Ungineering, not geoengineering
by Bruce Melton, first published at the GRag Blog on May 27, 2026
Podcast from Rag Radio, 97.1 FM, Coop Austin
(Cover image: Ship trails in the North Pacific cool our climate through the oldest climate pollution treatment (geoengineering) strategy humans have been practicing for 150 years. Credit: NASA.)
Summary: Geonegineering is not as it seems to our current climate culture. Geoengineering is the bad things we have done to Mother Earth by burning fossil fuels and clearing half of the world’s forests. Geoengineering in our current climate culture should actually be called climate pollution treatment, because what we need to do to cool our climate is not a bad thing.
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Most Earth systems are now degrading from the effects of human-caused warming. Tropical, high altitude, and boreal forests, permafrost, ice sheets, sea ice, ocean currents, and corals are now degrading and most of these have begun to emit millennia of stored carbon as greenhouse gases because of this degradation. The damage to these systems does not stop, ever, unless the thing that caused the degradation to begin is removed. Eliminating human-caused greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels, and from land use and abuse, and creating net zero climate pollution emissions (greenhouse gases) tomorrow morning — only — reduces future warming, it does nothing to remove the warming effects from current warming and past emissions that have accumulated in our sky, that have caused our Earth systems to begin to degrade. This degradation must be separated from other human-caused degradation forces. It is entirely from warming effects related to heat and drought, and very important: If the warming effects are not removed by about mid-century for most of our systems that are currently in degradation, the damages to those systems and ecologies will become so profound that even if the warming effects are removed, the system would not be able to stabilize and recover.