It’s time for a serious look at shading the Earth, say the Swiss. Switzerland kicked the hornet’s nest of geoengineering with an official proposal at the UN Environment Assembly’s latest gathering in Nairobi.

The Swiss wanted the UN to set up an expert group to study “the risks, benefits and uncertainties” of blocking some of the sun’s rays using techniques of solar radiation modification (SRM). The most common suggestion is to inject sulphur aerosols into the atmosphere and reflect some fraction of the sun’s heat before it hits the Earth.

The proposal provoked fierce opposition, especially from African nations, which countered with a demand for a “non-use” agreement on SRM. After some cantankerous debate, nothing was agreed. Switzerland ultimately pulled its proposal, saying, “At least we managed to start a global conversation about this important topic.”

In truth, that conversation is already well underway. In the past several months, climate engineering has been part of reports and research strategies issued by the U.S. government, as well as the European Commission and the European Parliament. There’s a Climate Overshoot Commission studying geoengineering chaired by the former head of the WTO that includes Kim Campbell, who was (briefly) Canada’s 19th prime minister.

Luminaries of climate science like James Hansen are calling for intensified research and there are now institutes at various universities and scientific conferences dedicated to the topic. It’s a hornet’s nest even in academic circles where some scientists say we’d better get our emergency options figured out while others think we’re already running too many geoengineering experiments altering the atmosphere with heat-trapping gasses.

Several countries have geoengineering on their research agendas, including Canada. Environment and Climate Change Canada’s science strategy aims to “understand the potential for climate engineering and determine the implications,” specifically for solar radiation modification, marine geoengineering and carbon dioxide removal techniques.

Almost everyone involved seems to think it’s a desperate idea. Tempered by the fact that we’re headed into desperate territory. “Solar radiation management is both a terrifying, terrible idea and an absolutely inevitable future,” says Nils Gilman, editor at Noema Magazine.

“Inevitable” might be a provocative turn of phrase but the Swiss are not just looking at their own vanishing glaciers. The numbers have been tabulated for February and the global heat wave is unrelenting.

It was the ninth straight month obliterating global heat records. February was not just the hottest February on record, it averaged 1.77 C above pre-industrial temperatures. Every month since last July has exceeded the symbolic 1.5-degree figure.

Last year, it felt momentous that we topped 2 C for two days. This February, there were four days above two degrees.

The global heat wave is most obvious in the world’s oceans — temperatures are not just record-high but streaking way above any recorded precedent. The red line shows this year, while orange is 2023 and those grey lines date back to 1979.

One of the most immediate impacts of heating up the oceans is unfolding on the world’s coral reefs. The U.S. government’s Coral Reef Watch has been forced to add new alert levels and warns we are on the verge of the “worst bleaching event in history,” impacting corals in the Caribbean, the Pacific and the Indian oceans.

In Australia, officials at the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park just officially declared the world’s largest reef is suffering mass bleaching — something unheard of before 1998 but this is now the fifth “event” on the Great Barrier Reef in the past eight years.

Lissa Schindler, a scientist at the Australian Marine Conservation Society, told The Guardian: “This is a huge wake-up call for Australia and the global community that we need to do much more to address climate change, which is driving the marine heat waves that lead to coral bleaching.

“Australia’s current target of a 43 per cent cut in carbon pollution by 2030 is consistent with a 2 C warming pathway, which equates to the loss of 99 per cent of the world’s coral reefs.”

First world progress?

It often feels like we’re barrelling into ever higher temperatures and still spewing more and more climate pollution. Sadly that’s still true at the global level — CO2 emissions were higher last year than ever before. But if you dig beneath the top-line bad news, the trends in clean energy are beginning to make an impact, and climate pollution from rich countries is actually decreasing.

You might be surprised to hear that rich countries’ CO2 emissions have been reduced to the lowest level since the 1970s. Last year, emissions fell about 4.5 per cent across the advanced economies — the biggest annual drop ever outside of recessions and the pandemic.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) figures carbon pollution has been in structural decline since 2007 from this group of wealthy countries and is now lower than 50 years ago.

And rich countries are burning less coal than they have since 1900. Coal hit its peak in 2007 and has dropped by half, with some wealthy countries eliminating coal burning entirely. “This reduction was driven by the remarkable increase in the share of renewables,” says the IEA. The agency reports that renewables “more than doubled from 16 per cent to 34 per cent of electricity generation during this period.”

That’s not to say there wasn’t also a lot of switching from coal to fossil gas. But not as much as renewables and certainly not the coal-conquering role advertised by the gas industry. “There has been significant coal-to-gas switching,” acknowledges the IEA. “The share of natural gas in electricity generation (rose) from 22 per cent to 31 per cent.

The deployment of clean energy is starting to make a dent. Over the past five years, it has displaced 2.2 billion tonnes of CO2 that would otherwise have come from fossil fuel burning.

It’s not yet a big enough dent to drive down carbon pollution at a global level. Emissions grew in 2023 but clean energy is limiting the growth. Without all that clean energy, the global rise in CO2 emissions last year would have been three times larger.

By far the biggest share of these “avoided emissions” came from China where solar, wind and EVs are being deployed at stunning rates. But it’s a bifurcated picture because China’s climate pollution is still rising. Its CO2 emissions per capita are now higher than Europe’s or Japan’s.

China recorded a big increase in carbon pollution last year and worryingly, about a third of the increase resulted from a historically bad year for hydropower caused by drought. India, Indonesia and other developing countries also had increases in CO2 emissions. About a quarter of the increase in India was similarly caused by a poor monsoon season, which decreases hydropower while increasing demand for electricity.

Here’s the overall picture of our predicament, broken down by region: