Nature has created the perfect carbon capture and removal mechanism, known as the carbon pump. Tiny photosynthetic phytoplankton convert carbon into biomass, fulfilling their role as the primary producers of the oceanic ecosystem.

As predators consume them, only 1% of the carbon captured reaches the sea bottom. We have developed a method to safely harness phytoplankton fixation, while improving the sequestration ratio by two orders of magnitude.

The Opportunity

Around 23% of the sun’s energy is reflected away from the Earth by clouds. Typically, only around 40% of the tropical and subtropical oceans are covered by cloud at any time. Increasing cloud cover in these regions by 3-4% could provide sufficient cooling to halt today’s warming trend.

Where do marine clouds come from? Phytoplankton, seaweed, and corals produce the ‘smell of the sea’ (dimethyl sulphide, or DMS). This substance reacts and combines with airborne sea salt and mineral dust to produce microscopic particles known as cloud condensation nuclei (CCN). These CCN particles float naturally in the air, and water vapour naturally condenses onto them up high where the air is cold, forming clouds in the sky. The more DMS there is in the air over the oceans, the brighter the clouds, the longer they last before ‘burning off’ in the sun, and the greater their total cooling effect.

It’s time to act in order to keep the planet cool. Humans can help Earth turn down its thermostat, enhancing its own natural processes to reduce global temperatures. We have grouped these processes together into what we call The Planet Earth Coolkit.

We need you to help us get the message out that global cooling is possible!

Global warming is the biggest threat to mankind. It is time now to Cool Planet Earth.

Children whose future has and is being compromised

Climate scientists, who recognise the shortcomings of the inadequacy of proposed responses

Campaigners looking for solutions rather than just screaming, “Do something!”

Politicians and leaders, who need positive plans and messages to encourage voters

Businesses concerned about their fiduciary responsibilities to their shareholders, employees, and customers

Bankers, insurers and hedge funds that need to take action to preserve the value of their portfolios

Hydrocarbon companies that grasp the need to transition

We are now in a new geological era, the Anthropocene, characterized by humanity’s dramatic impact on Earth’s biophysical conditions. And though the average global citizen’s health has improved over the past century, the stability of our planet’s life support systems has sharply declined—putting recent public health and development gains at risk.

It is not just climate change; it is everything change! We face not only a disrupted climate system, but the 6th mass extinction of life on Earth; global scale pollution of air, water, and soil; shortages of arable land and freshwater; pervasive changes in land use and cover; and degradation of marine systems.

These anthropogenic environmental changes affect the quality of the air we breathe and of the water we drink, the quality and quantity of food we produce, our exposure to infectious diseases, and even the habitability of the places where we live. Changes to natural life support systems are already impacting our health and are projected to drive the majority of the global burden of disease over the coming century, hitting today’s most vulnerable people and future generations the hardest.

Everything is connected — changing our planet’s natural systems comes back to affect us, and not always in ways that we would expect. Understanding and acting upon these challenges calls for massive collaboration across disciplinary and national boundaries to safeguard our health.

On the first day, experts spoke and answered questions about the particular risks in which they specialized. The second day was for breakout groups to discuss these threats. These groups generated the overall Platform for Survival, which was adopted in a plenary session.

As a follow-up, we created a new website, tosavetheworld.ca, and gradually adopted an organizational title: Project Save the World. We acquired a YouTube channel and began holding forums by Zoom — hour-long discussions by experts about these global threats, live on YouTube, and which we edited and posted permanently both on YouTube and our website. We advertise these conversations on social media and by mailed posters to a growing list of frequent viewers.

Although initially Project Save the World was produced and managed as the project of Peace Magazine,

a small publication for peace activists, over time the strength of the two organizations reversed. Peace Magazine’s circulation was declining markedly, whereas the work and expense involved in producing the website and forum series mushroomed. Also, the magazine’s 40-year archive, which is available as text-only on the Internet, attracts a large audience of people searching for particular topics with browsers.

During Covid, the magazine’s printing house went out of business so we began to publish the magazine exclusively in a digital form, available through a magazine aggregating company, PressReader, although the paid subscriptions remain insufficient to predict a bright future as a profit-seeking publication.

However, the digital format made it possible to distribute the magazine free-of-charge to thousands of like-minded organizations worldwide. Just as the prospects of the print magazine vanished, the actual distribution of the digital publication multiplied by the thousands. We were mainly producing articles based on the discussions of researchers in the forum series. In effect, the magazine had morphed into an exceptionally fine house organ, the newsletter of Project Save the World.

Now in 2023, that de facto reversal will be recognized with legal and official changes. CANDIS, the not-for-profit corporation that had owned and controlled Peace Magazine, will turn over the magazine to a newly incorporated not-for-profit, Project Save the World, and then dissolve, having no further purpose. The magazine will fulfill part of Project Save the World’s official purpose, namely “the advancement of education by providing an open forum for qualified researchers to discuss their research with other experts and to make those results available to the public.”

The second half of this purpose — making the results available to the public — is now fulfilled by all three of our platforms; our two websites, the forum of videos and audio podcasts, and our digital newsletter/“Peace Magazine.” These services are all widely available withut charge as our offering toward the survival of humankind. But we thank those subscribers to the magazine who remain with us loyally and still pay, now mainly throughPressReader, CAN $20 per year.

We. the members of Project Save the World, are all people who have supported some of these activities, either by volunteering to work on the publication, a website, or the “broadcasts” or by donating money – usually about CAN $100 — at least once within the past three years. If newcomers wish to participate in these projects, please contact us, for we have a list of chores that sometimes requires volunteer assistance. Email us, stating your interests and aptitudes, at project@tosavetheworld.ca.

Marine Cloud Brightening (MCB) is potentially the first feasible way to start cooling the planet by reflecting more sunlight back to space.

Deployment would help slow global temperature rise, refreeze the poles and mitigate extreme weather such as storms, fires, droughts, heatwaves and floods.

Sea salt sprayed into the lower atmosphere in targeted areas is expected to prove a harmless way to reverse warming.

MCB has potential to reverse sea level rise with benefit to cost ratio estimated at 50,000 to 1.

MCB has been recognised for 50 years as a simple way to cool the oceans. It relies on the ‘Twomey Effect’, from its discoverer Dr Sean Twomey, who showed that clouds with smaller drops reflect more sunlight and are brighter than clouds with larger drops. Dr John Latham then showed that the optimal cloud drop size for MCB can be produced with sea salt particles smaller than one micron.

the anthropocene is NOT inevitable or unsolvable.

We have found that we have solutions.

We have found that with the right help,

we can stop the mass extinctions,

We can lower the carbon,

We can reverse climate change,

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we can save the Earth.

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Yale Climate Connections is grateful for the generous financial support of the Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment and of individual Yale University alumni. We also thank the CO2 Foundation for its support of our Spanish-language articles. Yale Climate Connections is solely responsible for all content.