There ultimately is no way to stabilize the climate without addressing the fact that humans are emitting far too much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, year after year.
But cutting emissions is not the only response to the climate crisis, nor was it the one that scientists proposed over half a century ago in the first-ever government report on climate change.
To address the problem of “Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide,” noted U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Science Advisory Committee, the “solution” could not be to emit less of the stuff, because that apparently seemed unimaginably costly and difficult to do. Instead, the committee suggested that the effects of excessive carbon dioxide in the atmosphere might be mitigated by brightening the world’s oceans to radiate more heat back into space.
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