Where Earth's climate system breaks, mapped against the technologies working on each threshold. Research and opinion — not investment advice.
Read each bar as a range of possible tipping temperatures — the wider the bar, the less certain the science. Vertical guides mark the Paris targets and where current policies are heading. Click any element for its full record.
A note on scaleThe last time CO₂ sat near today's level (~420 ppm) was the mid-Pliocene, roughly 3 million years ago, when seas stood some 10–20 m higher. We are steering the planet toward a climate it last knew before modern humans existed.
The same technologies, grouped by the only question the thresholds above care about: when can this bend the temperature curve? The bar on each band shows roughly where the money sits. Nearly all of it is parked in the middle band — gigatonne CO₂ removal that matters after 2050 — while the top band, the only one that moves peak warming inside the threshold window, runs on two startups and a grants program. Click any card for its full record.
The middle band holds roughly 98% of the money on this page. The top band is the only one that moves temperature inside the window the thresholds above are crossed.
The two ends of the top and middle bands, side by side.
Machines scrubbing CO₂ from ambient air.
Destroying CH₄ at barns, mines, wells and waste sites.
"Long the machine that photographs well; short the molecule doing half a degree of the warming." — the prospectus upstairs, presumably
The honest boundary: most 1.5–2°C pathways still need durable CO₂ removal after mid-century — this is an argument about sequencing, not existence. And the deployable methane plays today are point-source capture and enteric cuts; open-atmosphere methane removal remains TRL 1–3 research. Sources: CDR.fyi DAC Market Snapshot 2025; US DOE; IEA Global Methane Tracker; IPCC AR6; Global Carbon Project (emissions-per-second arithmetic).
No technology refreezes an ice sheet or restarts an ocean current. Leverage means lowering how far past each threshold we travel — by cutting the warming and turning waste carbon into value.
Of every technology charted in the section above, MES scores the most modest potential climate impact. It is an early-stage contributor to the emissions & industrial-carbon lever — not a planetary thermostat. Its real role: treating waste streams while generating energy, converting CO₂ into usable chemicals, and recovering metals and nutrients. It shrinks footprints and closes loops; it does not touch ice sheets or ocean currents directly, and it will not move the thresholds charted above on its own.
A modest-impact technology can still belong in a portfolio. MES already works at pilot-to-industrial scale (TRL 7) on problems — waste treatment, metal recovery — worth solving regardless of whether the field ever reaches gigatonne scale. That is a smaller, more defensible claim than the "underfunded, high-leverage" case made for the technologies above, and it's the one MES can actually support.
Warming is still the master lever — every threshold on this page moves with it, and nothing below changes that. But the funding is sorted by the wrong clock: the only band that moves peak warming inside the threshold window — methane capture and blue-carbon protection — runs on roughly $150M, while direct air capture alone absorbs $5B+ for impact that arrives after 2050. If you take one thing from this page, take this: fund by when a technology bends the curve, not by how well it photographs.
This is one team's synthesis of public, cited data — not a recommendation. Read the sources, check the ones flagged for verification below, and form your own view of where the money should actually go.