Category: Science

Summary: Searching for a delay window where adaptive carbon removal most effectively lowers peak temperature before hysteresis and cost make later action less useful.

Climate mitigation is strongly shaped by delay: waiting can increase warming, but acting too aggressively at the wrong time can also raise cost without proportional benefit. This experiment asks whether adaptive carbon removal has a re-entrant timing window where temperature reduction is best relative to its cost.

The script runs delayed-removal protocols and compares gain at several delays, including immediate, moderate, and long-lag interventions. It tracks best delay, peak temperature, removal cost, and a re-entrant index summarizing whether the middle of the delay range outperforms the edges.

That framing is useful because hysteresis in the climate-carbon system means timing may matter as much as total intervention. The experiment is aimed at identifying when delayed removal still retains leverage and when it mainly pays to undo already-locked-in warming.

Method: Climate–carbon protocol simulations with adaptive removal delayed by multiple amounts, compared through gain, peak-temperature, and cost summaries.

What is measured: Best delay, best gain, re-entrant index, gain at fixed delays, mean peak temperature, and mean removal cost.