Geoengineering: We have been for centuries
Powerpoint Presentation, June 2, 2026
This presentation covers the concepts of geoengineering and pollution treatment that our advanced culture has been practicing for centuries and millennia. It started when we terraformed Earth by cutting down more than a third of its trees before the Industrial Revolution. Geoengineering is evident everywhere we look. Our planet today is vastly different than before humans learned to use fire and agriculture and developed civilization. This geoengineering warmed Earth a degree C – before we began burning fossil fuels. Now, because we have warmed our planet beyond the evolutionary boundaries of our Earth’s systems, they have begun to degrade.
Once degradation begins in almost all systems, it does not stop and can only lead to collapse and re-evolution with species and mechanisms tolerant of the new conditions unless, we restore our climate back to within those evolutionary boundaries. This is climate tipping, it is active (systems are degrading) and the academic literature tells us that the point of no return, where the systems become so degraded they cannot self-restore even if the thing that caused the degradation to begin is removed, is about mid-century for most of the systems that are currently degrading. The results would be the re-emission of millenia of stored carbon in the form of greenhouse gases. At risk are ten times all the greenhouse gas emissions that humans have ever emitted and much of these emissions will happen faster than the rate of human’s emissions since we began burning fossil fuels.
Today, the best geoengineering practices to restore our climate (the best heat pollution treatment strategies,) so that we have time to remove the excess greenhouse gases from our atmosphere, so that we can create a truly sustainable human culture, these best practices are conceptually identical to the pollution treatment practices our culture has been practicing for hundreds of years. Geoengineering is the really bad things we have done to change planet Earth and disrupt is stable systems that we humans have depended upon for our advanced civilization’s evolution. If these systems fail, humanity risks the same outcome as any system faces when it begins degrading. To ensure we do not cross this extremely high risk threshold, we have to cool; and remove, and reduce.
See the notes in the presentation for academic references.
Image: Jospeh Tellerer, Unsplash