Global Warming: A Truth Too Painful to Dissect
title: "Global Warming: A Truth Too Painful to Dissect" date: "2026-09-13" author: "Zhigeng" channel: "ecology" excerpt: "The 1.5°C target is dead, 1.8°C is a placebo, and 2.0°C is equally indefensible on the current path. The greenhouse effect is a 'big quilt' woven from many gases; cutting only carbon dioxide leaves the quilt intact—and as long as the quilt remains, every joule of waste heat humanity emits directly warms the planet. What is truly missing is the 'total heat emission limit' that no one has ever dared to mention." tags: [] readTime: 20
This is a topic I have long been afraid to touch, because it is too heavy and offers no solution. Why have I written about it today? Because it is too important, too urgent—and because I have, at last, caught a faint glimmer of light.
I. The Obituary of 1.5°C, and the Placebo of 1.8°C
On September 2, 2026, the UN Environment Programme published a news release based on the Emissions Gap Report 2025, titled "UNEP report: global warming will breach the 1.5°C threshold, but it is still possible to limit the rise, strengthen adaptation, and push temperatures back down." For the first time, it admitted that 1.5°C is about to be lost.
Anyone familiar with such documents knows that UN language is famously restrained—it will say "there is a risk" rather than "very likely," and "possible" rather than "certain." So when its judgment becomes this blunt, it means the problem can no longer be covered up.
The release stated: "In the coming years, global warming may breach 1.5°C, pushing climate risks and impacts to a dangerous new level; but limiting warming and achieving the global goals of the Paris Agreement remains possible."
That famous, endlessly repeated 1.5°C target—the number written into the Paris Agreement, the number world leaders have chanted for a decade—has, in effect, been declared dead by its own guardian.
But the story did not end at the funeral of 1.5°C. Perhaps to soothe the public, or perhaps to keep action from losing momentum, the same document weakly suggested that 1.8°C is still achievable—as long as countries strengthen their commitments, intensify their actions, and deepen their cooperation.
To my ears, this already sounds like a groan of pain.
To be fair, a placebo does have medical value. The problem is that the patient may, because of it, delay real treatment. When an institution with serious responsibility knows that 1.5°C can no longer be defended and so shifts its hopes to 1.8°C, it is actually doing something dangerous—using a new, looser number to rebuild the public illusion that "the problem is still on track." But the climate system does not recognize numbers; it only recognizes physics.
Writing this piece is unbearably sad: I cannot bear to dissect it, yet I cannot avoid dissecting it. What I want to say is this—not only is 1.5°C indefensible, so is 1.8°C, and so is the final line of 2.0°C (once warming reaches that point, the positive-feedback loops cannot be turned back). The reason is not that emissions cuts are insufficient, but that the entire "emission reduction" narrative rests on a misplaced logic whose physical foundation has never been taken seriously.
II. The 2030 Agenda: Another Promissory Note Destined to Default
Before unfolding the logical and physical anatomy of global warming, let me glance at a related, even larger promissory note.
In 2015, the UN General Assembly adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, proposing 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)—from ending poverty and achieving zero hunger to quality education, clean energy, climate action, life below water, and life on land—169 specific targets in all, promising to put the world on a track where "people and planet" both win by 2030. This was the largest and most idealistic collective commitment in human history; no country said "no" when signing.
From 2015 to 2030 is a mere 15 years. Setting goals so comprehensive, so grand, so complex—and so full of internal conflicts between the sub-targets—was, at best, an attempt to concentrate spiritual force and guide action: even a little progress would be better than nothing. But the side effect of this spiritual victory is that the broad public, and even various levels of management, came to believe they were actually working, actually acting.
Ten years have passed. The figures released at the UN's own progress summit are these: of the 169 targets, only 12% are on track; nearly half are off track; about 30% have stalled or even fallen below the 2015 baseline. On current trends, 575 million people will still be living in extreme poverty by 2030; eliminating the legal gender gap will take 286 years; insufficient global education investment will leave 84 million children out of school.
In other words, it is not the failure of one climate goal alone, but the collective default of an entire basket of human promises. The climate goal (Goal 13) is merely the most conspicuous line on this defaulting promissory note.
Why bring this up? Because the failure pattern of the SDGs and the failure pattern of 1.5°C are the same: goals set on wishes, paths built on illusions, verification deferred to ten years later—even if "the floods come" ten years from now. Once you see through this layer, you understand that "1.8°C is achievable" is the same grammar as "a beautiful world can be built by 2030"—a purely wishful grammar, unrelated to physics or reality.
III. The Physics of the "Big Quilt" and Carbon Dioxide Reduction
Let us return to physics.
The Earth's temperature is determined by the difference between two kinds of radiation: how much solar radiation comes in, and how much terrestrial heat radiation goes out. The role of greenhouse gases is to set up a checkpoint on the "outgoing" side—they are roughly transparent to sunlight (so sunlight can come in), but opaque to the infrared heat radiation from the ground (so heat cannot get out). The entire atmosphere is like a "big quilt" draped over the Earth's sky: the quilt is not a heat source; it merely blocks the ground's heat and prevents it from escaping into space.
This "quilt" is made of many greenhouse gases, of which carbon dioxide is only the most famous. The other main ones include:
Methane: roughly 28 times the warming potential of carbon dioxide per unit (over 80 times on a 20-year scale). Livestock farming, rice paddies, oil and gas leaks, wetlands, and landfills all emit methane into the air. At the 2021 UN climate conference, methane was singled out for the first time (the "Global Methane Pledge," under which signatories agreed to cut emissions 30% by 2030)—the signing was real, but so far little implementation has been seen.
Nitrous oxide: the more fertilizer is used, the more of it there is, with a warming potential nearly 300 times that of carbon dioxide. Vast agricultural land and vast inland waters, largely permeated by fertilizer, have become diffuse sources of nitrous oxide.
Halocarbons (Freon and its descendants): synthetic super-greenhouse gases, some of whose single-molecule warming potential is tens of thousands of times that of carbon dioxide.
Ozone: while the stratospheric ozone layer shields ground life from ultraviolet radiation, too much tropospheric ozone is both a pollutant and a greenhouse gas.
Water vapor: the largest component of the "big quilt"—its concentration is determined by temperature itself. The higher the temperature, the more water evaporates; the more water vapor, the higher the temperature, forming a positive-feedback loop that amplifies warming. Apart from cooling itself, humanity currently has almost no direct and effective means of controlling it.
……
Now look at the actions against global warming advocated by the UN and implemented by various countries: they focus almost entirely on carbon dioxide—carbon footprints, carbon tariffs, carbon accounts, carbon markets—as if the "quilt" contained only carbon dioxide.
The harm of this approach is that it makes people believe that going low-carbon solves the problem, while concealing the other true culprit of warming.
IV. The Forgotten Other Culprit
Because attention is locked onto greenhouse gases, people seem to have forgotten the other culprit behind Earth's warming—the increasingly explosive growth in energy consumption. The result is this: the "big quilt" is wrapped tight, while underneath, firewood and flame are being added—how could the temperature not surge?
The principle of the greenhouse effect determines that, as long as the quilt exists, temperature depends on the balance between the surface's "income" and "expenditure." The quilt blocks expenditure—so every additional input of heat directly pushes up the temperature, whether that heat comes from burning coal, burning oil, the cooling towers of nuclear power plants, the potential energy of dams, or every server and every air-conditioner's outdoor unit.
And humanity's current situation is this: on one hand comforting ourselves that "I am cutting carbon," while on the other discharging waste heat into the atmosphere and oceans on an unprecedented scale.
New power stations are built one after another—not only all thermal power, but also every giant fission reactor, wind farm, solar field, and river dam built in the name of "cleanliness," the much-anticipated fusion energy, and the extra solar energy imported from space. Because after any energy is consumed, the energy does not disappear—it ultimately remains in the Earth system in the form of heat, beneath the "big quilt."
The momentum of this energy-consumption growth is like a monstrous beast, riding the gale of AI and the evil wind of war, and it cannot be tamed at all.
The electricity swallowed by data centers for AI ends up almost entirely as heat, discharged into the atmosphere and water bodies by cooling systems. Wars are burning, military exercises are burning, global logistics is burning, the computing power and manufacturing of every technological race is burning, and the lives of 8 billion people are burning too.
This creates an absurd situation: humanity believes that cutting carbon dioxide can bring down the Earth's fever, so it recklessly adds firewood, and every joule of heat released is trapped by that unreducible "quilt"—how could the temperature not rise?
Therefore, if we truly want to cool the Earth through "emission reduction," the correct posture must be two-legged: suppress all greenhouse gases (including the hardest-to-handle water-vapor loop) while strictly limiting the total heat emitted by human activity. The current situation is that, on the former, we merely put on a show with carbon dioxide alone; on the latter—limiting total heat emissions—it has almost never entered any international agenda.
V. Why "Carbon Neutrality" and Its Kin Are Pseudo-Concepts: Misleading Is More Harmful Than Useless
Here I must first say something fair: carbon dioxide was indeed once the dominant greenhouse gas, and identifying it was a major scientific achievement.
That was the contribution of a group of scientists beginning in the late 19th century (to be discussed elsewhere, due to space constraints). At that time, the external energy humans used was mainly firewood, timber, and coal, and the main greenhouse gas humans added to nature was carbon dioxide. But from then until now, humanity's energy types, total energy use, the types of things we create, and the ways we use them have all changed enormously. To still lock the cause of warming onto the single factor of carbon dioxide is truly like plugging one's ears while stealing a bell—foolish in the extreme.
Carbon management, carbon accounting, and carbon markets are not entirely without value as management tools; the problem is that they have been packaged as an all-purpose solution.
When does a concept become a pseudo-concept? The answer: when its actual function is not to drive a real solution. For example:
"Carbon neutrality" is widely understood as "net-zero emissions by a certain year, problem solved." But the algorithm of "net" is emissions plus offsets—planting trees, buying credits, carbon-sink trading. The physics of the "quilt" tells us: offsetting does not change the total thickness of the "quilt" in the atmosphere; postponement is not elimination. "Carbon reduction" involves only a single component of the "quilt," yet it has contracted for the public's entire imagination of "climate action."
What is the evaluation standard for "clean energy" and "green energy"? Examine each new energy source: is it truly clean? Truly green? (To be discussed elsewhere, due to space constraints.)
A pseudo-concept is more harmful than no concept: it makes the public believe the problem can be solved through current means, so they confidently continue doing what should not be done. Those building power stations keep building, those burning energy keep burning, those expanding production keep expanding—after all, "there is a carbon-neutrality roadmap." Psychological comfort is addictive: every piece of news about "we are acting" issues a license for the next "we can emit a little more."
This is why I say 1.8°C is a placebo and carbon neutrality is a painkiller—what they jointly manufacture is an illusion that "humanity is acting."
VI. The Prisoner's Dilemma: Why This Problem Cannot Be Solved Within the Current Framework
Some may say: you have made your arguments, so all countries should unite and strictly limit total heat emissions.
This is the same truth as the fact that all frontier AI companies know the situation is already critical, yet no one dares to be the first to brake.
Reducing heat emissions means limiting industry, limiting power expansion, limiting computing-power construction—and all countries are expanding. Whoever restrains themselves first yields speed in the competition. Energy demand comes from industry, daily life, war, technological competition, and all of these point to the same requirement: more.
From the perspective of sustainable development, the correct approach is to develop an energy-efficient economy. But on one hand, micro-level energy saving is recognized by everyone, while macro-level energy saving is unimaginable; on the other hand, the Jevons paradox tells us that the more energy-efficient we become, the more energy we use (to be discussed elsewhere, due to space constraints).
This is the most classic prisoner's dilemma in game theory: the sum of individual rationality equals collective irrationality. Within the current framework of "acting separately + development competition," limiting total heat emissions structurally cannot happen—the rules of the game determine the outcome.
This is exactly why, over a decade, climate conferences have been held one after another, reports issued one after another, yet the curve has barely moved. The root cause is that the structure of the promises is destined to remain unfulfilled.
VII. Is There Really No Way Out?
To be fair again, over the decades, although few have expressed the idea of controlling total energy use, some methods for macro-level cooling have indeed been contemplated. One of them is to spray aerosols into the stratosphere to block part of the solar radiation. This method has no controllability or adjustability, and no one dares to implement it because of its obvious side effects and aftereffects. Today's Earth atmosphere, polluted beyond recognition in the process of industrialization and modernization, already contains spontaneously formed aerosols that we have no way to solve—dare we deliberately add more pollution?
If emission reduction is physically wrong and game-theoretically blocked, and if aerosols, once sprayed into the atmosphere, cannot be removed, are we left with nothing but despair? I once dared not touch this topic precisely because almost nothing but despair remained.
On August 30, 2026, Musk answered a netizen's question—"the most realistic way to cool the Earth is a super-intelligent Dyson swarm"—on X, giving his own solution: build a satellite swarm with perception capabilities, launched by electromagnetic catapults on the Moon to the Sun-Earth Lagrange point, to regulate the solar radiation reaching Earth. "This could solve global warming for about one billion years." He added an urgent timetable: the window of action left to humanity is only about 50 years.
The beauty of this solution is that it offers an answer to every deadlock above.
Why the Lagrange point L1? The Sun-Earth system's L1 point lies on the line between the Sun and the Earth, about 1.5 million kilometers from Earth (four times the Earth-Moon distance). Here, the Sun's gravity, the Earth's gravity, and the orbital centrifugal force exactly balance, so a satellite would "hover" forever between the Sun and the Earth—the only position in the solar system where a shadow can be cast permanently on the Earth. Related research has long calculated that blocking only about 1.7%–1.8% of solar radiation would be enough to offset the warming from a doubling of carbon dioxide. There is no need to darken the Earth; only to drape an extremely thin veil over the sky.
Why launch from the Moon? Because shielding this proportion of sunlight requires materials on the order of hundreds of millions of tons, whereas everything humanity has ever sent into space from Earth totals only tens of thousands of tons. The Moon's gravity is one-sixth of Earth's, and it has no atmosphere, so an electromagnetic mass driver can directly accelerate satellites to escape velocity—without burning a drop of fuel, theoretically firing once every dozen seconds, with a marginal cost roughly equal to the electricity bill. The lunar soil contains abundant silicon, aluminum, and iron: build the factory on the Moon, take materials from the Moon, and launch the product toward L1. This is not science fiction—SpaceX has already released a concept video of a lunar electromagnetic catapult, and NASA proposed the DimSun concept of deploying a dust cloud at L1 in July 2026. Thanks to advances in AI, this has become a solution that is feasible both logically and in engineering terms.
Why can it circumvent the prisoner's dilemma? Because the knob of temperature changes from "each country's individual emission behavior" (dispersed, unverifiable, full of conflicting interests) to "a single centralized physical facility" (single, verifiable, requiring only one global authorization). Whether the shielding ratio goes up or down by 0.1% is measurable, auditable, and negotiable—this simplifies climate governance from "restraining the behavior of billions of people" to "managing one planetary thermostat." To date, this is the only solution that is self-consistent both logically and in engineering terms.
Of course, I must honestly list the costs and unsolved problems of this plan: it is shading rather than detoxification—the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will not decrease because of it, and ocean acidification will continue as before; "whose hand is on the thermostat" will be the greatest political problem in history—different countries will inevitably have different preferences for "what temperature to set it to," and after a single drought, the thermostat will inevitably become the target of public anger; the reliability, cybersecurity, and even the ethics of the word "perception" in billions of autonomous satellites are all still blank. It is not a savior; it is, so far, the only cooling solution worth taking seriously.
VIII. Conclusion: Honesty Is the First Step of Cooling
1.5°C is dead, 1.8°C is a placebo, and 2.0°C is equally indefensible on the current path; the 2030 Agenda, with its 12% on-track rate, has declared the overall bankruptcy of "wish-based governance." The physics of the greenhouse effect is a "big quilt"; the quilt is made of many gases, and cutting only one component—carbon dioxide—leaves the quilt intact; as long as the quilt remains, every joule of waste heat humanity emits is directly warming the Earth's atmosphere—so what we truly lack is not just emission reduction, but the "total heat emission limit" that no one has ever dared to mention, which cannot spontaneously occur within the prisoner's dilemma of the development race.
That is the truth I cannot bear to dissect.
Is there really no way out? The universe is vast; as long as one thinks seriously, thinks from first principles, a way will be found—Musk's planetary thermostat is currently the only solution that can simultaneously untie both the physical deadlock and the game-theoretic deadlock. However, before looking up at L1, humanity at least owes itself one act of honesty—
Stop comforting yourself with 1.8°C, stop anesthetizing yourself with "carbon neutrality," and admit that the quilt is wrapped, the heat is being emitted, and the temperature will rise. Honesty does not cool the Earth, but without honesty, everything is merely a performance of wishful thinking.
In this regard, Europe has walked ahead: in 2023, the EU issued the Green Claims Directive, prohibiting companies from using carbon credits to advertise "carbon neutrality," treating it as a greenwashing tool. Because the historical lesson is profound: from 2013 to 2020, the EU carbon market allowed companies to use carbon credits under the Kyoto Protocol to offset emissions, which led to an influx of "low-cost, high-controversy" projects, triggering excessive emissions, environmental fraud, and a collapse in carbon prices. Ultimately, the EU completely halted this permission in 2021. After September 27, 2026, the Green Claims Directive will take effect, and using greenwashing terms like "carbon neutrality" will become illegal.
That number is dead; let the living no longer bow to it.
Building a "sunshade" from lunar soil on the Moon is no simple matter. The Earth's ecosystem is on the verge of collapse, and Musk says the window is only 50 years. In fact, this is a super-gamble—a super-gamble between AI helping humanity defeat the various crises humanity has accumulated for itself, and AI autonomously destroying humanity, or AI not intending to destroy humanity yet unconsciously draining the Earth's resources.
In this era where everything accelerates and everything quickly decays, I fear that even Musk's estimate of a 50-year window is optimistic.
I had wanted to add one more sentence as a conclusion, but then I felt this essay can only end with "speechlessness."
Main References and Factual Sources
- UNEP report: Global warming will breach the 1.5°C threshold, but it is still possible to limit the rise, strengthen adaptation, and push temperatures back down. https://www.unep.org/zh-hans/xinwenyuziyuan/
- UN SDG progress summit data: 12% of the 169 targets on track, 30% stagnant or regressing (2023 SDG Summit political declaration draft and UN official materials)
- Global Methane Pledge: launched at COP26 (2021), committing to a 30% reduction in global methane emissions from 2020 levels by 2030
- Musk's original post: 2026-08-30, X platform, reply to @Xenocosmography; combined with NetEase "Wali Village Man" technical interpretation (2026-08-30), Russian media AIF reports (2026-09-05), etc.
- L1 sunshade blocking 1.7%–1.8% of solar radiation can offset CO₂ doubling warming: classic space sunshade research, Angel (2006) and others
- NASA DimSun concept: released July 2026
- Berkeley Earth: 2025 was the third warmest year on record, 1.44°C above the 1850–1900 average
- Greenhouse gas warming potential: IPCC AR6, methane 20-year GWP about 81, nitrous oxide about 273