Rapid expansion of small-scale geoengineering will happen sooner than most think, and there is about the same chance of avoiding an increasing number of major climate impacts, even in developed nations of the Global North, as Lassie the Collie designing, building, and driving a car. July 30, 2022 I posted “Professor Stefan Rahmstorf of Postsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research Explains Extreme Jet Stream Weather Changes” to clarify Arctic heating causing jet stream changes as “hot dry sunny weather lingers for longer, maybe for weeks on end, therefore causing drought problems, wildfire problems, and also the rainfall systems are moving more slowly [ . . . . ].” This segment is at 1:39:50 on the DW News July 26, 2022 YouTube “Beyond extreme weather: How the climate crisis changes life on Earth | News Desk.” This may help explain July 4, 2025 flooding in central Texas near the Guadalupe River. “Slow moving storms, that’s what happened in this particular case,” said AccuWeather Chief Meteorologist John Porter in the July 6, 2025 YouTube “What Caused the Deadly Flooding in Central Texas?”
More, and possibly worse, events such as this will happen in coming years due to fossil fuel addiction. In my July 11, 2024 “250 Trillion Dollars or Bust (Probably Bust)” climate writer Tad DeLay noted, “Carbon dioxide is the temperature knob, and it is also the mass extinction knob. And we need to ask ourselves why we are not able to stop the progress of this storm, and in my book I wager that it has something to do with the fact that on paper fossil fuel reserves currenty are worth a little over 250 trillion dollars. They also power 4/5 of our energy, right, such that turning them off would collapse us into a depression [ . . . ] so we are hooked on a particular relationship that we do not seem to have the material or ideological repertoire to extricate ourselves from.”
Eventually citizens will demand action from mostly climate-illiterate leaders faced with the difficult task of saying yes or no to expanded levels of small-scale geoengineering. In the Nick Breeze ClimateGenn May 15, 2025 YouTube arguments in favor of researching this for possible use are in “2.5ºC–3ºC Is Not Viable: Dr. Mike MacCracken’s Case for Solar Radiation Management.” Arguments against ever using Solar Radiation Management are made in the Nick Breeze ClimateGenn April 3, 2025 YouTube “The Damocles World: Professor Raymond Pierrehumbert on the Dangers of Solar Geoengineering.” Specifically, Pierrehumbert argues “there isn’t really any use case for solar geoengineering.”
Both MacCraken and Pierrehumbert have strong arguments. I included MacCraken in my February 9, 2018 post “Happer vs MacCracken.” I included Pierrehumbert in my August 8, 2018 post “Oxford Climate Physicist Raymond Pierrehumbert Calls Scientists’ ‘Hail Mary’ Idea ‘Barking Mad.’”
So how about solutions? In the Nick Breeze ClimateGenn Jun 24, 2025 YouTube “Can India avert 1bn future deaths with a climate cooling intervention plan? Dr Soumitra Das,” Dr Soumitra Das “offered clear sunlight reflection methods in two categories. One category, non-controversial lowrisk and ready for deployment and that will solve immediate cooling issues for the people particularly bottom of the pyramid people to at least survive. It’ll provide a sustainable [ . . . ] outcome for them. And other side is more controversial side that has bigger impact in terms of lowering the temperature but at the same time it’s not ready yet [ . . . . ]”
I also liked the May 9, 2025 YouTube “The Best Way to Lower Earth’s Temperature — Fast | Daniel Zavala-Araiza | TED” in which chemical engineer Daniel Zavala-Araiza argues “The EU has set a very ambitious goal to become climate neutral by 2050, and this is part of the European Green Deal. [ . . . . ] It also means not importing products that are causing emissions elsewhere. To gain access to the European oil and gas market, which today remains one of the largest in the world, companies all around the world are going to have to cut their methane emissions, just as European producers are also required to do. The details are still being sorted out, but this access to market is likely to be based on methane intensity. That is the total amount of methane emissions as a percentage of production. For example, companies could be held to a standard of as little as two-tenths of one percent of their production.
As with all policies, success depends on implementation, and the EU methane policy still needs to be implemented across the 27 member states.”
Zavala-Araiza claims “MethaneSAT and other satellites are already scanning the globe, looking at all those different places where oil and gas production is taking place. They’re already delivering accurate methane data in near-real time, which is at the heart of making the new EU methane strategy work.
It also explains why the EU helped establish the International Methane Emissions Observatory, where I do some of my work. This observatory is not a telescope. It’s a global data hub hosted by the UN Environment Programme,
and it’s already bringing together data from different satellites and monitoring tools. It will soon allow us to measure, monitor, report and verify methane emissions from different oil and gas producers in a consistent way.”