Why I am Writing This Newsletter

I've been thinking about geoengineering for a long time—probably longer than most people want to think about it.

Not because I'm particularly drawn to technological moonshots or planetary-scale interventions. Actually, it's the opposite. Twenty years of studying marine microbes taught me that ecosystems are staggeringly complex, interconnected in ways we barely understand, and that our interventions—even well-meaning ones—cascade unpredictably.

So when I started hearing serious proposals to inject aerosols into the stratosphere to dim the sun and buy us time against warming, my first reaction was: We don't know enough to do this safely. My second reaction was: We might do it anyway.

That tension—between what we can do and what we understand, between buying time and creating new problems—is what I can't stop thinking about. And eventually, I realized I needed to write a novel about it.

The novel no one asked for

For the past decade, I've been working on a book set in 2078, after we've deployed solar radiation management. Not a story about whether we should do it (that debate will be over by then), but about what comes after. The side effects we didn't fully predict. The follow-on technologies we develop to address them. And most importantly: who controls those technologies and how those decisions get made.

I call it a "real-topia"—not a dystopian collapse where everything goes wrong, but a plausible near-future where we've made imperfect choices under pressure and now have to live with the consequences while making more imperfect choices.

Writing it has required me to learn atmospheric chemistry, geopolitics, the actual mechanics of stratospheric aerosol injection, and the narrative craft to make all of that interesting without turning the book into a seminar. It's been slow. There have been moments where I've walked away from it entirely, convinced it was impossible or pointless or both.

But I keep coming back. Because I think we need stories that don't collapse into either techno-optimism (science will save us!) or doom (we're screwed no matter what). We need stories that sit in the messy middle—where we have options, none of them perfect, and we still have to choose.

What this newsletter is about

This is where I think out loud about:

Climate science and ocean systems - I'm a marine microbiologist by training, and I teach graduate courses in climate science. I'll share what I'm learning, what I'm teaching, and what keeps me up at night (and what gives me hope).

Geoengineering and planetary intervention - Not advocacy, not fear-mongering. Just trying to understand what we're actually proposing, what the research says, and what questions we should be asking.

Writing fiction about hard problems - How do you write speculative fiction that's grounded in real science without becoming a textbook? How do you create characters people care about in a story about atmospheric chemistry? I'm figuring this out as I go.

The complexity problem - Why climate communication is so hard, why people tune out, and how storytelling might help (or might not).

I'll publish roughly twice a month. Some posts will be science-heavy, some will be about the writing process, some will just be me working through an idea that won't leave me alone.

If you're interested in climate science, geoengineering, fiction that grapples with hard questions, or what it takes to write a novel while teaching and working full-time—this might be for you.

If you're looking for simple answers or clear villains, this probably isn't the right newsletter. I'm pro-science and also deeply aware of science's limitations. I think geoengineering research is necessary and I'm terrified of deployment without proper governance. I want climate action and I understand why it's so hard to get.

I live in that tension. This newsletter is an attempt to make sense of it.

Thanks for being here.

— Melissa