We Must Consider Extreme Climate Solutions – Watts Up With That?

Essay by Eric Worrall

“… Ideas such as thickening sea ice to prevent collapse … may once have seemed extreme. …”

We passed the 1.5C climate threshold. We must now explore extreme options

David King
Mon 7 Apr 2025 19.00 AEST

We do not have the luxury of rejecting solutions before we have thoroughly investigated their risks, trade-offs and feasibility

As a lifelong scientist, I have always believed that if something is possible, we can find a way to achieve it. And yet, one of the starkest realities we now face is that the world is failing to meet its climate goals. Last year marked a historic and deeply troubling threshold: for the first time, global temperatures exceeded 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. Without drastic and immediate climate action, this breach will not be temporary. The consequences – rising sea levels, extreme weatherand devastating loss of biodiversity – are no longer projections for the distant future. They are happening now, affecting millions of lives, and likely to cause trillions in damages in decades to come.

But we must think beyond our immediate horizons. When I read The Iliad, I am reminded that it was written 2,800 years ago. I often wonder: in another 2,800 years, what will people – if humanity as we know it still exists – read about our time? Will they see us as the generation that failed to act or one that made the choices necessary to safeguard the planet for the future?

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One of the greatest challenges of climate science today is that many of the necessary levers to regain control are uncomfortable, even controversial. Ideas such as thickening sea ice to prevent collapse or brightening marine clouds to reflect sunlight may once have seemed extreme. Yet, as we contend with an escalating crisis, we must at least explore these possibilities. We do not have the luxury of rejecting solutions outright before we have thoroughly investigated their risks, trade-offs and feasibility.

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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/apr/07/climate-solutions-extreme-options

We hit 1.5C by some measures, but there are no climate disasters, except in the imagination of scientists like Professor David King. Nor will there be any climate disasters, even if temperatures climb higher.

Face it Professor King, you and your friends are wrong – a warmer world is a more benign world for humans.

The proof is that our monkey ancestors thrived in a much hotter world. The Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, 5-8C hotter than today, was the age of monkeys. Our monkey ancestors thrived on the abundance of the hothouse PETM, and colonised much of the world, as far as Greenland and Siberia, only retreating when the cold returned.

The only thing I fear is our benign warm climate might soon come to an end – not in my lifetime, but way too soon for a human race which is only beginning to embrace its full potential.

Geologically the Earth is still locked in the Late Cenzoic Ice Age, which began 34 million years ago and still holds our planet in its frozen grip.

The last ice age was so cold it may have almost been an extinction event.

As we approach the end of the Holocene Interglacial, global cooling is a far greater long term threat than global warming. Winter is coming, and we don’t have enough coal to drive back the ice.

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