IS CLIMATE STABILIZATION STILL POSSIBLE? Metacrisis Salon #10 - Cleaned Transcript May 16, 2026 - Brooklyn, NY Recorded by Mike the pigeon. Cleaned and condensed: filler trimmed, crosstalk smoothed, the shape of the night kept intact. Not verbatim. The recording picks up as Kelly takes the mic, after Von's opening on the carbon pulse and a clip of the largest glacier calving event ever filmed. dearcrisis.com/salon/10-is-climate-stabilization-still-possible ==================================================================== 1. Going off script Kelly: I had not seen that video in a while and I deliberately did not rewatch it beforehand, so I was not expecting to be that struck by it. I am going to go off script for a minute. I am Kelly, and I am a climate lifer. It has always been the thing I care most about. As a kid it was cute: starting environmental clubs, collecting rocks, watching the science channel, all of it awe at the natural world. Then I was a nonprofit founder and a climate-tech entrepreneur for years, working with scientists to carry technologies from an idea to an applied solution. Now I direct a climate philanthropy that funds organizations working on climate stabilization. 2. Why sea level rise is not even Kelly: Something I learned recently from our glaciologists finally explained a thing I never understood, which is how sea level can rise globally and fall regionally. Part of it is bathymetry, the shape of the land under the water, because there are mountains down there too. But with glaciers there is another dynamic. Ice sheets are so massive that they exert their own gravitational pull. So intuitively you would think a glacier in the northern hemisphere collapsing into the sea would raise sea levels nearby. In fact they fall, because that ice was holding the water toward it. The water instead moves toward the equator and the southern hemisphere, where it floods and drives storm surge in the most vulnerable places. And that shift in the Earth's mass balance has been large enough to register cosmologically. While we debate whether humans should geoengineer, we have already changed the tilt of the Earth on its axis and the speed at which it rotates, purely through how much ice we have lost and where the water has resettled in the last hundred years. There is a lot in climate and in natural systems that causes me awe. There was a talk this week about awe, how it can be awful and awesome and everything in between, and that is the right word for this. 3. The photon Kelly: I read a book recently arguing that the story of carbon dioxide is the story of everything, and there is one illustration in it I keep coming back to. A photon leaves the sun, crosses space, passes through the atmosphere and lands on Earth about 315 million years ago, on a prehistoric tree. The tree uses it for photosynthesis. The tree dies and becomes compost, the compost becomes swamp, the swamp is subducted into the crust, and under heat and pressure that photon-turned-tree-turned-swamp becomes rock. Then you snap your fingers, and in that snap the dinosaurs come and go and several ice ages pass, and we arrive at today. For the first time in 315 million years that photon sees daylight again, by way of an open pit mine, as a lump of coal. The coal goes to a processing facility, becomes heat, becomes electricity, and powers a data center on a highway in Wisconsin that processes a credit card transaction. Then the photon is exhausted as heat and carbon dioxide and makes its way back out to space, in the most diffuse form of energy there is. Which is remarkable, because for all of biological history life was limited by one thing: how much you could eat to hold off entropy. Humans broke that chain. We figured out fire, then agriculture, then energy systems, then we scaled them. It took four billion years of evolution to reach that point. Fire, at scale, took the last ten thousand years. Industrial energy took the last two hundred. And realizing at a mainstream level that the consequences are bad took the last fifty. Every one of those steps is improbable, and the gap between four billion years and fifty is the thing I want you to hold. 4. The dashboard Kelly: Today we have two climate strategies. Mitigation reduces human emissions. Adaptation protects communities from the impacts mitigation cannot prevent. Climate is confusing right now because one article says we are doing brilliantly on clean energy and the next says tipping points will kill us all. I find it useful to think of a dashboard with lights flashing green, yellow and red. Green: the speed and scale of clean energy deployment. Around 1.8 trillion dollars went into clean energy in 2023, more than double the investment in fossil fuels. Ten years ago this would have read as science fiction. It is not fast enough, and it is still an accomplishment worth celebrating. Yellow: we are deploying clean alternatives, but we are not replacing fossil fuels with them. There is a good book called More and More and More about how the energy transition is really an energy addition. We are using more wood than we ever have, more coal, more gas, more of every fossil fuel, and more solar and more wind. We are building on top, not swapping out. That is where caution is warranted, because the script is not written. Red: the Earth systems themselves are destabilizing. We are far beyond the Paris goal of 1.5 degrees, many think we are heading into a 2.5 or 3 degree world, the rate of warming is accelerating faster than scientists predicted, and feedback loops are arriving sooner than modelled. So the question is no longer only how much we will emit. It is how Earth systems are responding to what we have already emitted. Climate is becoming a system stability problem. 5. Tipping points, feedbacks, and two kinds of risk Kelly: Earth system tipping points are systems at risk of dramatic change that would be irreversible on human timescales, meaning hundreds to hundreds of thousands of years. Some are painfully visible already; a lot of people have been following the coral die-off, and reefs hold more than a quarter of ocean biodiversity. Others now in realistic range include permafrost thaw and ocean current collapse. There is genuine scientific disagreement about exactly what tips and how fast. What matters is that we are not really talking about a tip, we are talking about irreversible change. Then there are feedback loops. The planet warms, snow and sea ice shrink, that exposes dark ocean, dark ocean absorbs more heat, the heat accelerates warming, the warming melts more ice. Feedbacks are a large part of why our future climate is so hard to predict. I sort the risks into two buckets. Amplifying risks are natural systems destabilizing in ways that accelerate warming itself. Destabilization risks do not necessarily accelerate warming but cause irreversible harm on their own. Both say the same thing: the risk landscape is more complex and more nonlinear than our strategies assumed. And these dynamics do not only threaten ecosystems and people, they threaten the political, economic and social institutions we would use to respond. Those institutions were built for the Holocene. We say we are in the Anthropocene as though it were only a word. It has physical consequences. 6. Risk one: declining planetary reflectivity Kelly: This is probably the most important climate impact you have never heard of. The Earth is naturally reflective and bounces back about 30% of incoming sunlight, and that reflectivity has declined significantly, most of it observed in the last 25 years. The simple mental model most of us carry is that 30% is reflected and 70% absorbed, radiation in and radiation out. That is not what is happening, because we do not live in a stable climate. Greenhouse gases trap some of the outgoing radiation. The net of those two effects is Earth's energy imbalance, and Earth's energy imbalance is the fundamental driver of global warming. We need to think in terms of energy imbalance, not only emissions curves. NASA's satellite record, corroborated by ground observation, shows absorbed solar radiation up by about 1.7 watts per square meter. That number means nothing to most people, so here is the concrete version: to produce the same warming with carbon dioxide alone, we would have to add another 2,400 gigatons to the atmosphere, which is everything humanity has emitted since 1750. We would have to do all of it again. The Earth is now taking up substantially more energy, mostly into the oceans, driving continued warming, thermal sea level rise and more energetic weather. We have global warming and global darkening at once, and they reinforce each other. The biggest suspected driver is a decline in cloud cover, specifically the reflective clouds; some clouds trap heat and some reflect it, and we are losing the reflective ones, probably as a feedback of warming. Second is surface reflectivity, since we are losing sea ice and land ice. Third, smaller but real, is cleaner air. We have reduced aerosol pollution, which is excellent for human health, but particulates are reflective and they help clouds nucleate. Here is the part that should worry you. Climate models did predict Earth's energy imbalance would increase. They are probably wrong by a factor of two on how fast. If you plot change in absorbed radiation against outgoing radiation over 25 years, the observation sits with its uncertainty cross in one place and the model runs scatter away from it. In a good world they would land inside the cross. Worse, the models are color-coded by how much warming they expect from a given amount of carbon dioxide, and it is the low-sensitivity, cooler-running models that miss most badly. Which means two problems: we cannot use the models to explain what has already happened, and we cannot use them to tell us where we are going. It is not conclusive, this is live and emerging science, but it strongly suggests we will need to revise our warming projections upward. 7. Risk two: sea level rise and glacier instability Kelly: Sea level rise is a huge and badly under-informed threat. Hundreds of millions of people live in vulnerable coastal regions, along with trillions of dollars of homes, farmland, ports and cultural heritage, and about a third of the world's population lives within a day's walk of a coastline. Map two meters onto New Orleans, or Shanghai, or Bangladesh, and the consequences are not subtle. Roughly 70% of the people who will be displaced by sea level rise are in coastal Asia, and southern Bangladesh is among the most vulnerable because of density, exposure and limited capacity to relocate. So how much will it rise? The IPCC is the conventional authority, used by governments, planners and insurers, and it projects roughly half a meter by 2100. But if you take the observed trend of the last 60 years and extrapolate, you get something very different, and you notice that the IPCC is implicitly saying sea level rise will slow as the world warms, which is physically inconsistent with what we observe. One of the glaciologists we fund and his colleagues are building updated forecasts that couple sea level and temperature and fit the relationship between them in new ways. Their result is more than double the IPCC projection for 2100. That paper publishes in the next couple of weeks and there will be press about it. Importantly, that is only the predictable part, the part driven directly by warming. Sea level rise comes from two things: thermal expansion, the steric effect, which is about a third of it, and new water and ice from glaciers and ice sheets. The largest potential source on top of that doubling is the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet. Thwaites is its keystone, which is why the papers call it the doomsday glacier, and losing Thwaites alone could add two meters globally. It is a marine ice sheet, a body of ice grounded to the sea floor by its own mass, so once water gets underneath it, it can slip and collapse quickly. It is the last remaining marine ice sheet; the others collapsed under relatively modest warming in past climate events, and this one survives largely because it is very cold down there. We know from the past that sea levels can rise several meters in a century when these systems fail. Thwaites accounts for something like 60 to 80% of the uncertainty in additional sea level rise. And here is the clincher. For Thwaites, warming was the trigger, not the driver. If we could wave a wand and stop emissions tomorrow it would not matter. The fuse is lit; the water is already under the ice. So the blue lines on that chart, the warming-driven rise, are the best case. The purple line, with Thwaites, takes us well past another meter and a half. Best case is bad, worst case is very bad, and we are talking about hundreds of millions of climate refugees. Think about what one million Syrian refugees did to European politics, then think about a hundred million displaced people arriving in a geopolitical environment already this fractured. 8. Risk three: super pollutants and warming-induced emissions Kelly: Super pollutants are things like methane and nitrous oxide, and together with carbon dioxide and other gases they are responsible for roughly half of current warming. We already have significant ongoing warming baked in from them. Where there are markets that pay and regulations that bite, we have technical solutions. Where there are not, the solutions are thin. The bar I want to draw your attention to is the one with the enormous uncertainty on the end, warming-induced emissions, which could turn out to be as large as the biggest single source we have. This is another feedback: the planet warms, and a warming planet emits more greenhouse gases on its own. Large-scale wildfires are releasing enormous amounts of carbon dioxide. Tropical wetlands and peatlands are releasing more methane. Permafrost thaw is releasing both. Degraded agricultural land is starting to emit nitrous oxide. These sources hold real potential for additional warming, and both our scientific understanding and our measurement of them are badly underdeveloped. What is creepiest is that they are not in our climate policy or our models at all. They are off-balance-sheet emissions. No country is incentivized to say those are mine. 9. The third pillar Kelly: Back to strategy. Human emissions cause physical climate impacts, so we built mitigation to break that chain. Physical impacts cause human impacts, so we adopted adaptation to protect communities. But for Earth system instabilities, mitigation and adaptation are necessary and not sufficient. So we need a third pillar, and that is what we call climate stabilization: the research, the monitoring, the governance and the options needed to address destabilizing Earth systems. The tools have been neglected because of the elephant in the room, geoengineering. The environmental movement treated it as taboo for a long time, on a reasonable theory of moral hazard: invest in geoengineering and we will stop cutting emissions at the speed required. The consequence was not only that we failed to study the tools. It became politically impossible to talk about the severity of Earth system risks at all, because naming the severity meant admitting we might need tools outside the mainstream box. So we have an entire domain of possible response that is almost unfunded, under-researched and largely ungoverned, while we drift toward catastrophic scenarios. And the most uncomfortable part of the debate, which Von set up earlier, is the assumption that intervening would be starting something. We are already geoengineering the planet, in the dirtiest, most inequitable and least informed way available. Burning fossil fuels alters atmospheric chemistry, alters ocean acidity, alters cloud formation, cools the planet unevenly and masks warming so we cannot even tell how hot it is getting. Deforestation is changing regional rainfall. Industrial aerosols cool unevenly, and cleaning them up changes reflectivity again. So climate stabilization is an attempt to correct that history. The goal is not geoengineering; nobody wakes up excited to engineer the planet. The goal is a climate stable enough for us to keep our cultural practices and build a thriving planetary society. A full toolkit means four things: reduce emissions faster, remove carbon dioxide, add resilience and adapt, and research whether we can reflect and protect against the most dangerous tipping points. 10. Research: sunlight reflection Kelly: Sunlight reflection is controversial for good reasons. It is being explored because it might mitigate near-term impacts and restore some of the reflectivity we have lost, and it would only ever make sense alongside deep emissions cuts and large-scale carbon removal. You are all experts in Earth's energy imbalance now: sunlight in, heat out. Reflection works on the incoming side, reducing energy before it becomes heat. It is not new; it was proposed in a 1965 report to President Johnson, which said it might be the only way to cool the planet. There are a few approaches. Surface albedo modification, painting roofs white or brightening deserts, cools locally but never touches global temperature. Marine cloud brightening sprays sea salt to brighten or nucleate marine clouds, and it is being explored in Australia to protect the Great Barrier Reef from heat events, but models disagree sharply about how uneven the cooling would be, which means unintended regional consequences. Space-based reflectors are conceivable and probably very costly and hard to deliver. And then there is stratospheric aerosol injection, releasing particles into the stratosphere, which appears most promising for even global cooling and is where most of our research and governance funding goes. Nothing I am about to say means anyone thinks it should be deployed. Nature already does this. Phytoplankton exhale sulfur aerosols that nucleate clouds over the ocean. Volcanoes release sulfur dioxide in bulk. When Mount Pinatubo erupted in 1991 it put roughly 20 million tons into the stratosphere and produced about half a degree of global cooling for a year. Temporary, but proof of the physics at planetary scale, and the empirical foundation for everything since. Decades of modelling suggest it would cool the planet fairly evenly. That is the one thing we know. What we do not know is nearly enough about the second and third order effects to make an informed decision, or how to maximize benefit and minimize risk, or the regional patterns, or the changes to stratospheric chemistry. And there is plenty it would not fix, ocean acidification among them. Meanwhile climate risks are accelerating faster than our ability to produce transparent, decision-relevant research, and the wider that gap gets, the greater the risk of premature or uninformed deployment by a government under pressure to do something for its people. An organization we fund called Reflective, along with many scientists around the world and a striking amount of the work coming out of the global South, is trying to close it. 11. Research: holding the glaciers Kelly: The Arête Glacier Initiative works on the sea level side. First, better forecasting: bringing scientists, engineers and technologists together to gather new kinds of data and integrate them in new ways, and to fold the wide uncertainties in glacier dynamics into the models rather than leaving them out. That lays the ground for the second body of work, which is whether we can slow or stop glacier loss. Thwaites is accelerating because there is water under the bed of the glacier and it is slipping. Nature offers a clue that stabilization is possible: under certain conditions glaciers have refrozen themselves to their beds. So the question is whether technology can mimic that, removing heat or reducing water underneath the ice. The intervention their glaciologists are most excited about is thermosyphons, an off-the-shelf technology already used in oil and gas and other large industrial processes. Think of it as an elegant passive heat pump. You drill into the glacier, place the thermosyphon, inject pressurized gas, and it draws cold from the top to freeze the water at the bottom, exchanging that heat out the top as snow or ice. They are studying it in artificial glaciers now, with a field season this year to understand the basal dynamics. It is also tractable economically, which is the part that gets me. Look at what we already spend reacting downstream: a storm surge barrier proposed for New York City at 52 billion dollars, a seawall in Houston at 50 billion, Jakarta at 40 billion. And every one of those is planned against the outdated IPCC estimates, not the doubled predictable rise and not the Thwaites scenario. Upstream, Arête's program to build the models and test the interventions costs around 100 million dollars, and deploying thermosyphons across an area roughly the size of Manhattan would cost something like 8 billion. 12. Research: the emissions nobody counts Kelly: On warming-induced emissions, Spark Climate Solutions is leading the charge. Three problems: the emissions are not captured in our models or policies, we do not know which mitigation options would work, and they are simply not well understood. So Spark is working to characterize them by actually observing and modelling them more robustly, then to get them integrated into climate policy so they count toward our warming trajectory, and then to explore direct mitigation. Are there forest management practices that reduce wildfire? Wetland practices that reduce methane? Arctic practices that slow permafrost thaw? They are also looking at a further-out option, atmospheric methane removal, which is hard because methane is far more diffuse than carbon dioxide. It is being explored because natural sinks already do it: there is a lovely, complicated set of reactions involving radicals, which are in fact called radicals and are in fact radical, that clean methane out of the atmosphere. There is only a stable amount of them, so the less methane we emit the shorter it stays up there, and the more we emit the longer it lingers. The question is whether we can increase what nature is already doing. 13. Q&A Kelly: What we feel at Outlier, and what I feel as a human being, is not that we need to do any of these things. It is that we need to research them, so we understand the option set, which means getting into the weeds on what could go wrong, what could go right, and how to minimize the wrong. With stratospheric aerosol injection, sulfur dioxide is a devil we know, and we have the empirical foundation, but the regional specifics are exactly what people are working on now. An example of what could go wrong is altering rainfall patterns in ways that hurt some regions and help others. There are probably ways to design a deployment that controls for that, and we need the research to know how. The other one everyone knows is termination shock: if you are cooling with aerosols and you stop, all that warming arrives at once. That is a governance and institutional capacity problem, and we would have to solve it before contemplating anything at scale. At the very least, research is something most people can agree on. Q: Who pays for this, and how do we coordinate globally when the incentives run the other way? Different answers on different timescales. Right now the research is mostly philanthropically funded, across research institutions, universities and NGOs around the world. There are a few federal programs. Our philanthropy funds this work and also convenes and educates to bring more philanthropic capital in, and we think philanthropy has a lot it can do over the next five to seven years. Into the 2030s, governments should take up the mantle. The reason now is catalytic is that the uncertainty bounds are so wide that there is no decision-grade information for a government to act on. Close that gap and governments can move, and if there turn out to be safe and effective options, deployment has to be government funded and government run. Q: A silly one from the app: if a volcano cooled the planet temporarily, why not just set off volcanoes? Someone said something like this to me yesterday, that maybe God let us heat the planet because he knew he was going to set off a load of volcanoes in 2030. Only a male god would plan it that way. Q: There is a lot of noise around this topic. How are you contending with it? A number of people work in the communications space and we fund all of them. Two of the most interesting youth climate advocacy organizations right now are Operaatio Arktis, which works out of Finland with Arctic communities including Indigenous ones, and Emerging Climate Frontiers, a youth organization based in Africa. They are working together and pushing some of the most interesting policy and diplomacy conversations happening on climate interventions, and a lot of the messaging work too. I also rebranded geoengineering as climate stabilization, in case you did not notice, because geoengineering is not the goal and it implies a fixed set of tools. Stabilization names an outcome and stays agnostic about how. Little moves like that open the aperture. And the conversation is changing surprisingly fast. The big green groups are in it now; both the Environmental Defense Fund and the Natural Resources Defense Council have sunlight reflection research programs. There has also been a lot of focus group work, and the interesting finding is the opposite of the moral hazard story. You would expect that hearing about geoengineering makes people relax about emissions. What actually happens is people say they had no idea things were bad enough that we were considering something this messed up, and it makes them want to push harder on cutting emissions. Q: Do you think a country has an inherent right to geoengineer? For global approaches, no. And I do not think unilateral deployment would ever be tractable. The United States has a program called Earth's Radiation Budget, which just received new funding, and it can observe changes in stratospheric chemistry. So if any country or individual altered stratospheric chemistry to produce cooling, the United States would know. China probably has a program too, though nobody really knows. If a major power found out someone else was changing global temperature, I think the response would be violence or diplomacy, immediately. Which means the only way this happens is multilaterally. Q: Who should be doing this work? Researchers, architects, everyday people? Everybody. Definitely researchers, because we need more climate scientists at the top of the field on these questions. Architects, yes, because we built our cities and our lives around a stability we no longer have; we cannot assume the same flooding patterns for our sewage systems or the same heat loads on our energy grid. Everyday people, by asking for and advocating for responsible research and for exploring the full option set. And artists, please. Q: Could you map all of this on a severity scale? Injecting into the stratosphere feels very different from cooling the base of a glacier. That is a good ask, and I only covered three approaches tonight. There are many more being developed for different risk pathways, and I did not even cover all the risks. Q: Is there actually still time, or are we giving ourselves hope? There is. That is what motivates me. There are things we can do in the next ten to twenty years that change what is possible, and whether we live in a survival world for the next hundred or two hundred years depends on what happens in the next ten, twenty, thirty. There really are things we could do to change the course of these systems, and doing them effectively would open the room for everything else, decarbonization, adaptation, resilient design, to take root. What choice do we have? 14. Close Ben: We are going to run poll number two now, to capture where you are and how you are feeling at this moment. Paper is floating around if you would rather use that, and if the app is stuck, pull down to get to the second part. There is space in the middle if you want to gather there. Kelly is staying after, and there will be one more short section, so for now I will be quiet and let you focus.