What Carbon Removal Taught Me About Cooling

After I wrote about the Global Tipping Points conference giving geoengineering the cold shoulder, Pete Irvine from SRM360 reached out. They'd had plenty of climate scientists and policy folks weigh in on cooling interventions, but nobody from deep in the carbon removal trenches. We went back and forth over email, and the piece that came out of it just went live on SRM360: "Cooling Isn't Plan B. It's How Plan A Succeeds."

Pete had this great observation about how our climate toolkit keeps expanding. First it was just emissions cuts. Then we grudgingly accepted we'd need adaptation. Then carbon removal fought its way into respectability. Now here we are, talking about cooling.

Each expansion happens the same way, and each time it happens because the math stops working without it.

I've been thinking about this progression all year. I've been trying to figure out and describe why carbon removal isn't scaling faster—meeting with founders, talking to investors, dissecting the bottlenecks. The uncomfortable truth kept surfacing: even if we solve every problem, we're still not going to scale fast enough. Since February, when Hansen's acceleration paper made that timeline collapse undeniable for me, I've been diving into cooling interventions. Reading everything, attending webinars, trying to understand this space the way I understand carbon removal. (This is the kindling phase of starting something new, if you've read my past articles.)

The numbers are brutal. We're removing maybe 1-3 million tonnes of CO2 annually. We need 285 million by 2030 just to stay on track. That's not a gap you close with incremental progress.

And rising temperatures don't just make life harder—they actively sabotage the solutions we're trying to scale. Think about it: how much harder will it be to build massive industrial infrastructure for carbon removal while supply chains are breaking from extreme weather? How likely is unprecedented international cooperation while climate migration increases and populism rises in kind? What do we do when increasing temperatures reduce nature’s ability to drawdown CO2? The hotter it gets, the harder everything becomes.

That's the insight that made cooling click for me. It's not some separate thing from our climate response. It's what keeps the window open for everything else to work. There are very real downside risks to cooling, but if we can manage them, it’s plausibly the best option for giving decarbonization and carbon removal a fighting chance.

SRM360 does something nobody else is doing well—they translate between worlds. Their webinars break down the legal landscape without requiring a law degree. They publish perspective pieces from glaciologists, ethicists, Global South researchers. They're not pushing an agenda; they're building shared understanding. When you're dealing with something this complex and contentious, that's invaluable.

Anyway, go read the piece. Then poke around their other work. We're going to need these resources for what's coming.

Humanity is eventually going to use cooling interventions, one way or another. The only question is whether we'll be ready when we do.