1/ Yesterday @wmo-global.bsky.social made Earth's Energy Imbalance a headline #climate indicator for the first time. I think this could be a significant reframing of climate discourse, and it's worth paying close attention to why. 🧵

2/ EEI is the gap between heat the Earth absorbs and heat it radiates back to space. The WMO's 'State of the Global #Climate' report includes it as a headline indicator for the first time, reporting a record high in 2025 wmo.int/news/media-centre/earths-climate-swings-increasingly-out-of-balance

3/ Here's what troubles me: how we frame the problem shapes the solution set Scientific indicators are never just neutral, we saw that with net zero If EEI becomes "the problem", Solar Radiation Management, blocking sunlight to compensate for warming, enters as the logical technological response

4/ I've drawn a diagram that maps the full causal chain, from root drivers to Earth's Energy Imbalance, and the interventions implied at each level. The direction of travel matters enormously.

5/ At the root: fossil finance, colonial structures, geopolitics. These are the hardest to change, which is exactly why decades of #climate politics have consistently avoided them and pushed intervention up the chain instead.

6/ Rather than restructuring economies, we focused on changing behaviour. Rather than transforming energy systems, we added CCS. Rather than staying within carbon budgets, we're relying on CDR to claw back concentrations later. Each step a retreat from causes toward symptoms.

7/ CDR and NETs followed the same logic, promising future technological redemption in exchange for continued emissions today. The IPCC overshoot pathway essentially institutionalised this trade-off.

8/ Now we're at EEI. And the intervention waiting at that level is SRM, solar geoengineering. The most reactive, most risky, and once started, potentially impossible to stop safely without catastrophic rebound warming #TerminationShock

9/ It's worth asking who benefits from intervening at the top of the chain rather than the bottom. Fossil finance doesn't get restructured. Colonial resource relations stay intact. Geopolitics remains organised around energy dependency. Root drivers left to fester.

10/ This maps onto Donella Meadows' leverage points. Deepest leverage: paradigms & root structures. Shallowest: managing physical symptoms. @jamesgdyke.info & Bissett (2025) apply exactly this logic to geoengineering

11/ The concern Dyke & Bissett raise is "mitigation deterrence." If SRM can fix EEI later, why decarbonise now? A burn-now-pay-later logic that would suit incumbent fossil fuel interests perfectly.

12/ EEI is a symptom. GHG concentrations are a symptom. Emissions are a symptom. The root is in our economic and political structures. That's where our attention needs to go. The #climate movement should be pulling attention left. Not right.|

13/ What does that actually look like? Ending financing of fossil fuels. Restructuring debt so poorer nations can invest in their own transitions. Technology transfer so those transitions are actually possible. Hard political fights, but the ones that actually address the problem.

14/ Note: The diagram was inspired by work from Prof. Detlef van Vuuren, who maps a similar causal chain across #climate research domains github.com/acscc/acscc....