But I'm genuinely curious about your perspective on this. How do you think about balancing the need for momentum with the risks of uncoordinated action? Would love to discuss more sometime. Let me know!
Hi Paul, thank you for this piece that was sent to me. Pity we missed each other in Exeter, we are definitely on the same team!
Onward!
Rob
Thank you Rob! I will find you on LinkedIn.
Hello Paul,
Yes, totally agree with the need for cooling, thank you for sharing your message.
I wonder, what are your thoughts on the impact of restoring the living skin of the Earth (i.e. Walter Jehne’s synthesis, https://regenerate-earth.org/restoring-water-cycles-cooling-climate/) as a cooling process?
E.g. Vegetation transpires cloud-condensing bacteria and phytoplankton create dimethyl sulphide, another essential biologally created clound condensation nuclei, without which, our Earth’s albedo drastically decreases and our sensible surface heat dramatically increases?
Hi Katie,
I come from a background spending seven years building Nori, where we were primarily focused on regenerative agriculture adoption, so I am absolutely an advocate for regenerative practices. That experience informs a lot of how I've come to the conclusions I wrote in this article. I see a LOT of challenges for scaling and adoption in the regenerative space, and I do not believe they are going to happen fast enough to avoid the need for some sort of intentional cooling that works more rapidly. It still needs to happen, but I'm viewing global cooling interventions as necessary to buy time for this sort of regeneration. I've written more on the barriers here: https://www.inevitableandobvious.com/p/we-wont-achieve-gigatonne-carbon
Paul
The best cooling intervention would be rebuilding the water-cycle.
Hi Paul,
(After reading your post in more detail!) A few more links that may be of interest:
1) Healthy Planet Action Coalition website: https://www.healthyplanetaction.org/
2) YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@HealthyPlanetActionCoali-tf8fk
3) including a presentation from Make Sunsets' Luke Iseman (that we were early supporters of - see posts from me and Robert Tulip on the MakeSunsets blog): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLD42kz45Zk&t=641s)
4) @HPACoalition (Bluesky and Twitter/X)
5) A couple of HPAC peer reviewed academic papers that expressly and explicitly call for urgent deployment of climate cooling
(I know of only three others: Wake Smith et al. 2024, Wake Smith 2024, and Hansen et al. 2023).
Addressing the Urgent Need for Direct Climate Cooling: Rationale and Options
Baiman et al. 2024. Oxford Open Climate Change: https://academic.oup.com/oocc/article/4/1/kgae014/7731760
An Open Letter to the IMO Supporting Maritime Transport that Cools the Atmosphere While Preserving Air Quality Benefits. Baiman et al. 2024. Oxford Open Climate Change: https://academic.oup.com/oocc/article/4/1/kgae008/7706251?searchresult=1
BTW - We have been trying in every way to get an NGO with standing or member state with standing (almost all countries of the world are International Maritime Organization (IMO) member states with standing) to submit this to the IMO"s Marine Environment Protection Committee (MEPC) for consideration (and have been encouraged to do so by the IMO's lead scientist and Secretary of the MEPC). If anyone reading this has contacts please contact me!
6) Also contact me healthyplanetaction@gmail.com if you'd like to get more involved with HPAC including joining our very active google group with over 300 members and now also a thread on Paul’s Substack article.
Thank you Paul for your excellent article that brilliantly summarizes our (humanity's) current pressing and critical existential problem of a scale never before encountered in human history, and outlines what practically needs to be done to meet this challenge and opportunity.
Best,
Ron
Dear Paul et al.,
Folllowing up on Robert Tulip's comment, below is a short comment from me (to another thread - the "piece that Greg shared" is this Paul Gambill article - with links to documents produced by the HPAC Urgent climate cooling Response Working Group that may be of interest to you and your readers:
"The key is the potential to have significant global impact in the near-term. Here's an (still in process) ordered chart of methods that the HPAC Urgent climate cooling Response WG has been working on: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1DK4OvG7bTG7wMUB7btYHOhxNCsNvbMH2/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=116465941111195452408&rtpof=true&sd=true
Here's the AGU 2025 abstract submission (with a title reminiscent of the opinion piece that Greg shared) that (if accepted) will draw on the final version of the powerpoint above: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1P4g5PtP5eBgsDlVdoXoGVcL0LQoe3SUG/view?usp=sharing"
Best,
Ron Baiman
Hello Paul, this is an excellent article—thank you for writing it. In my experience, the Healthy Planet Action Coalition (HPAC) is the most practical organisation bringing together people who recognise and support the urgent need for cooling advocacy that you highlight here.
Scientific bodies have been far too timid and apolitical on this front. You’d be very welcome to join one of our fortnightly public Zoom calls. Herb Simmens from HPAC was at the Exeter conference and observed the same divide you mention between the tipping point community and those prioritising active cooling. His interview with Johan Rockström starkly illustrates this tension.
In my recent article published in The Hill, I proposed an Albedo Accord modelled on the Montreal Protocol, based on the observation that the Earth's Albedo Layer is collapsing—just as the ozone layer was in the 1980s. We urgently need a focused international effort to restore the 2.5% of planetary albedo lost since 2000 as the top climate priority.
Everyone who grasps the scale and speed of this problem should be working together to develop coherent advocacy strategies. This needs to include building alliances with commercial sectors most at risk from escalating heat—such as insurance, finance, agriculture, energy, and tourism—to help generate constituencies of support and catalyse coordinated action.
Hi Paul,
excellent article!!!
But you forgot one option. Methane removal. Unlike CDR methane removal is actually possible at scale.
Compare our websites
https://amr.earth
https://georestoration.earth
https://cool-planet.earth
Have a great week
Oswald
I'm excited you're writing about solar geoengineering! However, I worry about looking up to carbon removal as a role model for how our field develops. Might we not learn more from looking at some other industry that's been more successful while also being controversial? The growth of cryptocurrency is one of my favorite examples.
Hey Luke, thanks for the comment and I totally take your point. In terms of actual atmospheric impact, carbon removal has achieved next to nothing so far, relatively speaking.
My reflection on Nori is that we took on two tasks simultaneously: educating the market and running a commercial carbon credit business. We were extremely successful at the former (measured by the literal dozens of people who have told me they work in CDR because of Nori content plus the large scale growth of investment into the space), and obviously not successful at the latter. That's the experience driving my conviction that clear advocacy work is needed.
As for crypto, I was around at the start of that industry too (discovered and bought BTC in January 2011, and Nori was crypto-first). You're right that crypto offers lessons beyond just the financial incentives: building despite regulatory uncertainty, creating facts on the ground, developing passionate communities. Those elements could absolutely apply here.
The key difference I see is risk distribution. Crypto could "move fast and break things" because the downside was mostly financial and mostly affected participants. With cooling interventions, we're talking about potential externalities that affect everyone. That seems to demand different approaches to governance and deployment.
But I'm genuinely curious about your perspective on this. How do you think about balancing the need for momentum with the risks of uncoordinated action? Would love to discuss more sometime. Let me know!