Over a week ago, the fine folks at Vox profiled the exploits of Russ George, a “San Francisco-based entrepreneur” (alarms bells already ringing!) turned climate vigilante who conspired with residents of British Columbian islands Haida Gwaii in 2012 to revive fallow salmon populations by dumping 100 tons of iron sulfate into the water. The idea was that the sulfate dust would spawn a bloom of algae that would attract hungry fish, and that the bloom would, as a bonus, feed off the unwelcome surfeit of carbon dioxide that modern industry has foisted upon our poor atmosphere. George says the fish did indeed come back because of his stunt, and that the bloom cleaned the surrounding air, but it’s not exactly a good idea to take him at face value when he credits himself in such a manner.

If the idea of saving the ocean by dumping a bunch of shit in it strikes you as ill-advised, you’re not alone. Greenpeace and other environmental groups cried out in horror at George’s exploits, which is a logical gut reaction to a Bay Area bro boasting that he can disrupt climate change by rusting up the planet. It’s the same reaction you probably had to the idea of slightly cooling the Earth by blotting out the sun, or any other number of seemingly nutty ideas to reverse climate change by extreme means.

But you get better used to ideas like this coming at you in the future. What’s more, you may as well get over yourself right now and begin giving them serious consideration. This is partially because there is plausible scientific backing behind such ideas, and—more important—because Earth is gonna force the issue.

It has already begun doing so. From Vice, here’s a climate report from an Australian think tank that says we have roughly 30 years left to live. All of us. That is hardly the only climate report to proclaim our present situation as dire, and yet the general reaction to the news from the richest country on Earth has resembled that of an addict storming out of an intervention to hightail it to Vegas:

Given the intractability and downright stupidity of our modern institutions, it’s unlikely that there will be a successful, rapid, effective effort by all of mankind to stop doing the shit it’s doing to poison the Earth. There is neither the proper social incentive nor, more important, the financial incentive for leadership to act. Why would they? They’re rich, they’re comfortable, and they’ll be dead before the Himalayas erupt. They knew all this was coming. Some of them even banked on it. Hoping collective sacrifice from them, or from everyone else, will come to pass may have already proven fatal to every soul left living here. As George says in the kicker to that Vox story: “The greatest threat to the environment is waiting for someone else to save it.”