Your children and grandchildren can experience a safe climate they don’t have to worry about.
Impossible.
You’re probably thinking killer storms, floods, wildfires, they’re all getting worse. Today, I’m going to challenge our climate thinking and show you that we can and probably will end the climate crisis in 25 years. Nature shows us how before ice ages. We just need to pay attention. Beyond stopping our planet from getting hotter, imagine a plan to cool it back down.
I have two children and five grandchildren. Several decades ago, I committed myself leaving them a safe climate and world. Now, if you have children, you probably feel the same way and will do anything for future generations.
Imagine you have a high fever and the doctor says, “We’re trying to keep your fever from getting too much worse.” That’s depressing. We want the doctor to say, “We’ll do everything we can to get your temperature back to normal as soon as possible.”
As a society, we haven’t even considered restoring a safe climate, even though that’s exactly what we want. It seems we simply assumed it’s impossible or just too risky to even try. Actually, it’s not.
Here’s why I say it can be done. We know that climate is largely a function of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. CO2 is a greenhouse gas that warms the planet like a blanket. More CO2 makes the planet hotter. like another blanket makes you warmer. Here you can see the CO2 and the Earth’s temperature over the the nearly the last million years. And notice how closely they match the CO2 and the temperature.
Today CO2 levels are 50% higher than in 1800. That’s why we’re seeing our climate chaos in the wildfires. You can also see that nature has removed massive amounts of CO2 many times over the last million years. And now we know how she does it. And there’s no scientific reason that we can’t do the same thing.
Let me tell you a story. Back in 1975, 50 years ago, I was a student at MIT. Yes, that’s me with more hair.
I was excited about astrophysics and making a difference and then I read an article about global warming. It was the first article I ever saw about global warming and I was I was just devastated. CO2 was going up because more people were driving cars and flying in airplanes and the planet would become catastrophically hot in my lifetime. They knew this in 1975. And I thought, what the heck? No one was discussing solutions back then besides cutting fossil fuel emissions by using clean energy. But cutting emissions clearly is not going to get the excess CO2 back out of the air.
Despite that fact, as a young man, I was hopeful that the experts would figure out how to remove the excess CO2, much like they do it out of submarines and spacecraft. So, I decided to trust the experts and set aside my deep concern and continued studying astrophysics. Spoiler alert, there weren’t actually any experts working on restoring safe CO2. I was dreaming. Have you lived in that dream too?
Anyway, years later, I found myself working with farmers in Africa who were struggling to grow their crops because the rains had become unpredictable from global warming. And that’s when it hit me again. Just trying to reduce emissions is not enough. That wouldn’t pull the CO2 out of the air that’s already there. and it wouldn’t bring back normal weather patterns. To restore the rain patterns of the past, we have to restore the climate of the past and the CO2 of the past. We need to turn global warming from an emergency into a blip that we’re going to recover.
Our old climate goals originated in the early 1980s. Back then, no one could actually see the effects of global warming, so it was considered a theory. And back then, experts and policymakers called for stopping emissions and stabilizing CO2 levels in and indeed if we had stopped emissions and stabilized CO2 levels in the 1980s, the climate would be just fine now. But we didn’t stop driving or flying airplanes.
Today, as evidenced by the climate disasters around us, these goals are antiquated and they desperately need to be updated to restore an actually safe climate.
And you may be asking, why hasn’t this been done already? It turns out our government and organizations weren’t set up to act on it. Our institutions were formed while our climate was still stable and before global warming was understood and accepted as a real threat. Our collective and naive hope was that actively reducing CO2 levels would never be required. Unfortunately, that turned out to be wrong.
Despite more and more CO2 accumulating in the atmosphere, no one proposed a plan to remove it. Where was the moonshot for restoring the safe climate? There simply wasn’t one. And why haven’t the world governments proposed one? Simple answer, the government doesn’t have kids. We do.
The realization that nobody had a plan left me hopeless and depressed for a year. And then my daughter came home from college and reminded me of my personal mission to leave a world that we’re proud of to our children. I didn’t intend to lead a climate movement, but someone had to. I committed then to work on this and not stop until we’re securely on the path to giving her and you a safe climate by 2050. That’s climate restoration.
In plain language, climate restoration means giving our children the same historically safe CO2 levels and climate we had 50 or 100 years ago and which we had for 10,000 years, which allowed us to develop agriculture and civilization. In technical terms, means getting CO2 back down to safe levels below 300 parts per million.
So, how do we restore the climate? We have to copy nature’s pathway because we have no time now to cook up something new. The idea of submarines and spacecraft, it’s too late for that. Science did know didn’t know this in 1975. But in the last few decades, we have learned how nature removes the massive amounts of CO2 before each ice age you see here.
In fact, the amount of CO2 that nature pulls from the atmosphere before ice ages is just just abou the same as we need to remove now to restore safe CO2 levels.
So, you’re asking, how does nature do it? I’m not going to surprise you. It’s photosynthesis. I’ll surprise you that it’s photosynthesis in the ocean. We know this from analyzing the chemistry of the seafloors and the Antarctic ice. That gives us climate data going back hundreds of thousands of years. As you see here, when plants on the land die, they rot and burn and the carbon goes back into the air. When ocean vegetation dies, it sinks into the deep ocean where there’s not enough oxygen to rot and so it just dissolves into carbonates. Nature increases ocean photosynthesis through a process called ocean iron fertilization or OIF. It’s just like when you fertilize your
lawn. It’s the same iron that you might use on your lawn but much much much less.
Everything that’s alive needs iron, plants and animals, but it’s absent in much of the upper ocean because the iron sinks. These areas are anemic just like we get anemic. And when iron-rich dust from the land blows into the ocean, it fixes the anemia and phytolanton grow that the algae grows and a lot of it sinks into the deep ocean and it feeds the fish and those uh those fish feed billions and billions of people.
And we know all of this from analyzing the chemistry of seafloor sediment and the Antarctic ice layers. Now some of you remember may remember the Mount Pinatubo eruption in 1991 and others of you have heard of it. The eruption slightly cooled the earth for a year because of sulfates that were blown into the outer atmosphere. Separate from that effect and but even more amazing is how it reduced CO2 levels. And it shows us how to remove CO2 very rapidly.
In 1992, human activities emitted 20 billion tons of CO2. That’s half of what we emit these days. And they were all removed, leaving CO2 levels flat. And you can see that on the graph on the right. That means nature got us to net zero in 1992. It appears that the phytolanton in oceans absorbed all of that CO2 and there’s no sign since then that it came back that carbon got dissolved into the deep ocean.
The best part is that the area where the volcanic ash fell only amounts to a a tenth of 1% of the whole ocean area. If we produce this, reproduce this rate of CO2 removal in a half a percent of the oceans’s area, we could restore safe CO2 levels in 25 years, by 2050. I’ll say that again. We can restore safe CO2 levels by 2050 by listening to what nature does.
Even skeptical scientists agree, although they note, we’re not yet sure exactly how we would do it. And that’s true. We need to figure out how to do it efficiently. Now, do we need to trigger volcanic eruptions? Fortunately, not. The way we would replicate this, and has been tested, is to to distribute trace amounts of the iron dust, the same fertilizer you might use in your garden, but do it from the back of ships as just the same way you might fertilize your lawn with a spreader. But we do it in exactly the right place and the right time and the right quantity. The optimization we do results in amazingly low estimated costs. A thousand times cheaper than any other way to remove carbon from the atmosphere.
Now you may be wondering if it’s safe. Is it safe to do this? It always has been. There are simply no verified reports of bad side effects after 13 scientific tests, dozens of eruptions, and millions of years of dust storms blowing across the Atlantic and the Pacific.
Now, yes, writers do speculate things that might happen, like science fiction, but as a scientist, I prefer data over speculation. I urge you to do the same. Now, here’s a side effect that commonly does happen. The fish that eat phytolanton grow and multiply as do the fish that eat those and that those that eat them. And this is good news for fisheries at this time when the quantity of phytolanton is down massively causing fish populations to collapse around the world.
The takeaway is this. Nature has removed the amount of CO2 that we need to remove. And it’s done it many times during ice age cycles. No, we won’t plunge into another ice age. We’ll stop when we get to the safe CO2 levels that we want. You and I have been waiting decades for the government to plan to restore a safe climate for our children. But it turns out it’s not in their job description. It’s in our job description as parents and grandparents. We need to make sure this happens and we need to fund it. So you’re asking what might what can I do? First, change your conversation. First say what you want, which is restoring a safe climate for our children rather than avoiding the worst impacts, whatever that means.
Tell your friends, family, and teachers, and representatives about climate restorations. They want to know and they’ll be just as delighted as you probably are to know that we can and probably will restore a safe climate. And most importantly, lead and support the action. Become an early donor to climate restoration projects. There’s almost no funding even now. You can find them on the internet. Just search for climate restoration. And your donations, even if modest, will inspire others with resources to follow you.
The main thing is this. Don’t be like me 50 years ago, standing aside assuming someone smarter than you will fix this. Act now like your future depends on it. It does. Climate restoration is the best hope for my daughter, her children, and for all of humanity.
Thank you.