Like so many termites, humans have nibbled away at the environmental foundations of our planet since the dawn of civilization. Today, we need to urgently repair the damage we’ve caused to our planet’s atmosphere so future generations can continue living here.

Where do we begin, though? Our approach to-date has been topical—let’s call the exterminator so we can prevent further damage from occurring. But in truth, we also need to make repairs so our house doesn’t collapse. Why aren’t we doing both?

The reason is that the climate repair variety of geoengineering has an image problem, often portrayed as some sort of mad scientist undertaking that is both dangerous and morally in league with oil companies. This framing obscures a complex history, misleading vocabulary, scientific cherry-picking, and legal and regulatory structures that are ill-suited to the challenges ahead.

Meanwhile, geoengineering’s image problem is causing political leaders everywhere to hesitate. We need to move past this stalemate, and begin having a more urgent and responsible conversation about what kinds of climate solutions our future demands.

History

Humans have always engineered their worlds, both intentionally and accidentally, from carving canals to building berms and dams, diverting rivers, draining swamps, clearing forests, killing wildlife, planting crops, altering coastlines, and building roads. These “geoengineering” projects have mostly been of the lithosphere engineering variety, altering the upper part of the Earth’s crust. They grew out of necessity, as well as the conviction of societies everywhere that nature should be proactively mastered to support growth, security and economic stability. Over time, a reactive lineage of lithospheric engineering also developed, focused on repairing the damage caused by our proactive recklessness.

Atmospheric geoengineering has lots of overlap with its lithospheric cousin. It’s often framed as a modern phenomenon—as something that began with the Industrial Revolution in the mid-1700s, when coal-fired steam engines and later oil-powered systems began releasing unprecedented amounts of carbon dioxide into the air. But human influence on the atmosphere actually began far earlier. A growing body of research suggests that our early agricultural practices—especially large-scale deforestation for cropland, the spread of livestock herding, and the rise of methane-emitting wet rice agriculture—began measurably altering our atmosphere thousands of years before industrialization. While the magnitude of these effects remains debated, most carbon-cycle reconstructions find that early human land use likely warmed our planet by several tenths of a degree, possibly preventing the onset of another ice age.

The pace and magnitude of our atmospheric tampering, however, only came into sharp focus in the mid-1950s as our fossil fuel addiction started becoming noticeable. And as it became noticeable, debates about atmospheric geoengineering inherited lithospheric engineering’s longer history of tension between past and future, proactive and reactive—between what we’ve done to our environment and continue to do in the name of progress, and the possibility that reactive geoengineering, however well-intended, might create new environmental harm.

The scholarship and policy around atmospheric geoengineering is also much newer than for lithospheric engineering, but its intellectual roots still trace back at least two centuries. In 1824, mathematician Joseph Fourier first proposed that the Earth’s atmosphere acts like a thermal blanket, trapping in heat and preventing us from freezing. Building on Fourier’s work, Claude Pouillet refined the physics of solar radiation and heat transfer in the 1830s, and in 1856, Eunice Newton Foote demonstrated experimentally that air rich in carbon dioxide warms more under sunlight. A few years later, John Tyndall provided precise measurements showing that water vapor and carbon dioxide are critical greenhouse gases.

By the turn of the 20th century, Svante Arrhenius and Nils Ekholm extended these foundations into quantitative climate science. Arrhenius’ 1896 calculations suggested that rising CO2 levels could warm our planet by several degrees, while Ekholm speculated in 1901 that humanity might someday “regulate the future climate of the Earth” to stave off another ice age.

Global warming still wasn’t recognized as a threat during this period, however. In fact, some scientists even saw potential benefits in manipulating carbon dioxide levels. In 1954, Caltech geochemist Harrison Brown proposed increasing CO2 levels to boost agricultural productivity.

This mindset of carbon dioxide as a purely harmless gas began shifting in the 1950s along four parallel lines:

  1. First, climate science itself started evolving. In a series of papers published between 1953 and 1956, Gilbert Plass used modern radiative-transfer calculations to confirm that CO2 was in fact highly effective at trapping infrared radiation. Then in 1958, Charles David Keeling’s precise measurements at Mauna Loa established the Earth’s atmospheric carbon levels were rising every year. And by the mid-1960s, new climate-modeling work—most notably by Syukuro Manabe and Richard Wetherald—demonstrated that doubling our planet’s carbon dioxide concentration would lead to substantial planetary warming.
  2. Second, society’s perception of environmental harm was being rapidly transformed by a string of highly visible pollution crises. The 1952 Great London Smog killed roughly 12,000 people, and throughout the 1950s and 60s, similar smog crises occurred in Los Angeles, New York, Tokyo and Mexico City. On top of this, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, published in 1962, highlighted for the first time the ecological and health consequences of industrial chemicals, which helped galvanize public rage into action. Together, these events and others starting convincing the public that humans could damage their environment on a large scale, and that we could and should take a more active role in protecting it.
  3. Third, environmental science was starting to develop a more systemic lens. Advances in atmospheric circulation modeling, early global carbon-cycle research, the coordinated measurements of the 1957-58 International Geophysical Year, and Keeling’s new ability to track planetary CO2 trends, all fed into a growing understanding that the Earth’s natural systems were interconnected.
  4. And fourth, at the same time, environmental policy and public activism began taking shape across much of the industrialized world. The US saw the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970, the first Earth Day, and sweeping federal air- and water-quality laws; the UK strengthened its pollution-control regime after the 1952 Great London Smog and later smog crises; Japan enacted some of the world’s strictest industrial-emissions laws following mercury poisoning and asthma disasters; and Western European countries began establishing dedicated environment ministries between 1970 and 1972. This momentum culminated in the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, which for the first time framed environmental degradation as a global, interconnected challenge requiring international cooperation. Together, these developments signaled a shared recognition that ecological harms were systemic, transboundary, and rooted in many of the same human activities that climate science was beginning to scrutinize.

Against this backdrop of advancing science, rising public alarm and advocacy, evolving environmental law, and a rapidly changing understanding of Earth’s interconnected systems, an “Earth systems” view was gradually taking hold—one that would eventually shape how societies approached planetary-scale environmental risk.

The term “geoengineering” made its first appearance during this period, when William Kellogg and Stephen Schneider published their 1974 paper in Science outlining speculative climate-modification strategies. Throughout the 1970s and 80s, researchers proposed a growing list of other geoengineering ideas. By the late 1980s and early 90s, climate-related carbon dioxide removal (CDR) was emerging as a coherent scientific topic in its own right. The term CDR did not yet exist, researchers were still scattered across disciplines, and geoengineering was still not a commonly-used term, but the growing research interest in this field was everywhere.

In 1988, this field’s scientific importance was recognized with the establishment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC’s first assessment report was issued in 1990 and played a major role in informing the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The First International Conference on Carbon Dioxide Removal also happened in 1992, bringing together researchers working on carbon capture, disposal, and utilization.

Early IPCC assessments discussed the importance of carbon sinks and sequestration, and later reports in the 1990s and early 2000s began exploring emerging options like carbon capture and storage (CCS) and bioenergy systems. Still, despite this mounting scientific clarity and credibility, there was no strong public backlash against geoengineering or carbon removal. Climate modification remained academically interesting but politically nonthreatening.

This end of political obscurity for geoengineering happened rather suddenly in 2006 when Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen published a paper in the journal Climatic Change titled “Albedo Enhancement by Stratospheric Sulfur Injections.” Crutzen—concerned that society might fail to reduce carbon emissions fast enough—argued that certain solar radiation modification (SRM) strategies should be studied as a fallback. The reaction to Crutzen, both scientifically and politically, was swift and intense. Critics accused him and other geoengineering proponents of playing God with the climate, a sentiment that soon became shorthand for the perceived moral overreach of all forms of climate engineering, and the ETC Group launched a global campaign against “geoengineering experiments.” In one stroke, Crutzen’s work legitimized SRM scientifically while politicizing both it and CDR publicly, and geoengineering became synonymous with reckless science.

Three years later in 2009, the Royal Society issued a report similar in tone to Crutzen’s (Geoengineering the Climate) warning that while emissions cuts must remain our priority, research into climate-modification strategies might become necessary if those cuts proved insufficient. Even this cautious framing, however, was condemned by Greenpeace and others. In 2010, the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) adopted a de facto moratorium on geoengineering activities, and several high-profile climate-modification experiments were cancelled in 2011–12. And in 2014, former U.S. vice-president Al Gore declared it would be “insane, utterly mad and delusional in the extreme” to pursue geoengineering as a climate strategy. The idea of using any geoengineering processes to slow global warming had become widely viewed as falling outside the bounds of serious policy discussion, more akin to offering a “get out of jail free” card to fossil-fuel companies than pursuing legitimate science-based strategies for stabilizing temperatures.

CDR remained joined at the hip to SRM and politically marginalized until around 2015, when climate-modeling work reminded policymakers that mitigation alone could not meet 1.5C or 2C pathways. The necessity of CDR became unmistakable with the IPCC’s 2018 Special Report on 1.5C, and the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report (2021–22) made this even clearer: Every scenario limiting warming to 1.5C or 2C would require substantial carbon dioxide removal this century.

There’s an important side-story to the history of geoengineering that was especially influential during the period of 1990 to around 2010 and that casts a hue over every piece of climate policy and climate research that transpired during this period: oil hate. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, journalists, scientists, and policymakers were becoming increasingly aware that major fossil-fuel companies had both understood the risks of climate change and, at the same time, funded efforts to seed doubt about the science. As documented extensively by historians like Naomi Oreskes (in Merchants of Doubt), this disinformation campaign helped to polarize public opinion, delay policy responses, and frame the fossil-fuel industry as an antagonist in a global struggle for planetary survival. Once this framing solidified, climate politics evolved around a simple moral axis: emissions reduction as virtue, fossil fuels as vice.

This adversarial structure had consequences far beyond questions of corporate accountability. It shaped the entire vocabulary of climate action. Anything that appeared to ease pressure on the fossil-fuel industry—like carbon capture, carbon removal, or any form of deliberate climate intervention—risked being interpreted as a concession to the very actors seen as responsible for the crisis. As a result, approaches like CDR and SRM were often treated with suspicion not merely for scientific or governance reasons, but because they were perceived as politically tainted. If emissions reduction was seen as the only morally unambiguous solution, then any technology that could be construed as “helping” the fossil-fuel sector was relegated to the margins.

This dynamic helped entrench a kind of strategic silo: cut emissions first, consider everything else later. This stance was understandable given the political landscape of the time, but it came with a cost. By focusing almost exclusively on reducing fossil-fuel use—and resisting tools that might be misused as excuses for delay—society postponed serious consideration of climate interventions that would eventually prove essential. The result is the bind we face today: after decades of insufficient mitigation, large-scale carbon removal has moved from an uncomfortable idea to an unavoidable necessity.

And yet still today, despite the IPCC’s growing advocacy for CDR, debate over geoengineering remains anchored in the pre-1.5C era. Many major environmental organizations and several national and regional bodies maintain strong positions against “high-risk” forms of geoengineering, particularly SRM and large-scale marine-based CDR. Greenpeace warns these approaches risk ecological harm and will undermine emissions cuts; Friends of the Earth calls them false solutions that could deepen global inequalities; the Center for International Environmental Law warns of human-rights and governance risks; and the CBD continues to call for moratoria on certain activities.

Meanwhile, our emissions-reductions-or-bust strategy has failed, and global temperatures are on track to reach potentially catastrophic levels. How can we begin to reexamine our ideas about geoengineering so we can decide together what kind of role it might play in the future of climate policy?

Definitions

First, though, what do we even mean by “geoengineering”? This catch-all term has never been clear. The IPCC currently defines it as “a broad set of methods and technologies that aim to deliberately alter the climate system in order to alleviate impacts of climate change.” By the IPCC’s definition, there are two such broad categories of geoengineering: SRM and CDR.

Over the past decade, however, scientific bodies, assessment reports, and policy frameworks have all increasingly emphasized that SRM and CDR are not synonymous and should not be grouped together into a single category. Although both are often grouped under the umbrella of “climate intervention,” leading researchers and institutions now emphasize their different mechanisms, timescales, risks, ethics, governance structures, and roles in climate strategy; indeed, many don’t consider CDR to be geoengineering at all, more akin to pollution abatement than climate modification

For example:

  1. The IPCC separates CDR and SRM into different chapters and treats them as analytically distinct (SRM is not considered mitigation; CDR is). The NAS and the Royal Society have also issued major reports that intentionally treat SRM and CDR separately and as being fundamentally different processes. This structural distinction reflects the scientific consensus that they solve different problems.
  2. Unlike SRM, CDR is formally treated as part of mitigation scenarios in most 1.5C and 2C pathways. CDR is viewed as corrective infrastructure, while SRM is seen as temporary risk management, and put in a separate experimental class with different assumptions and risk framing. Consistent with this distinction, most governance proposals argue that SRM requires a distinct regulatory framework — that SRM’s immediacy, reversibility, regional climate implications, and termination shock risk demand using a different risk class and governance approaches completely different from those needed for CDR (such as MRV and long-term storage integrity).
  3. Scholars such as Bellamy & Geden (2019), Horton et al. (2018), Nicholson et al. (2021), and others emphasize that lumping carbon dioxide removal together with solar radiation modification under the single label of “geoengineering” obscures their fundamental differences: CDR addresses the root cause of warming, while SRM only masks its effects, making the term analytically confusing and politically misleading.

This movement away from the term has not been uniform, though. Several major policy institutions continue using geoengineering in their formal processes, not because the term is analytically precise, but because it is embedded in treaty language, negotiating procedures, and decades of institutional practice. The Convention on Biological Diversity, the London Convention and Protocol, and certain UN Environment Assembly deliberations still rely on the older vocabulary, a form of institutional inertia common in multilateral environmental law.

At the same time, many environmental advocacy organizations continue using geoengineering as a catch-all category in public communications. Their usage is well documented and often framed in strongly cautionary or oppositional terms, particularly in campaigns addressing SRM or ocean-based CDR. Whether this reflects strategic framing, simplicity, or long-standing organizational positions is difficult to determine, but the outcome is clear: the term retains a distinctly pejorative connotation in much of the public sphere. As a result, the scientific effort to disaggregate CDR and SRM has moved much faster than the public and institutional lexicon, leaving the policy debate shaped by a vocabulary that obscures meaningful distinctions among very different approaches.

Our definitions problem plays out on a more granular level as well. Researchers, institutions and advocates often speak about CDR and SRM in general terms, when in fact each category contains many different approaches with different mechanisms, risks, benefits, and maturities. Among CDR processes, for example, ocean iron fertilization (OIF) is often high on many critics’ “do not touch” list—intriguing because of its potential for large-scale, low-cost sequestration, but also still mysterious in that we don’t know enough yet about the potential speed, efficiency, and verifiability of this process at scale, or potential side effects. Generally speaking, CDR processes involving our oceans are criticized more often because the science and technology of ocean carbon removal is still new, and also because laws regarding ocean protection still prevent large-scale experimenting (although this may change in coming years; see the “External Factors” discussion).

Similarly, SRM comes in several varieties, and not all of these are equally criticized. Stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) is the most commonly known (and criticized) variety, where reflective particles like sulfur dioxide are released into the upper atmosphere to mimic the cooling effect seen after large volcanic eruptions. Other solutions, though, include marine cloud brightening, which involves spraying a fine mist of seawater into low-lying marine clouds to make them more reflective; surface albedo enhancement, where we increase the reflectivity of Earth’s surface by using reflective materials in urban areas (e.g., white roofs) or specific agricultural practices; and even space-based reflectors, where we deploy large mirrors or shades in orbit to block a portion of solar radiation from reaching Earth.

Natural analogues

There’s also a bias toward “natural” (also called “conventional”) solutions in our conversations about geoengineering, perhaps assuming these will be more politically and environmentally palatable than “unnatural” solutions (most often referred to as “novel” solutions). Planting trees and tilling soil certainly sounds more poetic than vacuuming air out of the sky.

But the reality is different. Trees don’t sequester carbon for very long, and are prone to reversal through disease and fire, particularly as our planet continues to warm. Trees and other plants—from grasslands and peat to algae—will play a huge role in the future of carbon sequestration, but their environmental footprints are large and their theoretical extraction potential may be small relative to some novel solutions like DAC.

Meanwhile, the Earth has actually deployed a huge variety of natural carbon sequestration processes over its history that will require “novel” intervention to reproduce. For example, rock weathering has been instrumental in the evolution of our atmosphere. As continents drifted apart and exposed vast new scabs of basalt, these surfaces helped draw down the amount of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere.

Similarly, SRM and OIF also have powerful “natural” analogues. Throughout Earth history, volcanoes have injected vast amounts of reflective aerosols into the upper atmosphere, cooling our planet for short blips or long centuries. Windblown mineral dust and volcanic ash have delivered iron into the ocean, triggering carbon-absorbing blooms that bury carbon in deep water. And polar ice caps have helped steady our temperatures by reflecting sunlight back into space.

Yet when humans propose recreating these same natural processes deliberately, they shift from natural planetary function to existential taboo. We currently think of natural solutions in a very narrow band, when in fact our planet has been endlessly creative in how it goes about keeping temperatures in check.

Time scales

Aside from tripping over our definitions and biases, the debate over geoengineering also diverges with regard to time scales. Are we solving for now or the future? Policy is necessarily myopic because the public has little appetite for solving long-term systemic problems. And this attention deficit has been problematic for climate policy, where it has been difficult to think in time frames longer than a few decades. Ideally, though, at least for our global warming policies, we need to think on the millennia-scale. What we do today—or fail to do—will shape our Earth’s climate long after our languages, nations, and technologies have faded into history.

This timescale myopia underscores a related flaw in our modern approach to climate policy: the assumption that our planet is naturally calm and stable, and that our only job is to stop disturbing it. This may feel true from the vantage point of human history, especially the last 12,000 years when climate conditions have allowed agriculture, cities, technology, and culture to flourish. But across geologic time, our Earth is a violent, unstable place. Continents drift. Volcanoes erupt. Seas rise and fall by hundreds of feet. Our atmosphere thickens and thins. Ecosystems collapse. Interstellar objects smash into us and reset the clock on life itself. We have been living in a rare window of tranquility but act like this window is a given, here to stay forever if we only tread carefully.

Fearing the unknown

The strongest fears about geoengineering, however, seem to be governance-based, and are reserved for efforts like SRM that have the potential to directly manipulate our climate on short time scales. Who gets to set our planetary thermostat? Who decides what the “optimal” climate is? What if one country wants cooler temperatures but another fears disruption? What if a wealthy nation or even a private actor deploys solar aerosols without permission? And if something goes wrong, what tribunal exists to adjudicate responsibility?

The perspective that has prevailed to-date is that these questions are too complicated to solve, risking a world where climate interventions are driven by unilateral desperation instead of coordinated responsibility. But it is also true that these questions simply point to the need for more study and diplomacy rather than policy paralysis and inaction.

In truth, the governance landscape for climate intervention has been quickly evolving in important ways that often go unnoticed at COP conferences. There is now a growing body of rules, standards, and institutional guidance in the carbon-removal domain in particular. The last decade has also seen the development of increasingly detailed monitoring, reporting, and verification frameworks; national and regional certification systems; and a clearer articulation of what ethical, scientifically credible, and durable carbon removal must entail. Article 6.4 of the Paris Agreement is also evolving, establishing a UN-supervised mechanism for crediting mitigation activities, including removals, with requirements for environmental integrity, transparency, and long-term stewardship. Similar work is underway across the EU, US, Canda, Australia, and a number of IGOs, each contributing to a more coherent set of expectations for what responsible CDR ought to look like. And emerging soft-law frameworks like the Vancouver Declaration fit into this broader landscape by providing high-level principles meant to support alignment across jurisdictions.

Even in the more contested area of solar radiation modification, a governance architecture has started to take shape. Academic and policy groups have outlined research principles designed to prevent unilateral or opaque activity, including the Oxford Principles, the National Academies’ 2021 recommendations, and ongoing deliberations at the UN Environment Assembly. While these proposals do not yet endorse deployment, they do set procedural conditions for transparency, public oversight, scientific independence, and international coordination should research proceed.

Considered together, this body of governance work shouldn’t entirely resolve all the concerns of geoengineering critics, but it does demonstrate that the field is not operating in morally rudderless vacuum. The question now is not whether rules exist, but whether they will evolve and coalesce in time to help effectively govern our future actions.

External factors

Accelerating our need for action is the fact that we are already past the point where emissions cuts alone will prevent dangerous warming. Even if we stop using fossil fuels tomorrow, our planet will continue warming for decades to come due to climate system inertia before temperatures eventually stabilize at this higher level for hundreds of years. The excess carbon dioxide already in our atmosphere (to say nothing of the 37 billion tons and climbing we’re adding every year) has locked in decades of additional heating. Our oceans will continue to warm. Ice sheets will continue to melt. Ecosystems will continue to collapse. We won’t preserve a livable climate for humankind by simply getting out of the way; active intervention is our new normal.

Complicating this need is the cost and complexity of intervention. Geoengineering approaches like OIF and SRM are compelling because they can in principle be deployed quickly and at scale for a mere fraction of the cost of other geoengineering efforts. Meanwhile, solutions like DAC may take decades and trillions of dollars to scale. Given that we will need broad action and rapid progress on this challenge—deploying multiple solutions across many regions and countries—no solution should be off the table for study and consideration.

A further complication is political and diplomatic inertia. For three decades already, international climate diplomacy has relied on processes that move slowly, require unanimity, and often reward symbolic commitments over material progress. Some analysts expect that only a major tipping-point crisis will overcome this inertia; others argue that meaningful action may instead come from coalitions of the willing operating outside formal UN processes—an idea reflected by the growing constellation of climate action frameworks seen at COP30.

And related to this political and diplomatic inertia is legal inertia. Across nearly every CDR pathway, the regulatory systems we rely on were built for a different era, designed to prevent localized industrial harms rather than to enable climate-scale carbon removal. Marine CDR illustrates this most clearly. Under the London Convention and Protocol, activities like ocean fertilization or alkalinity enhancement have long been treated as potential forms of “marine pollution,” triggering restrictive dumping rules that were never designed for climate mitigation (recall the previous discussion regarding definitions). Yet recent climate-law rulings from the International Court of Justice and the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea have made a different obligation unmistakable: States now carry a stringent duty of due diligence to prevent climate-driven harm to the marine environment, and precaution—as a legal principle—can no longer be interpreted narrowly as a brake on action. Instead, it must be applied holistically, balancing uncertain local risks against the certain and escalating harms of failing to mitigate climate change.

That logic extends far beyond the ocean. Direct air capture and geologic storage remain slowed by liability regimes and well-permitting systems written for fossil-fuel waste streams. Enhanced weathering and mineralization are governed by mining and waste-handling statutes that never contemplated climate mitigation. And biomass-based removals must navigate agricultural, waste, and air-quality frameworks that treat CDR as pollution control rather than carbon restoration. Even terrestrial removals are constrained by land-use and tenure systems built for conservation and short planning horizons, not century-scale carbon stewardship.

In each case, it is not explicit prohibition that constrains action but the absence of regulatory architectures suited to climate-restoration technologies. The evolution of climate jurisprudence—particularly the ICJ and ITLOS opinions—may eventually force countries to reinterpret these frameworks, but that process will be slow without deliberate focus. Until then, outdated legal rules will continue to function as de facto barriers, reinforcing the perception that governments are legally constrained from moving aggressively on carbon removal at exactly the moment when such action is most needed.

Whichever path materializes, the underlying issue is the same. Our systems are strained by a problem that is geophysically urgent, institutionally slow, and increasingly costly to postpone.

The question not asked

Against this backdrop, the fundamental question we need to ask ourselves is this: How much longer would we like human civilization to survive? Another hundred years? Five hundred? Ten thousand? The bigger the number, the more active we will need to be in managing our planet’s climate stability. Geoengineering—whether we like the word or not—is simply recognizing that climate management is now part of humanity’s job description.

Will we intervene intentionally and responsibly, or will we continue intervening by accident and delay? If our goal is to limp through the next century and hope for the best, then we can continue our current arms-length relationship with geoengineering. But if our goal is to extend the lifespan of human civilization by millennia—if we hope future generations can enjoy the same opportunities past generations have enjoyed rather than wage a never-ending battle against an increasingly hostile climate—then we need to plan for climate interventions that will prevent irreversible climate catastrophe from occurring.

In the meantime, hopefully no global leaders outside of Washington DC are falling for the fantasy that melting icecaps will be good for global commerce, or that warming temperatures will mean fewer deaths due to cold, or that by focusing solely on adaptation we can help more people survive the coming centuries. This is political gibberish, not scientific analysis. Warming on the scale and pace we’re in store for will push civilization as we know it to the brink. There is no happy ending where we all move to northern Canada in 2075 and start enjoying warm summer beaches on Hudson Bay.

Still, this is not a call for reckless deployment. It is merely recognition that the time has come to put aside the reflexive idea, born in a bygone era of climate reality and climate policy activity, that any intentional climate management process is inherently immoral. The truth is, we have an even more compelling moral responsibility to preserve a livable planet for future generations. Combatting global warming quickly means studying our options and having solutions ready to deploy.

The choice is clear. The way forward is not. We’ve already geoengineered our planet—we’ve been geoengineering it for millennia. Can we re-engineer it with care? This is a rhetorical question. To do nothing is to abdicate our responsibility to the foreseeable future of human civilization, no different than launching a nuclear war. The question isn’t should we, but how, and to answer this question to the best of our ability, we first need to stop thinking about geoengineering as evil, optional, or something we might consider doing cautiously in the distant future. This small step is where we begin.