essays on the climate crisis

Responding to the Climate Threat: Essays on Humanity’s Greatest Challenge

A new book co-authored by MIT Joint Program Founding Co-Director Emeritus Henry Jacoby

From the Back Cover

This book demonstrates how robust and evolving science can be relevant to public discourse about climate policy. Fighting climate change is the ultimate societal challenge, and the difficulty is not just in the wrenching adjustments required to cut greenhouse emissions and to respond to change already under way. A second and equally important difficulty is ensuring widespread public understanding of the natural and social science. This understanding is essential for an effective risk management strategy at a planetary scale. The scientific, economic, and policy aspects of climate change are already a challenge to communicate, without factoring in the distractions and deflections from organized programs of misinformation and denial. 

Here, four scholars, each with decades of research on the climate threat, take on the task of explaining our current understanding of the climate threat and what can be done about it, in lay language―importantly, without losing critical  aspects of the natural and social science. In a series of essays, published during the 2020 presidential election, the COVID pandemic, and through the fall of 2021, they explain the essential components of the challenge, countering the forces of distrust of the science and opposition to a vigorous national response.  

Each of the essays provides an opportunity to learn about a particular aspect of climate science and policy within the complex context of current events. The overall volume is more than the sum of its individual articles. Proceeding each essay is an explanation of the context in which it was written, followed by observation of what has happened since its first publication. In addition to its discussion of topical issues in modern climate science, the book also explores science communication to a broad audience. Its authors are not only scientists – they are also teachers, using current events to teach when people are listening. For preserving Earth’s planetary life support system, science and teaching are essential. Advancing both is an unending task.

About the Authors

Gary Yohe is the Huffington Foundation Professor of Economics and Environmental Studies, Emeritus, at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. He served as convening lead author for multiple chapters and the Synthesis Report for the IPCC from 1990 through 2014 and was vice-chair of the Third U.S. National Climate Assessment.

Henry Jacoby is the William F. Pounds Professor of Management, Emeritus, in the MIT Sloan School of Management and former co-director of the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, which is focused on the integration of the natural and social sciences and policy analysis in application to the threat of global climate change.

Richard Richels directed climate change research at the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI). He served as lead author for multiple chapters of the IPCC in the areas of mitigation, impacts and adaptation from 1992 through 2014. He also served on the National Assessment Synthesis Team for the first U.S. National Climate Assessment.

Ben Santer is a climate scientist and John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellow. He contributed to all six IPCC reports. He was the lead author of Chapter 8 of the 1995 IPCC report which concluded that “the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate”. He is currently a Visiting Researcher at UCLA’s Joint Institute for Regional Earth System Science & Engineering.

Access the Book

View the book on the publisher's website  here .

Order the book from Amazon  here . 

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Book Reviews

Greta thunberg's 'the climate book' urges world to keep climate justice out front.

Barbara J. King

Swedish climate campaigner Greta Thunberg waits in Erkelenz, Germany, to take part in a demonstration at a nearby a coal mine on Jan. 14. Michael Probst/AP hide caption

Swedish climate campaigner Greta Thunberg waits in Erkelenz, Germany, to take part in a demonstration at a nearby a coal mine on Jan. 14.

Climate activist Greta Thunberg who, at age 15, led school strikes every Friday in her home country of Sweden — a practice that caught on globally — has now, at 20, managed to bring together more than 100 scientists, environmental activists, journalists and writers to lay out exactly how and why it's clear that the climate crisis is happening.

Impressively, in The Climate Book, Thunberg and team — which includes well-known names like Margaret Atwood, George Monbiot, Bill McKibben and Robin Wall Kimmerer -- explain and offer action items in 84 compelling, bite-size chapters.

Most critically, they — and Thunberg herself in numerous brief essays of her own — explain what steps need to be taken without delay if the world is to have a reasonable chance of limiting global temperature rise as stated in the 2015 Paris Agreement. The document aims to keep the temperature rise to below 2 degrees Celsius (and better yet below 1.5 degrees Celsius).

The essays also explain why climate justice must be at the center of these efforts.

Reading The Climate Book at a deliberate pace over some weeks (it's a lot to absorb), the cumulative impact on my understanding of the crisis through its data, cross-cultural reflections, and paths for step-by-step change became mesmerizing.

If you think the rich nations of the world are making real progress towards achieving limits on global warming, think again. In one essay, Kevin Anderson, professor of energy and climate change at the Universities of Manchester, Uppsala and Bergen, puts it this way: "Wealthy nations must eliminate their use of fossils fuels by around 2030 for a likely chance of 1.5C, extending only around 2035 to 2040 for 2C... We are where we are precisely because for thirty years we've favoured make-believe over real mitigation."

What does Anderson mean by "make-believe"? In her own chapter, journalist Alexandra Urisman Otto describes her investigation into Swedish climate policy, specifically its net zero target for 2045. She discovered a discrepancy between the official number of greenhouse gases emitted each year — 50 million tons — and the real figure, 150 million tons. That lower, official figure leaves out "emissions from consumption and the burning of biomass," which means the target is way off, she writes. If all countries were off by that much, the world would be heading straight for a catastrophic increase of 2.5 to 3C.

What does that mean, emissions from consumption and the burning of biomass? John Barrett, professor of energy and climate policy at the University of Leeds, and Alice Garvey, sustainability researcher at the same university, explain that "emissions from consumption" means emissions are allocated to the country of the consumer, not the producer. Because industrial production is often outsourced to developing economies, in a world where climate justice were front and center, the consumer country (in this example, Sweden) would take the burden of lessening the emissions from consumption.

As for biomass, that refers to burning wood for energy, and sometimes other materials like kelp. Burning wood for energy causes more emissions per unit of energy than fossil fuels, explain Karl-Heinz Erb and Simone Gingrich, both social ecology professors at Vienna's University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences.

Alice Larkin, professor of climate science and energy policy at the University of Manchester, adds "a highly significant complication" to this disturbing picture: international aviation and shipping aren't typically accounted for in national emission targets, policies, and carbon budgets, either.

This under-reporting situation, I would wager, isn't known even by many climate-literate citizens. It certainly wasn't to me.

One urgent goal, then, is transparency in climate-emission figures. Beyond that, Thunberg says, distribution of climate budgets fairly across countries of the world must be a priority. Without climate justice, policies are unlikely to succeed. An especially effective subsection of the book, "We are not all in the same boat," brings this point to life.

Saleemul Huq, director of a Bangladeshi international center for climate change, puts the point squarely: The communities most devastated by climate change "are overwhelmingly poor people of colour." But Bangladeshi citizens shouldn't be thought of as passive victims, Huq emphasizes. Communities work together to prepare for the effects of climate disasters in ways not often seen in the global north. For example, "An elderly widow living alone will have two children from the high school assigned to go and pick her up" in case of hurricane or other emergency.

Globally, then, what to do? First, we can hold industrial and corporate interests accountable and push back on their messages placing the burden solely on the individual, a tactic that allows the worst of the status quo carbon-emissions activities to continue.

Beyond this, it's not enough "to become vegetarian for one day a week, offset our holiday trips to Thailand or switch our diesel SUV for an electric car," as Thunberg puts it. Participating in recycling may lead to feel-good moments, but in fact, in the words of Greenpeace activist Nina Schrank, it's "perhaps the greatest example of greenwashing on the planet today." Even the 9% of plastic that does get recycled ends up (after one or two cycles) dumped or burned.

Thunberg herself has given up flying. In the book she writes, "Frequent flying is by far the most climate-destructive individual activity you can engage in." Though she writes that lowering her personal carbon footprint isn't her specific goal in sailing (instead of flying) across the Atlantic — she hopes to convey the need for urgent, collective behavioral change. "If we do not see anyone else behaving as if we are in a crisis, then very few will understand that we actually are in a crisis," she writes.

We can join Thunberg in giving up- or at least reducing- a flying habit if we have one. Three further steps, out of many offered in the book, are these: Switch to plant-based diets. Support natural climate solutions, by protecting forests, salt marshes, mangroves, the oceans, and all the animal and plant life in these habitats. Pressure the media to go beyond the latest story on a heat wave or collapsing glacier to focus on root causes, time urgency, and solutions. Thunberg writes that "No entity other than the media has the opportunity to create the necessary transformation of our global society."

Social norms can and do change, Thunberg emphasizes. That's our greatest source of hope — but only if we keep climate justice front and center at every step.

Barbara J. King is a biological anthropologist emerita at William & Mary. Animals' Best Friends: Putting Compassion to Work for Animals in Captivity is her seventh book. Find her on Twitter @bjkingape

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The Climate Crisis – A Race We Can Win

Climate change is the defining crisis of our time and it is happening even more quickly than we feared. But we are far from powerless in the face of this global threat. As Secretary-General António Guterres pointed out in September, “the climate emergency is a race we are losing, but it is a race we can win”.

No corner of the globe is immune from the devastating consequences of climate change. Rising temperatures are fueling environmental degradation, natural disasters, weather extremes, food and water insecurity, economic disruption, conflict, and terrorism. Sea levels are rising, the Arctic is melting, coral reefs are dying, oceans are acidifying, and forests are burning. It is clear that business as usual is not good enough. As the infinite cost of climate change reaches irreversible highs, now is the time for bold collective action.

GLOBAL TEMPERATURES ARE RISING

Billions of tons of CO2 are released into the atmosphere every year as a result of coal, oil, and gas production. Human activity is producing greenhouse gas emissions at a record high , with no signs of slowing down. According to a ten-year summary of UNEP Emission Gap reports, we are on track to maintain a “business as usual” trajectory.

The last four years were the four hottest on record. According to a September 2019 World Meteorological Organization (WMO) report, we are at least one degree Celsius above preindustrial levels and close to what scientists warn would be “an unacceptable risk”. The 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change calls for holding eventual warming “well below” two degrees Celsius, and for the pursuit of efforts to limit the increase even further, to 1.5 degrees. But if we don’t slow global emissions, temperatures could rise to above three degrees Celsius by 2100 , causing further irreversible damage to our ecosystems.

Glaciers and ice sheets in polar and mountain regions are already melting faster than ever, causing sea levels to rise. Almost two-thirds of the world’s cities   with populations of over five million are located in areas at risk of sea level rise and almost 40 per cent of the world’s population live within 100 km of a coast. If no action is taken, entire districts of New York, Shanghai, Abu Dhabi, Osaka, Rio de Janeiro, and many other cities could find themselves underwater within our lifetimes , displacing millions of people.

FOOD AND WATER INSECURITY

Global warming impacts everyone’s food and water security. Climate change is a direct cause of soil degradation, which limits the amount of carbon the earth is able to contain. Some 500 million people today live in areas affected by erosion, while up to 30 per cent of food is lost or wasted as a result. Meanwhile, climate change limits the availability and quality of water for drinking and agriculture.

In many regions, crops that have thrived for centuries are struggling to survive, making food security more precarious. Such impacts tend to fall primarily on the poor and vulnerable. Global warming is likely to make economic output between the world’s richest and poorest countries grow wider .

NEW EXTREMES

Disasters linked to climate and weather extremes have always been part of our Earth’s system. But they are becoming more frequent and intense as the world warms. No continent is left untouched, with heatwaves, droughts, typhoons, and hurricanes causing mass destruction around the world. 90 per cent   of disasters are now classed as weather- and climate-related, costing the world economy 520 billion USD each year , while 26 million people are pushed into poverty as a result.

A CATALYST FOR CONFLICT

Climate change is a major threat to international peace and security. The effects of climate change heighten competition for resources such as land, food, and water, fueling socioeconomic tensions and, increasingly often, leading to mass displacement .

Climate is a risk multiplier   that makes worse already existing challenges. Droughts in Africa and Latin America directly feed into political unrest and violence. The World Bank estimates that, in the absence of action, more than 140 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and South Asia will be forced to migrate within their regions by 2050.

A PATH FORWARD

While science tells us that climate change is irrefutable, it also tells us that it is not too late to stem the tide. This will require fundamental transformations in all aspects of society — how we grow food, use land, transport goods, and power our economies.

While technology has contributed to climate change, new and efficient technologies can help us reduce net emissions and create a cleaner world. Readily-available technological solutions already exist for more than 70 per cent   of today’s emissions. In many places renewable energy is now the cheapest energy source and electric cars are poised to become mainstream.

In the meantime, nature-based solutions provide ‘breathing room’ while we tackle the decarbonization of our economy. These solutions allow us to mitigate a portion of our carbon footprint while also supporting vital ecosystem services, biodiversity, access to fresh water, improved livelihoods, healthy diets, and food security. Nature-based solutions include improved agricultural practices, land restoration, conservation, and the greening of food supply chains.

Scalable new technologies and nature-based solutions will enable us all to leapfrog to a cleaner, more resilient world. If governments, businesses, civil society, youth, and academia work together, we can create a green future where suffering is diminished, justice is upheld, and harmony is restored between people and planet.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

The Sustainable Development Goals

Climate Action Summit 2019

UNFCCC | The Paris Agreement

WMO |Global Climate in 2015-2019

UNDP | Global Outlook Report 2019

UNCC | Climate Action and Support Trends 2019

IPCC | Climate Change and Land 2019

UNEP | Global Environment Outlook 2019

UNEP | Emission Gap Report 2019

PDF VERSION

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List: 15 essential reads for the climate crisis

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We — Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine Wilkinson — are climate experts who focus on solutions, leadership and building community.

We are a natural and a social scientist, a Northerner and a Southerner. We’re also both lifelong interdisciplinarians in love with words and the cofounders of The All We Can Save Project , in support of women climate leaders.

Our collaboration has led us to read widely and deeply about the climate crisis that’s facing humanity. Here are 15 of our favorite writings on climate — this eclectic list contains books, essays, a newsletter, a scientific paper, even legislation and they’re all ones we wholeheartedly recommend.

All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis coedited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine Wilkinson

We had the honor of editing this collection of 41 essays, 17 poems, quotes and original illustrations — so naturally we love it! But you don’t have to take our word for it. As Rolling Stone said : “Taken together, the breadth of their voices forms a mosaic that honors the complexity of the climate crisis like few, if any, books on the topic have done yet. … The book is a feast of ideas and perspectives, setting a big table for the climate movement, declaring all are welcome.” All We Can Save nourished, educated and transformed us as we shaped its pages, and we can’t wait for it to do the same for you.

Ghost Fishing: An Eco-justice Poetry Anthology edited by Melissa Tuckey

We count ourselves among those who can’t make sense of the climate crisis without the aid of poets, who help us to see more clearly, feel our feelings, catch our breath, and know we’re not alone. This anthology is a magnificent quilt of poems that are made for this moment and all its intersections.

“We Don’t Have to Halt Climate Action to Fight Racism” by Mary Annaïse Heglar

“Climate People,” as she likes to call us, should be grateful that Mary Annaïse Heglar decided a few years back to pick up her pen once more as a writer. All of her essays are necessary reading, but this one is especially so, crafted from Mary’s perspective as a “Black Climate Person.” It’s a powerful articulation of the inextricability of a society that values Black lives and a livable planet for all.

Sacred Instructions: Indigenous Wisdom for Living Spirit-Based Change by Sherri Mitchell — Weh’na Ha’mu Kwasset

Weh’na Ha’mu Kwasset means “she who brings the light,” and Sherri Mitchell does exactly that in this incredible tapestry of a book, which begins with Penawahpskek Nation creation stories and concludes with guidance on what it means to live in a time of prophecy. It is rare that a book so generously shares wisdom, much less wisdom about how we got to where we are, what needs mending, and what a path forward that’s grounded in ancestral ways of knowing and being might look like.

Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds by adrienne maree brown

How lucky are we to be contemporaries of adrienne maree brown? Very. This is a book that we come back to time and time again to ground and enliven our work. We love this line from her about oak trees: “Under the earth, always, they reach for each other, they grow such that their roots are intertwined and create a system of strength that is as resilient on a sunny day as it is in a hurricane.” That’s the kind of community we’re trying to nurture.

“Circumstances Affecting the Heat of the Sun’s Rays” by Eunice Newton Foote

Eunice Newton Foote rarely gets the credit she’s due — and she deserves a lot of credit. In fact, we like to think of her as the first climate feminist. In 1856, she connected the dots between carbon dioxide and planetary warming, but science and history forgot (dismissed?) her until recently. This is her original paper, which was published in The American Journal of Science and Arts . Foote was also a signatory to the women’s rights manifesto created at Seneca Falls in 1848, alongside visionaries like Frederick Douglass.

The Drawdown Review by Project Drawdown

Full disclosure: Katharine is The Drawdown Review’ s editor-in-chief and principal writer. But Ayana fully endorses this recommendation — it’s a valuable resource as we charge ahead toward climate solutions. We all need to know what tools are in the toolbox, and The Drawdown Review is the latest compendium of climate solutions that already exist. This publication is beautifully designed, grounded in research, and you can access it for free.

The Green New Deal Resolution by the 116th US Congress

It seems that almost everyone has an opinion about the Green New Deal, but few people have read the actual piece of legislation: House Resolution 109: Recognizing the Duty of the Federal Government to Create a Green New Deal, which was introduced by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey. The big secret is that it’s only 14 pages! It makes a clear, compelling and concise case for what comprehensive climate policy should look like in the US. We’d love for everyone to read it so we can all have a more grounded discussion about what we might agree and disagree with and chart a course forward.

“Think This Pandemic Is Bad? We Have Another Crisis Coming” by Rhiana Gunn-Wright

Speaking of policy … this op-ed , penned by Rhiana Gunn-Wright, who is one of the policy leads for the Green New Deal, makes the connections between climate, justice, COVID-19 and our recession as clear as day. She lays out an ironclad case for the the need to address these issues together, and why. As she writes, “We need to design the stimulus not only to help the US economy recover but to also become more resilient to the climate crisis, the next multitrillion-dollar crisis headed our way.”

“How Can We Plan for a Future in California?” by Leah Stokes

In the midst of raging fires and continuing pandemic, UC Santa Barbara Professor Leah Stokes, who’s based in Santa Barbara, lays it plain in her piece : “I don’t want to live in a world where we have to decide which mask to wear for which disaster, but this is the world we are making. And we’ve only started to alter the climate. Imagine what it will be like when we’ve doubled or tripled the warming, as we are on track to do.” As she and others have been pointing out, journalists have been failing to make the critical connection: “What’s happening in California has a name: climate change.”

HEATED by Emily Atkin

This is the reading rec that keeps on giving, literally — it’s a daily newsletter that brings climate accountability journalism right to your inbox. It’s chock full of smarts, spunk, truth-telling and super timely writing that isn’t hemmed in by media overlords. If you’re pissed off about the climate crisis, Emily Atkin made HEATED just for you.

The July 20 2020 Issue of TIME Magazine

This entire issue, titled “One Last Chance”, is dedicated to coverage of climate, and it includes wise words from so many luminaries from politician Stacey Abrams to soil scientist Asmeret Asefaw Berhe , with a lead piece by Time ’s climate journalist Justin Worland. Ayana also has a piece in this issue called “ We Can’t Solve the Climate Crisis Unless Black Lives Matter .” To see all of this collected in one place — insights on topics from oceans to agriculture to politics to activism — was heartening. We hope there’s much more of this to come, from many magazines.

“Wakanda Doesn’t Have Suburbs” by Kendra Pierre Louis

A pop-culture connoisseur and expert storyteller, Kendra Pierre Louis takes up the topic of climate stories in her essay — the good, the bad, and the ugly. The good, she explains, are all too rare, and that’s a big problem because stories are powerful. Black Panther may be our best story of living thoughtfully and well on this planet, not least thanks to an absence of carbon-spewing suburbs. It’s going to take much better narratives, and many more of them, if humans are to, as she puts it, “repair our relationship with the Earth and re-envision our societies in ways that are not just in keeping with our ecosystems but also make our lives better.” !

“We Need Courage, Not Hope, to Face Climate Change” by Kate Marvel PhD

This piece by NASA climate scientist Kate Marvel is, as the kids say, a whole mood. Hope is not enough, hope is often passive, and that won’t get us where we need to go. Pretty much everyone who works on climate is constantly being asked what gives us hope — how presumptuous to assume we have it! But what we do have is courage. In spades. As Marvel writes in this poetic piece: “We need courage, not hope. Grief, after all, is the cost of being alive. We are all fated to live lives shot through with sadness, and are not worth less for it. Courage is the resolve to do well without the assurance of a happy ending.”

Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis

Admittedly, this last recommendation isn’t something to read, but to watch and listen to. This playlist of TED Talks by women climate leaders (who were all contributors to our anthology All We Can Save — read about it above) will inspire you, deepen your understanding, connect the dots and help you find where you might fit into the heaps of climate work that needs doing. It includes poignant talks by Colette Pichon Battle and Christine Nieves Rodriguez , which are respectively about communities in Louisiana and Puerto Rico recovering from hurricanes and rebuilding resilience and which broke our hearts open. We were so moved we invited them to adapt their talks into essays for All We Can Save . Christine’s piece — “Community is Our Best Chance” — is the final essay in the book and the note we want to end on here. It’s not about what each of us can do as individuals to address the climate crisis; it’s about what we can do together . Building community around solutions is the most important thing.

Watch Ayana Elizabeth Johnson’s TED Talk here: 

Watch Katharine Wilkinson’s TED Talk here: 

About the authors

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson PhD is a marine biologist, policy expert and Brooklyn native. She is founder of the nonprofit think tank Urban Ocean Lab, founder and CEO of the consultancy Ocean Collectiv and cocreator and cohost of the Spotify/Gimlet podcast How to Save a Planet. She coedited the anthology All We Can Save and cofounded The All We Can Save Project in support of women climate leaders. Her mission is to build community around climate solutions. Find her @ayanaeliza.

Katharine Wilkinson PhD is an author, strategist, teacher and one of 15 “women who will save the world,” according to Time magazine. Her writings on climate include The Drawdown Review, the New York Times bestseller Drawdown and Between God & Green. She is coeditor of All We Can Save and co founder of The All We Can Save Project, in support of women climate leaders. Wilkinson is a former Rhodes Scholar. Find her @DrKWilkinson.

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Century of Science: Theme

Our climate change crisis

The climate change emergency.

Even in a world increasingly battered by weather extremes, the summer 2021 heat wave in the Pacific Northwest stood out. For several days in late June, cities such as Vancouver, Portland and Seattle baked in record temperatures that killed hundreds of people. On June 29 Lytton, a village in British Columbia, set an all-time heat record for Canada, at 121° Fahrenheit (49.6° Celsius); the next day, the village was incinerated by a wildfire.

Within a week, an international group of scientists had analyzed this extreme heat and concluded it would have been virtually impossible without climate change caused by humans. The planet’s average surface temperature has risen by at least 1.1 degree Celsius since preindustrial levels of 1850–1900 — because people are loading the atmosphere with heat-trapping gases produced during the burning of fossil fuels, such as coal and gas, and from cutting down forests.

A little over 1 degree of warming may not sound like a lot. But it has already been enough to fundamentally transform how energy flows around the planet. The pace of change is accelerating, and the consequences are everywhere. Ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are melting, raising sea levels and flooding low-lying island nations and coastal cities. Drought is parching farmlands and the rivers that feed them. Wildfires are raging. Rains are becoming more intense, and weather patterns are shifting .

The roots of understanding this climate emergency trace back more than a century and a half. But it wasn’t until the 1950s that scientists began the detailed measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide that would prove how much carbon is pouring from human activities. Beginning in the 1960s, researchers began developing comprehensive computer models that now illuminate the severity of the changes ahead.

Global average temperature change, 1850–2021

Long-term climate datasets show that Earth’s average surface temperature (combined land and ocean) has increased by more than 1 degree Celsius since preindustrial times. Temperature change is the difference from the 1850–1900 average.

Today we know that climate change and its consequences are real, and we are responsible. The emissions that people have been putting into the air for centuries — the emissions that made long-distance travel, economic growth and our material lives possible — have put us squarely on a warming trajectory . Only drastic cuts in carbon emissions, backed by collective global will, can make a significant difference.

“What’s happening to the planet is not routine,” says Ralph Keeling, a geochemist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif. “We’re in a planetary crisis.” — Alexandra Witze

Tracking a Greenland glacier

The calving front of Greenland’s Helheim Glacier, which flows toward the sea where it crumbles into icebergs, held roughly the same position from the 1970s until 2001 (left, the calving front is to the far right of the image). But by 2005 (right), it had retreated 7.5 kilometers toward its source. 

The first climate scientists

One day in the 1850s, Eunice Newton Foote, an amateur scientist and women’s rights activist living in upstate New York, put two glass jars in sunlight. One contained regular air — a mix of nitrogen, oxygen and other gases including carbon dioxide — while the other contained just CO 2 . Both had thermometers in them. As the sun’s rays beat down, Foote observed that the jar of CO 2 alone heated more quickly, and was slower to cool, than the one containing plain air.

The results prompted Foote to muse on the relationship between CO 2 , the planet and heat. “An atmosphere of that gas would give to our earth a high temperature,” she wrote in an 1856 paper summarizing her findings .

Three years later, working independently and apparently unaware of Foote’s discovery, Irish physicist John Tyndall showed the same basic idea in more detail. With a set of pipes and devices to study the transmission of heat, he found that CO 2 gas, as well as water vapor, absorbed more heat than air alone. He argued that such gases would trap heat in Earth’s atmosphere, much as panes of glass trap heat in a greenhouse, and thus modulate climate. “As a dam built across a river causes a local deepening of the stream, so our atmosphere, thrown as a barrier across the terrestrial rays, produces a local heightening of the temperature at the Earth’s surface,” he wrote in 1862.

Today Tyndall is widely credited with the discovery of how what are now called greenhouse gases heat the planet, earning him a prominent place in the history of climate science. Foote faded into relative obscurity — partly because of her gender, partly because her measurements were less sensitive. Yet their findings helped kick off broader scientific exploration of how the composition of gases in Earth’s atmosphere affects global temperatures.

Carbon floods in

Humans began substantially affecting the atmosphere around the turn of the 19th century, when the Industrial Revolution took off in Britain. Factories burned tons of coal; fueled by fossil fuels, the steam engine revolutionized transportation and other industries. In the decades since, fossil fuels including oil and natural gas have been harnessed to drive a global economy. All these activities belch gases into the air.

Yet Svante Arrhenius, a Swedish physical chemist, wasn’t worried about the Industrial Revolution when he began thinking in the late 1800s about changes in atmospheric CO 2 levels. He was instead curious about ice ages — including whether a decrease in volcanic eruptions, which can put CO 2 into the atmosphere, would lead to a future ice age. Bored and lonely in the wake of a divorce, Arrhenius set himself to months of laborious calculations involving moisture and heat transport in the atmosphere at different zones of latitude. In 1896 he reported that halving the amount of CO 2 in the atmosphere could indeed bring about an ice age — and that doubling CO 2 would raise global temperatures by around 5 to 6 degrees C.

It was a remarkably prescient finding for work that, out of necessity, had simplified Earth’s complex climate system down to just a few variables. Today, estimates for how much the planet will warm through a doubling of CO 2 — a measure known as climate sensitivity — range between 1.5 degrees and 4.5 degrees Celsius. (The range remains broad in part because scientists now incorporate their understanding of many more planetary feedbacks than were recognized in Arrhenius’ day.)  

But Arrhenius’ findings didn’t gain much traction with other scientists at the time. The climate system seemed too large, complex and inert to change in any meaningful way on a timescale that would be relevant to human society. Geologic evidence showed, for instance, that ice ages took thousands of years to start and end. What was there to worry about? And other laboratory experiments — later shown to be flawed — appeared to indicate that changing levels of CO 2 would have little impact on heat absorption in the atmosphere. Most scientists aware of the work came to believe that Arrhenius had been proved wrong.

One researcher, though, thought the idea was worth pursuing. Guy Stewart Callendar, a British engineer and amateur meteorologist, had tallied weather records over time, obsessively enough to determine that average temperatures were increasing at 147 weather stations around the globe. In 1938, in a paper in a Royal Meteorological Society journal , he linked this temperature rise to the burning of fossil fuels. Callendar estimated that fossil fuel burning had put around 150 billion metric tons of CO 2 into the atmosphere since the late 19th century.

Like many of his day, Callendar didn’t see global warming as a problem. Extra CO 2 would surely stimulate plants to grow and allow crops to be farmed in new regions. “In any case the return of the deadly glaciers should be delayed indefinitely,” he wrote. But his work revived discussions tracing back to Tyndall and Arrhenius about how the planetary system responds to changing levels of gases in the atmosphere. And it began steering the conversation toward how human activities might drive those changes.

When World War II broke out the following year, the global conflict redrew the landscape for scientific research. Hugely important wartime technologies, such as radar and the atomic bomb, set the stage for “big science” studies that brought nations together to tackle high-stakes questions of global reach. And that allowed modern climate science to emerge.

The Keeling curve and climate change

One major postwar effort was the International Geophysical Year, an 18-month push in 1957–1958 that involved a wide array of scientific field campaigns including exploration in the Arctic and Antarctica. Climate change wasn’t a high research priority during the IGY, but some scientists in California, led by Roger Revelle of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, used the funding influx to begin a project they’d long wanted to do. The goal was to measure CO 2 levels at different locations around the world, accurately and consistently.

The job fell to geochemist Charles David Keeling, who put ultraprecise CO 2 monitors in Antarctica and on the Hawaiian volcano of Mauna Loa. Funds soon ran out to maintain the Antarctic record, but the Mauna Loa measurements continued. Thus was born one of the most iconic datasets in all of science — the “Keeling curve,” which tracks the rise of atmospheric CO 2 . When Keeling began his measurements in 1958, CO 2 made up 315 parts per million of the global atmosphere. Within just a few years it became clear that the number was increasing year by year. Because plants take up CO 2 as they grow in spring and summer and release it as they decompose in fall and winter, CO 2 concentrations rose and fell each year in a sawtooth pattern — but superimposed on that pattern was a steady march upward.  

Monthly average CO 2 concentrations at Mauna Loa Observatory

Atmospheric carbon dioxide measurements collected continuously since 1958 at Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii show the rise due to human activities. The visible sawtooth pattern is due to seasonal plant growth: Plants take up CO 2 in the growing seasons, then release it as they decompose in fall and winter.

“The graph got flashed all over the place — it was just such a striking image,” says Ralph Keeling, who is Charles David Keeling’s son. Over the years, as the curve marched higher, “it had a really important role historically in waking people up to the problem of climate change.” The Keeling curve has been featured in countless earth science textbooks, congressional hearings and in Al Gore’s 2006 documentary on climate change, An Inconvenient Truth . Each year the curve keeps going up: In 2016 it passed 400 ppm of CO 2 in the atmosphere, as measured during its typical annual minimum in September. In 2021, the annual minimum was 413 ppm. (Before the Industrial Revolution, CO 2 levels in the atmosphere had been stable for centuries at around 280 ppm.)

Around the time that Keeling’s measurements were kicking off, Revelle also helped develop an important argument that the CO 2 from human activities was building up in Earth’s atmosphere. In 1957 he and Hans Suess, also at Scripps at the time, published a paper that traced the flow of radioactive carbon through the oceans and the atmosphere. They showed that the oceans were not capable of taking up as much CO 2 as previously thought; the implication was that much of the gas must be going into the atmosphere instead. “Human beings are now carrying out a large-scale geophysical experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past nor be reproduced in the future,” Revelle and Suess wrote in the paper. It’s one of the most famous sentences in earth science history.

“Human beings are now carrying out a large-scale geophysical experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past nor be reproduced in the future.”

Here was the insight underlying modern climate science: Atmosheric CO 2 is increasing, and humans are causing the buildup. Revelle and Suess became the final piece in a puzzle dating back to Svante Arrhenius and John Tyndall.

“I tell my students that to understand the basics of climate change, you need to have the cutting-edge science of the 1860s, the cutting-edge math of the 1890s and the cutting-edge chemistry of the 1950s,” says Joshua Howe, an environmental historian at Reed College in Portland, Ore.

Environmental awareness grows

As this scientific picture began to emerge in the late 1950s, Science News was on the story. A March 1, 1958 article in Science News Letter , “Weather May Be Warming,” described a warm winter month in the Northern Hemisphere. It posits three theories, including that “carbon dioxide poured into the atmosphere by a booming industrial civilization could have caused the increase. By burning up about 100 billion tons of coal and oil since 1900, man himself may be changing the climate.” By 1972, the magazine was reporting on efforts to expand global atmospheric greenhouse gas monitoring beyond Keeling’s work; two years later, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration launched its own CO 2 monitoring network, now the biggest in the world.

Environmental awareness on other issues grew in the 1960s and 1970s. Rachel Carson catalyzed the modern U.S. environmental movement in 1962 when she published a magazine series and then a book, Silent Spring , condemning the pesticide DDT for its ecological impacts. 1970 saw the celebration of the first Earth Day , in the United States and elsewhere, and in India in 1973 a group of women led a series of widely publicized protests against deforestation. This Chipko movement explicitly linked environmental protection with protecting human communities, and helped seed other environmental movements.

The fragility of global energy supplies was also becoming more obvious through the 1970s. The United States, heavily dependent on other countries for oil imports, entered a gas shortage in 1973–74 when Arab members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries cut off oil supplies because of U.S. government support for Israel. The shortage prompted more people to think about the finiteness of natural resources and the possibility of overtaxing the planet. — Alexandra Witze

Climate change evidence piles up

Observational data collected throughout the second half of the 20th century helped researchers gradually build their understanding of how human activities were transforming the planet. “It was a sort of slow accretion of evidence and concern,” says historian Joshua Howe of Reed College.

Environmental records from the past, such as tree rings and ice cores, established that the current changes in climate are unusual compared with the recent past. Yet such paleoclimatology data also showed that climate has changed quickly in the deep past — driven by triggers other than human activity, but with lessons for how abrupt planetary transformations can be.

Ice cores pulled from ice sheets, such as that atop Greenland, offer some of the most telling insights for understanding past climate change. Each year snow falls atop the ice and compresses into a fresh layer of ice representing climate conditions at the time it formed. The abundance of certain forms, or isotopes, of oxygen and hydrogen in the ice allows scientists to calculate the temperature at which it formed, and air bubbles trapped within the ice reveal how much carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases were in the atmosphere at that time. So drilling down into an ice sheet is like reading the pages of a history book that go back in time the deeper you go.

Scientists began reading these pages in the early 1960s, using ice cores drilled at a U.S. military base in northwest Greenland . Contrary to expectations that past climates were stable, the cores hinted that abrupt climate shifts had happened over the last 100,000 years. By 1979, an international group of researchers was pulling another deep ice core from a second location in Greenland — and it, too, showed that abrupt climate change had occurred in the past. In the late 1980s and early 1990s a pair of European- and U.S.-led drilling projects retrieved even deeper cores from near the top of the ice sheet, pushing the record of past temperatures back a quarter of a million years.

Together with other sources of information, such as sediment cores drilled from the seafloor and molecules preserved in ancient rocks, the ice cores allowed scientists to reconstruct past temperature changes in extraordinary detail. Many of those changes happened alarmingly fast. For instance, the climate in Greenland warmed abruptly more than 20 times in the last 80,000 years, with the changes occurring in a matter of decades. More recently, a cold spell that set in around 13,000 years ago suddenly came to an end around 11,500 years ago — and temperatures in Greenland rose 10 degrees Celsius in a decade.

Evidence for such dramatic climate shifts laid to rest any lingering ideas that global climate change would be slow and unlikely to occur on a timescale that humans should worry about. “It’s an important reminder of how ‘tippy’ things can be,” says Jessica Tierney, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

More evidence of global change came from Earth-observing satellites, which brought a new planet-wide perspective on global warming beginning in the 1960s. From their viewpoint in the sky, satellites have measured the steady rise in global sea level — currently 3.4 millimeters per year and accelerating, as warming water expands and as ice sheets melt — as well as the rapid decline in ice left floating on the Arctic Ocean each summer at the end of the melt season. Gravity-sensing satellites have ‘weighed’ the Antarctic and Greenlandic ice sheets from above since 2002, reporting that more than 400 billion metric tons of ice are lost each year.

Temperature observations taken at weather stations around the world also confirm that we are living in the hottest years on record. The 10 warmest years since record keeping began in 1880 have all occurred since 2005. And nine of those 10 have come since 2010.

What’s more, extreme weather is hammering the planet more and more frequently. That 2021 heat wave in the Pacific Northwest, for instance, is just a harbinger of what’s to come. — Alexandra Witze

Worrisome predictions from climate models

By the 1960s, there was no denying that the planet was warming. But understanding the consequences of those changes — including the threat to human health and well-being — would require more than observational data. Looking to the future depended on computer simulations: complex calculations of how energy flows through the planetary system. Such models of the climate system have been crucial to developing projections for what we can expect from greenhouse warming.

A first step in building climate models was to connect everyday observations of weather to the concept of forecasting future climate. During World War I, the British mathematician Lewis Fry Richardson imagined tens of thousands of meteorologists working to forecast the weather, each calculating conditions for a small part of the atmosphere but collectively piecing together a global forecast. Richardson published his work in 1922, to reviews that called the idea “of almost quixotic boldness.”

But it wasn’t until after World War II that computational power turned Richardson’s dream into reality. In the wake of the Allied victory, which relied on accurate weather forecasts for everything from planning D-Day to figuring out when and where to drop the atomic bombs, leading U.S. mathematicians acquired funding from the federal government to improve predictions. In 1950 a team led by Jule Charney, a meteorologist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., used the ENIAC, the first general-purpose, programmable electronic computer, to produce the first computer-driven regional weather forecast . The forecasting was slow and rudimentary, but it built on Richardson’s ideas of dividing the atmosphere into squares, or cells, and computing the weather for each of those. With the obscure title “Numerical integration of the barotropic vorticity equation,” the paper reporting the results set the stage for decades of climate modeling to follow.

By 1956 Norman Phillips, a member of Charney’s team, had produced the world’s first general circulation model, which captured how energy flows between the oceans, atmosphere and land. Phillips ran the calculations on a computer with just 5 kilobytes of memory, yet it was able to reproduce monthly and seasonal patterns in the lower atmosphere. That meant scientists could begin developing more realistic models of how the planet responds to factors such as increasing levels of greenhouse gases. The field of climate modeling was born.

The work was basic at first, because early computers simply didn’t have much computational power to simulate all aspects of the planetary system. “People thought that it was stupid to try to study this greenhouse-warming issue by three-dimensional model[s], because it cost so much computer time,” meteorologist Syukuro Manabe told physics historian Spencer Weart in a 1989 oral history .

Climate models have predicted how much ice the Ilulissat region of the Greenland ice sheet might lose by 2300 based on different scenarios for greenhouse gas emissions. The models are compared to 2008 (first image). In a best-case scenario, in which emissions peak by mid-century, the speed at which the glacier is sending ice out into the ocean is much lower (second image) than with a worst-case scenario, in which emissions rise at a high rate (third image).

An important breakthrough came in 1967, when Manabe and Richard Wetherald — both at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, a lab born from Charney’s group — published a paper in the Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences that modeled connections between Earth’s surface and atmosphere and calculated how changes in carbon dioxide would affect the planet’s temperature. Manabe and Wetherald were the first to build a computer model that captured the relevant processes that drive climate , and to accurately simulate how the Earth responds to those processes. (Manabe shared the 2021 Nobel Prize in physics for his work on climate modeling; Wetherald died in 2011.)

The rise of climate modeling allowed scientists to more accurately envision the impacts of global warming. In 1979, Charney and other experts met in Woods Hole, Mass., to try to put together a scientific consensus on what increasing levels of CO 2 would mean for the planet. They analyzed climate models from Manabe and from James Hansen of NASA. The resulting “Charney report” concluded that rising CO 2 in the atmosphere would lead to additional and significant climate change. The ocean might take up much of that heat, the scientists wrote — but “it appears that the warming will eventually occur, and the associated regional climatic changes so important to the assessment of socioeconomic consequence may well be significant.”

In the decades since, climate modeling has gotten increasingly sophisticated . Scientists have drawn up a variety of scenarios for how carbon emissions might change in the future, depending on the stringency of emissions cuts. Modelers use those scenarios to project how climate and weather will change around the globe, from hotter croplands in China to melting glaciers in the Himalayas. Climate simulations have also allowed researchers to identify the fingerprints of human impacts on extreme weather that is already happening, by comparing scenarios that include the influence of human activities with those that do not.

And as climate science firmed up and the most dramatic consequences became clear, the political battles raged. — Alexandra Witze

Climate science meets politics

With the development of climate science tracing back to the early Cold War, perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that the science of global warming became enmeshed in broader societal and political battles. A complex stew of political, national and business interests mired society in debates about the reality of climate change, and what to do about it, decades after the science became clear that humans are fundamentally altering the planet’s atmosphere.

Society has pulled itself together before to deal with global environmental problems, such as the Antarctic ozone hole. In 1974 chemists Mario Molina and F. Sherwood Rowland, both of the University of California, Irvine, reported that chlorofluorocarbon chemicals, used in products such as spray cans and refrigerants, caused a chain of reactions that gnawed away at the atmosphere’s protective ozone layer . The resulting ozone hole, which forms over Antarctica every spring, allows more ultraviolet radiation from the sun to make it through Earth’s atmosphere and reach the surface, where it can cause skin cancer and eye damage.

Governments ultimately worked under the auspices of the United Nations to craft the 1987 Montreal Protocol, which strictly limited the manufacture of chlorofluorocarbons . In the years following, the ozone hole began to heal. But fighting climate change would prove to be far more challenging. Chlorofluorocarbons were a suite of chemicals with relatively limited use and for which replacements could be found without too much trouble. But the greenhouse gases that cause global warming stem from a wide variety of human activities, from energy development to deforestation. And transforming entire energy sectors to reduce or eliminate carbon emissions is much more difficult than replacing a set of industrial chemicals.

In 1980, though, researchers took an important step toward banding together to synthesize the scientific understanding of climate change and bring it to the attention of international policy makers. It started at a small scientific conference in Villach, Austria. There, experts met under the auspices of the World Meteorological Organization, the International Council of Scientific Unions and the United Nations Environment Program to discuss the seriousness of climate change. On the train ride home from the meeting, Swedish meteorologist Bert Bolin talked with other participants about how a broader, deeper and more international analysis was needed. In 1985, a second conference was held at Villach to highlight the urgency, and in 1988, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, was born. Bolin was its first chairperson.

The IPCC became a highly influential and unique body. It performs no original scientific research; instead, it synthesizes and summarizes the vast literature of climate science for policy makers to consider — primarily through massive reports issued every couple of years. The first IPCC report , in 1990, predicted that the planet’s global mean temperature would rise more quickly in the following century than at any point in the last 10,000 years, due to increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Successive IPCC reports showed more and more confidence in the link between greenhouse emissions and rising global temperatures — and explored how society might mitigate and adapt to coming changes.

IPCC reports have played a key role in providing scientific information for nations discussing how to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations. This process started with the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 , which resulted in the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change. Annual U.N. meetings to tackle climate change led to the first international commitments to reduce emissions, the Kyoto Protocol of 1997. Under it, developed countries committed to reduce emissions of CO 2 and other greenhouse gases. By 2007 the IPCC declared that the reality of climate warming is “unequivocal ”; the group received the Nobel Peace Prize that year along with Al Gore for their work on climate change.

The IPCC process ensured that policy makers had the best science at hand when they came to the table to discuss cutting emissions. “If you go back and look at the original U.N. framework on climate change, already you see the core of the science represented there,” says Rachel Cleetus, a climate policy expert with the Union of Concerned Scientists in Cambridge, Mass. Of course, nations did not have to abide by that science — and they often didn’t.

Throughout the 2000s and 2010s, international climate meetings discussed less hard-core science and more issues of equity. Countries such as China and India pointed out that they needed energy to develop their economies, and that nations responsible for the bulk of emissions through history, such as the United States, needed to lead the way in cutting greenhouse gases. Meanwhile, residents of some of the most vulnerable nations, such as low-lying islands that are threatened by sea level rise, gained visibility and clout at international negotiating forums. “The issues around equity have always been very uniquely challenging in this collective action problem,” says Cleetus.

By 2015, the world’s nations had made some progress on the emissions cuts laid out in the Kyoto Protocol, but it was still not enough to achieve substantial global reductions. That year, a key U.N. climate conference in Paris produced an international agreement to try to limit global warming to 2 degrees C , and preferably 1.5 degrees C, above preindustrial levels.

Every country has its own approach to the challenge of addressing climate change. In the United States, which gets approximately 80 percent of its energy from fossil fuels, sophisticated efforts to downplay and critique the science led to major delays in climate action. For decades U.S. fossil fuel companies such as ExxonMobil worked to influence politicians to take as little action on emissions reductions as possible. Working with a small group of influential scientists, this well-funded, well-orchestrated campaign took many of its tactics from earlier tobacco-industry efforts to cast doubt on the links between smoking and cancer, as historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway documented in their book Merchants of Doubt.

Perhaps the peak of U.S. climate denialism came in the late 1980s and into the 1990s — roughly a century after Swedish physical chemist Svante Arrhenius laid out the consequences of putting too much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. In 1988 NASA scientist James Hansen testified to lawmakers about the consequences of global warming. “It is already happening now,” Hansen said, summarizing what scientists had long known.

The high-profile nature of Hansen’s testimony, combined with his NASA expertise, vaulted global warming into the public eye in the United States like never before. “It really hit home with a public who could understand that there are reasons that Venus is hot and Mars is cold,” says Joshua Howe, a historian at Reed College. “And that if you use that same reasoning, we have some concerns about what is happening here on Earth.” But Hansen also kicked off a series of bitter public battles about the reality of human-caused climate change that raged for years.        

One common approach of climate skeptics was to attack the environmental data and models that underlie climate science. In 1998, scientist Michael Mann, then at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst, and colleagues published a detailed temperature record that formed the basis of what came to be known as the “hockey stick” graph, so named because the chart showed a sharp rise in temperatures (the hockey blade) at the end of a long, much flatter period (the hockey stick). Skeptics soon demanded the data and software processing tools Mann used to create the graph. Bloggers and self-proclaimed citizen scientists created a cottage industry of questioning new climate science papers under the guise of “audits.” In 2009 hackers broke into a server at the University of East Anglia, a leading climate-research hub in Norwich, England, and released more than 1,000 e-mails between climate scientists. This “Climategate” scandal purported to reveal misconduct on the part of the researchers, but several reviews largely exonerated the scientists.  

The graph that launched climate skeptic attacks

This famous graph, produced by scientist Michael Mann and colleagues, and then reproduced in a 2001 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, dramatically captures temperature change over time. Climate change skeptics made it the center of an all-out attack on climate science.

Such tactics undoubtedly succeeded in feeding politicians’ delay on climate action in the United States, most of it from Republicans. President George W. Bush withdrew the country from the Kyoto Protocol in 2001 ; Donald Trump similarly rejected the Paris accord in 2017 . As late as 2015, the chair of the Senate’s environment committee, James Inhofe of Oklahoma, brought a snowball into Congress on a cold winter’s day in order to continue his argument that human-caused global warming is a “hoax.” In Australia, a similar mix of right-wing denialism and fossil fuel interests has kept climate change commitments in flux, as prime ministers are voted in and out over fierce debates about how the nation should act on climate.

Yet other nations have moved forward. Some European countries such as Germany aggressively pursued renewable energies, such as wind and solar, while activists such as the Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg — the vanguard of a youth-action movement — pressured their governments for more.

In recent years the developing economies of China and India have taken center stage in discussions about climate action. Both nations argue that they must be allowed extra time to wean themselves off fossil fuels in order to continue economic growth. They note that historically speaking, the United States is the largest total emitter of carbon by far.

Total carbon dioxide emissions by country, 1850–2021

These 20 nations have emitted the largest cumulative amounts of carbon dioxide since 1850. Emissions are shown in in billions of metric tons and are broken down into subtotals from fossil fuel use and cement manufacturing (blue) as well as from land use and forestry (green).

China, whose annual CO 2 emissions surpassed those of the United States in 2006, declared several moderate steps in 2021 to reduce emissions, including that it would stop building coal-burning power plants overseas. India announced it would aim for net-zero emissions by 2070, the first time it has set a date for this goal.

Yet such pledges continue to be criticized. At the 2021 U.N. Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Scotland, India was globally criticized for not committing to a complete phaseout of coal — although the two top emitters, China and the United States, have not themselves committed to phasing out coal. “There is no equity in this,” says Aayushi Awasthy, an energy economist at the University of East Anglia. — Alexandra Witze

Facing a warmer future

Climate change creeps up gradually on society, except when it doesn’t. The slow increase in sea level, for instance, causes waters to lap incrementally higher at shorelines year after year. But when a big storm comes along — which may be happening more frequently due to climate change — the consequences become much more obvious. Storm surge rapidly swamps communities and wreaks disproportionate havoc. That’s why New York City installed floodgates in its subway and tunnel system in the wake of 2012’s Superstorm Sandy , and why the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu has asked Australia and New Zealand to be prepared to take in refugees fleeing from rising sea levels.

The list of climate impacts goes on and on — and in many cases, changes are coming faster than scientists had envisioned a few decades ago. The oceans are becoming more acidic as they absorb carbon dioxide, harming tiny marine organisms that build protective calcium carbonate shells and are the base of the marine food web. Warmer waters are bleaching coral reefs. Higher temperatures are driving animal and plant species into areas in which they previously did not live, increasing the risk of extinction for many. “It’s no longer about impacts in the future,” says Rachel Cleetus, a climate policy expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “It’s about what’s happening in the U.S. here and now, and around the world.”

No place on the planet is unaffected. In many areas, higher temperatures have led to major droughts, which dry out vegetation and provide additional fuel for wildfires such as those that have devastated Australia , the Mediterranean and western North America in recent years. The Colorado River , the source of water for tens of millions of people in the western United States , came under a water-shortage alert in 2021 for the first time in history.

Then there’s the Arctic, where temperatures are rising at more than twice the global average and communities are at the forefront of change. Permafrost is thawing, destabilizing buildings, pipelines and roads. Caribou and reindeer herders worry about the increased risk of parasites to the health of their animals. With less sea ice available to buffer the coast from storm erosion, the Inupiat village of Shishmaref, Alaska, risks crumbling into the sea. It will need to move from its sand-barrier island to the mainland .

“We know these changes are happening and that the Titanic is sinking,” says Louise Farquharson, a geomorphologist at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks who monitors permafrost and coastal change around Alaska. Like many Arctic scientists, she is working with Indigenous communities to understand the shifts they’re experiencing and what can be done when buildings start to slump and water supplies start to drain away. “A big part is just listening to community members and understanding what they’re seeing change,” she says.

All around the planet, those who depend on intact ecosystems for their survival face the greatest threat from climate change. And those with the least resources to adapt to climate change are the ones who feel it first .

“We are going to warm,” says Claudia Tebaldi, a climate scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. “There is no question about it. The only thing that we can hope to do is to warm a little more slowly.”

That’s one reason why the IPCC report released in 2021 focuses on anticipated levels of global warming. There is a big difference between the planet warming 1.5 degrees versus 2 degrees or 2.5 degrees. Consider that we are now at least 1.1 degrees above preindustrial levels of CO 2 and are already seeing dramatic shifts in climate. Given that, keeping further global temperature increases as low as possible will make a big difference in the climate impacts the planet faces. “With every fraction of a degree of warming, everything gets a little more intense,” says paleoclimatologist Jessica Tierney. “There’s no more time to beat around the bush.”

Historical and projected global temperature change

Various scenarios for how greenhouse gas emissions might change going forward help scientists predict future climate change. This graph shows the simulated historical temperature trend along with future projections of global surface temperature based on five scenarios from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Temperature change is the difference from the 1850–1900 average.

The future rests on how much nations are willing to commit to cutting emissions and whether they will stick to those commitments. It’s a geopolitical balancing act the likes of which the world has never seen.

Science can and must play a role going forward. Improved climate models will illuminate what changes are expected at the regional scale, helping officials prepare. Governments and industry have crucial parts to play as well. They can invest in technologies, such as carbon sequestration, to help decarbonize the economy and shift society toward more renewable sources of energy. “We can solve these problems — most of the tools are already there,” says Cascade Tuholske, a geographer at Columbia University. “We just have to do it.”

Huge questions remain. Do voters have the will to demand significant energy transitions from their governments? How can business and military leaders play a bigger role in driving climate action? What should be the role of low-carbon energy sources that come with downsides, such as nuclear energy ? How can developing nations achieve a better standard of living for their people while not becoming big greenhouse gas emitters? How can we keep the most vulnerable from being disproportionately harmed during extreme events, and incorporate environmental and social justice into our future?

These questions become more pressing each year, as CO 2 accumulates in our atmosphere. The planet is now at higher levels of CO 2 than at any time in the last 3 million years. Yet Ralph Keeling, keeper of the iconic Mauna Loa record tracking the rise in atmospheric CO 2 , is already optimistically thinking about how scientists would be able to detect a slowdown, should the world actually start cutting emissions by a few percent per year. “That’s what the policy makers want to see — that there’s been some large-scale impact of what they did,” he says.

At the 2021 U.N. climate meeting in Glasgow diplomats from around the world agreed to work more urgently to shift away from using fossil fuels. They did not, however, adopt targets strict enough to keep the world below a warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius. It’s been well over a century since Svante Arrhenius recognized the consequences of putting extra carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and yet world leaders have yet to pull together to avoid the most dangerous consequences of climate change.

Time is running out. — Alexandra Witze

Climate change facts

We know that climate change and its consequences are real, and we are responsible. Here’s what the science tells us.

How much has the planet warmed over the past century?

The planet’s average surface temperature has risen by at least 1.1 degree Celsius since preindustrial levels of 1850–1900.

What is causing climate change?

People are loading the atmosphere with carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases produced during the burning of fossil fuels, such as coal and gas, and cutting down forests.

What are some of the effects of climate change?

Ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are melting, raising sea levels and flooding low-lying island nations and coastal cities. Drought is parching farmlands and the rivers that feed them. Wildfires are raging. Rains are becoming more intense, and weather patterns are shifting.

What is the greenhouse effect?

In the 19th century, Irish physicist John Tyndall found that carbon dioxide gas, as well as water vapor, absorbed more heat than air alone. He argued that such gases would trap heat in Earth’s atmosphere, much as panes of glass trap heat in a greenhouse, and thus modulate climate.

What is the Keeling curve?

One of the most iconic datasets in all of science, the Keeling curve tracks the rise of atmospheric CO 2 . When geochemist Charles David Keeling began his measurements in 1958 on the Hawaiian volcano of Mauna Loa, CO 2 made up 315 parts per million of the global atmosphere. Each year the curve keeps going up: In 2016 it passed 400 ppm of CO 2 in the atmosphere, as measured during its typical annual minimum in September. In 2021, the annual minimum was 413 ppm.

Does it get hotter every year?

Average global temperatures fluctuate from year to year, but temperature observations taken at weather stations around the world confirm that we are living in the hottest years on record. The 10 warmest years since record keeping began in 1880 have all occurred since 2005. And nine of those 10 have come since 2010.

What countries emit the most carbon dioxide?

The United States has been the largest total emitter of carbon dioxide by far, followed by China and Russia. China’s annual CO 2 emissions surpassed those of the United States in 2006.

What places are impacted by climate change?

No place on the planet is unaffected. Higher temperatures have led to major droughts, providing fuel for wildfires such as those that have devastated Australia , the Mediterranean and western North America in recent years. The Colorado River came under a water-shortage alert in 2021 for the first time in history. In the Arctic, where temperatures are rising at more than twice the global average, permafrost is thawing, destabilizing buildings, pipelines and roads. With less sea ice available to buffer the coast from storm erosion, the Inupiat village of Shishmaref, Alaska, risks crumbling into the sea. All around the planet, those who depend on intact ecosystems for their survival face the greatest threat from climate change. And those with the least resources to adapt to climate change are the ones who feel it first .

Editor’s note: This story was published March 10, 2022.

British mathematician Lewis Fry Richardson (shown at center) proposes forecasting the weather by piecing together the calculations of tens of thousands of meteorologists working on small parts of the atmosphere.

Geochemist Charles David Keeling (shown in 1988) begins tracking the rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide at Mauna Loa in Hawaii. The record, which continues through today, has become one of the most iconic datasets in all of science.

Rachel Carson (shown) publishes the book Silent Spring , raising alarm over the ecological impacts of the pesticide DDT. The book helps catalyze the modern U.S. environmental movement.

The first Earth Day, organized by U.S. senator Gaylord Nelson and graduate student Denis Hayes, is celebrated.

The first Landsat satellite launched (shown), opening the door to continuous monitoring of Earth and its features from above.

A powerful eruption from the Philippines’ Mount Pinatubo (shown) ejects millions of tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, temporarily cooling the planet.  

World leaders gathered (shown) at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro to address how to pursue economic development while also protecting the Earth. The meeting resulted in an international convention on climate change.

Activist Greta Thunberg initiates the “School Strike for Climate” movement by protesting outside the Swedish parliament. Soon, students around the world join a growing movement demanding action on climate change . (Activists at the 2021 U.N. Climate Change Conference are shown.)

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Cutting carbon dioxide emissions to curb climate change and reach net zero is possible but not easy.

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Your climate crisis reading list: 15 essential reads

By Ayana Elizabeth Johnson on October 5, 2020 in News + Updates

We —  Ayana Elizabeth Johnson  and  Katharine Wilkinson  — are climate experts who focus on solutions, leadership and building community.

We are a natural and a social scientist, a Northerner and a Southerner. We’re also both lifelong inter-disciplinarians in love with words and the cofounders of  The All We Can Save Project , in support of women climate leaders.

Our collaboration has led us to read widely and deeply about the climate crisis that’s facing humanity.

Here are 15 of our favorite writings on climate — this eclectic list contains books, essays, a newsletter, a scientific paper, even legislation— and they’re all ones we wholeheartedly recommend:

1.  All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis  coedited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine Wilkinson

We had the honor of editing this collection of 41 essays, 17 poems, quotes and original illustrations — so naturally we love it! But you don’t have to take our word for it. As  Rolling Stone   said : “Taken together, the breadth of their voices forms a mosaic that honors the complexity of the climate crisis like few, if any, books on the topic have done yet. … The book is a feast of ideas and perspectives, setting a big table for the climate movement, declaring all are welcome.”  All We Can Save  nourished, educated and transformed us as we shaped its pages, and we can’t wait for it to do the same for you.

2.  Ghost Fishing: An Eco-justice Poetry Anthology  edited by Melissa Tuckey

We count ourselves among those who can’t make sense of the climate crisis without the aid of poets, who help us to see more clearly, feel our feelings, catch our breath, and know we’re not alone. This anthology is a magnificent quilt of poems that are made for this moment and all its intersections.

3.  “We Don’t Have to Halt Climate Action to Fight Racism”  by Mary Annaïse Heglar

“Climate People,” as she likes to call us, should be grateful that Mary Annaïse Heglar decided a few years back to pick up her pen once more as a writer. All of her essays are necessary reading, but this one is especially so, crafted from Mary’s perspective as a “Black Climate Person.” It’s a powerful articulation of the inextricability of a society that values Black lives and a livable planet for all.

4.  Sacred Instructions: Indigenous Wisdom for Living Spirit-Based Change  by Sherri Mitchell — Weh’na Ha’mu Kwasset

Weh’na Ha’mu Kwasset means “she who brings the light,” and Sherri Mitchell does exactly that in this incredible tapestry of a book, which begins with Penawahpskek Nation creation stories and concludes with guidance on what it means to live in a time of prophecy. It is rare that a book so generously shares wisdom, much less wisdom about how we got to where we are, what needs mending, and what a path forward that’s grounded in ancestral ways of knowing and being might look like.

5.  Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds  by adrienne maree brown

How lucky are we to be contemporaries of adrienne maree brown? Very. This is a book that we come back to time and time again to ground and enliven our work. We love this line from her about oak trees: “Under the earth, always, they reach for each other, they grow such that their roots are intertwined and create a system of strength that is as resilient on a sunny day as it is in a hurricane.” That’s the kind of community we’re trying to nurture.

6.  “Circumstances Affecting the Heat of the Sun’s Rays”  by Eunice Newton Foote

Eunice Newton Foote rarely gets the credit she’s due — and she deserves a lot of credit. In fact, we like to think of her as the first climate feminist. In 1856, she connected the dots between carbon dioxide and planetary warming, but science and history forgot (dismissed?) her until recently. This is her original paper, which was published in  The American Journal of Science and Arts . Foote was also a signatory to the women’s rights manifesto created at Seneca Falls in 1848, alongside visionaries like Frederick Douglass.

7.  The Drawdown Review   by Project Drawdown

Full disclosure: Katharine is  The Drawdown Review’ s editor-in-chief and principal writer. But Ayana fully endorses this recommendation — it’s a valuable resource as we charge ahead toward climate solutions. We all need to know what tools are in the toolbox, and  The Drawdown Review  is the latest compendium of climate solutions that already exist. This publication is beautifully designed, grounded in research, and you can access it for free.

8.  The Green New Deal Resolution  by the 116th US Congress

It seems that almost everyone has an opinion about the Green New Deal, but few people have read the actual piece of legislation: House Resolution 109: Recognizing the Duty of the Federal Government to Create a Green New Deal, which was introduced by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey. The big secret is that it’s only 14 pages! It makes a clear, compelling and concise case for what comprehensive climate policy should look like in the US. We’d love for everyone to read it so we can all have a more grounded discussion about what we might agree and disagree with and chart a course forward.

9.  “Think This Pandemic Is Bad? We Have Another Crisis Coming”  by Rhiana Gunn-Wright

Speaking of policy … this  op-ed , penned by Rhiana Gunn-Wright, who is one of the policy leads for the Green New Deal, makes the connections between climate, justice, COVID-19 and our recession as clear as day. She lays out an ironclad case for the the need to address these issues together, and why. As she writes, “We need to design the stimulus not only to help the US economy recover but to also become more resilient to the climate crisis, the next multitrillion-dollar crisis headed our way.”

10.  “How Can We Plan for a Future in California?”  by Leah Stokes

In the midst of raging fires and continuing pandemic, UC Santa Barbara Professor Leah Stokes, who’s based in Santa Barbara, lays it plain in her piece :  “I don’t want to live in a world where we have to decide which mask to wear for which disaster, but this is the world we are making. And we’ve only started to alter the climate. Imagine what it will be like when we’ve doubled or tripled the warming, as we are on track to do.” As she and others have been pointing out,  journalists have been failing  to make the critical connection: “What’s happening in California has a name: climate change.”

11.  HEATED  by Emily Atkin

This is the reading rec that keeps on giving, literally — it’s a daily newsletter that brings climate accountability journalism right to your inbox. It’s chock full of smarts, spunk, truth-telling and super timely writing that isn’t hemmed in by media overlords. If you’re pissed off about the climate crisis, Emily Atkin made HEATED just for you.

12.  The July 20 2020 Issue  of  TIME Magazine

This entire issue, titled “One Last Chance”, is dedicated to coverage of climate, and it includes wise words from so many luminaries from politician  Stacey Abrams  to soil scientist  Asmeret Asefaw Berhe , with a  lead piece  by  Time ’s climate journalist Justin Worland. Ayana also has a piece in this issue called “ We Can’t Solve the Climate Crisis Unless Black Lives Matter .” To see all of this collected in one place — insights on topics from oceans to agriculture to politics to activism — was heartening. We hope there’s much more of this to come, from many magazines.

13.  “Wakanda Doesn’t Have Suburbs”  by Kendra Pierre Louis

A pop-culture connoisseur and expert storyteller, Kendra Pierre Louis takes up the topic of climate stories in her essay — the good, the bad, and the ugly. The good, she explains, are all too rare, and that’s a big problem because stories are powerful.  Black Panther  may be our best story of living thoughtfully and well on this planet, not least thanks to an absence of carbon-spewing suburbs. It’s going to take much better narratives, and many more of them, if humans are to, as she puts it, “repair our relationship with the Earth and re-envision our societies in ways that are not just in keeping with our ecosystems but also make our lives better.” !

14.  “We Need Courage, Not Hope, to Face Climate Change”  by Kate Marvel PhD

This piece by NASA climate scientist  Kate Marvel  is, as the kids say, a whole mood. Hope is not enough, hope is often passive, and that won’t get us where we need to go. Pretty much everyone who works on climate is constantly being asked what gives us hope — how presumptuous to assume we have it! But what we do have is courage. In spades. As Marvel writes in this poetic piece: “We need courage, not hope. Grief, after all, is the cost of being alive. We are all fated to live lives shot through with sadness, and are not worth less for it. Courage is the resolve to do well without the assurance of a happy ending.”

15.  Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis

Admittedly, this last recommendation isn’t something to read, but to watch and listen to. This playlist of TED Talks by women climate leaders (who were all contributors to our anthology  All We Can Save —  read about it above) will inspire you, deepen your understanding, connect the dots and help you find where you might fit into the heaps of climate work that needs doing. It includes poignant talks by  Colette Pichon Battle  and  Christine Nieves Rodriguez , which are respectively about communities in Louisiana and Puerto Rico recovering from hurricanes and rebuilding resilience and which broke our hearts open. We were so moved we invited them to adapt their talks into essays for  All We Can Save . Christine’s piece — “Community is Our Best Chance” — is the final essay in the book and the note we want to end on here. It’s not about what each of us can do as  individuals  to address the climate crisis; it’s about what we can do  together . Building community around solutions is the most important thing.

Watch Ayana Elizabeth Johnson’s TED Talk here: 

Watch Katharine Wilkinson’s TED Talk here: 

Learn more about the global Countdown initiative , explore the lineup of speakers , and watch the event live on October 10th.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson  PhD is a marine biologist, policy expert and Brooklyn native. She is founder of the nonprofit think tank Urban Ocean Lab, founder and CEO of the consultancy Ocean Collectiv and cocreator and cohost of the Spotify/Gimlet podcast How to Save a Planet. She coedited the anthology All We Can Save and cofounded The All We Can Save Project in support of women climate leaders. Her mission is to build community around climate solutions. Find her @ayanaeliza.

Katharine Wilkinson  PhD is an author, strategist, teacher and one of 15 “women who will save the world,” according to Time magazine. Her writings on climate include The Drawdown Review, the New York Times bestseller Drawdown and Between God & Green. She is coeditor of All We Can Save and co founder of The All We Can Save Project, in support of women climate leaders. Wilkinson is a former Rhodes Scholar. Find her @DrKWilkinson.

This piece was adapted for TED-Ed from  this Ideas article.

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To Address the Climate Crisis, Focus on More Than Carbon Dioxide

By Kathy Castor

Ms. Castor is the chair of the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis.

In conversations around the climate crisis, there’s often a focus on carbon dioxide. It is trapping heat and warming our atmosphere , fueling deadlier climate disasters than normal and costing billions year after year. We are right to focus on carbon dioxide. In 2019, it made up about 80 percent of human-caused, heat-trapping pollution in the United States. Reducing it remains the key to achieving as soon as possible a net-zero economy.

But an alarming new report, released today , by the United Nations-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, sheds light on the urgent need to cut down on another harmful pollutant: methane. Over 20 years, methane has more than 80 times the heat-trapping power of carbon dioxide, making it a major contributor to the climate crisis.

The new report makes it clear: If we are to keep global temperatures in check, we urgently need to focus on cutting methane pollution. When every fraction of a degree counts, moving quickly to reduce this super pollutant is one of the most immediate and powerful ways to start solving the climate crisis. And because of methane’s relatively short life span — it lingers in the atmosphere for around 12 years , while carbon dioxide hangs around for hundreds of years — bringing down our methane emissions will help clear the atmosphere , helping to moderate temperatures and making a real impact on our near-term climate goals .

The panel’s findings have important implications for our clean energy future. When it comes to generating electricity in the United States, increased use of so-called clean natural gas has often made up for decreased use of carbon-intensive coal. This has led some of my Republican colleagues to call for expanded natural gas production and the easing of restrictions on exporting the resource abroad.

But the natural gas we use is made up of 85 to 90 percent methane . Yes, natural gas often emits somewhat less carbon dioxide than does coal when burned at power plants. Methane, however, escapes at every point of its production and distribution, from when it’s extracted from drilling or fracking sites to when it’s transported through gas pipelines to when it’s purified at refineries. These leaks undermine the potential climate benefit of natural gas.

The science is clear on the need to keep greenhouse gases like methane out of our atmosphere. A global methane assessment released in May showed how reducing its emissions by 45 percent this decade could help us avoid nearly 0.3°C of warming globally as early as the 2040s. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but it would make a world of difference for vulnerable communities in America and across the globe . Each fraction of a degree of warming we avoid can help protect families from climate-fueled devastation, including more intense hurricanes, more severe flooding, more frequent droughts and more extreme heat and wildfires.

We’re already living with the devastating consequences of having warmed the planet more than 1°C. From the deadly heat domes in the Northwest to the harmful algal blooms killing the fish that we see washed up on the shores of Florida, humans have caused this problem. But we have the tools to fix it.

We can expand climate solutions and clean energy, which have the incredible potential to create millions of good-paying jobs, lower energy bills, strengthen our national security, and provide clean air and water for communities hurt by environmental injustice.

To solve this crisis, Congress must act. Last year, the Democrats on the Select Committee on the Climate Crisis that I lead released a road map to help America reach net zero emissions. In our Climate Crisis Action Plan, we recommended reducing methane pollution from oil and gas extraction by 90 percent by the end of the decade, as well as phasing out the routine flaring of methane.

Last month, I was disappointed to see only 12 House Republicans join our Democratic majority when we voted in favor of stronger safeguards against methane pollution. This was truly low-hanging fruit: a measure to require oil and gas companies to regularly find and repair methane leaks. The resolution even had support from some of the world’s largest oil companies . And yet most of our colleagues across the aisle refused to put the health of American families above the profits of polluters.

This is a huge issue. While some Republicans have softened their rhetoric when it comes to climate, many of them continue to stand in the way of clean energy and climate solutions. This needs to change quickly, and they must get serious about tackling this crisis with urgency.

Whether through a bipartisan infrastructure bill, a reconciliation package or some combination of the two, Congress has a moral obligation to advance policies that push the United States toward clean electricity and a net-zero emission economy. We have an urgent need to build out renewable energy, to fund job-creating programs like the Civilian Climate Corps and to help employ former fossil fuel workers to clean up orphaned oil and gas wells and abandoned mines.

We’ve known for years that we are in a race against time. We’ve run out of time. Now, every bit of pollution — and every fraction of a degree — counts.

Kathy Castor is the chair of the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis. She represents Florida’s 14th Congressional District.

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News from the Columbia Climate School

Climate and the Personal Essay — A Reading List

Hayley Martinez

The Earth Institute recently announced Mary Annaïse Heglar as its first writer-in-residence, a newly launched joint initiative of the Earth Institute and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). Heglar, a noted climate justice essayist, will spend the next six months at Columbia exploring the intersection of climate science, art and literature.

Starting this Friday , Heglar will be leading a reading group for Columbia students that explores climate change topics through personal essays. Each week, students will read a few chosen pieces around a specific theme, with a particular emphasis on emotional depth and marginalized communities.

The climate crisis may be scientific and political, but it is also deeply emotional and personal, and Heglar seeks to create a safe space for students to explore that emotionality. Students will meet weekly to discuss the chosen essays, and will be encouraged to journal and invited to share their own writing. According to Heglar, “I’m hoping that participants, including myself, will be able to see ourselves in these stories and use that reflection to hone our own voices.”

While this seminar is only open to Columbia students, others can follow along. The nine-week reading list is below.

Week 1: Climate Grief

• Under the Weather, by Ash Sanders
• Endlings , by Harriet Riley

Week 2: The Problem with Hope

• We Need Courage, Not Hope, to Face Climate Change, Kate Marvel
• Is it Wrong to be Hopeful about Climate Change? Diego Arguedas Ortiz

Week 3: If Not Hope, What?

• The Case for Climate Rage , Amy Westervelt
• But the Greatest of These is Love , Mary Annaïse Heglar
• Time to Panic , David Wallace Wells

Week 4: We’re Not Recreating the Wheel

• Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King
• The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin
• Climate Change Ain’t the First Existential Threat , Mary Annaïse Heglar

Week 5: Who’s Missing?

• What Listening Means in the Time of the Climate Crisis , Tara Houska
• Perhaps the World Ends Here , Julian Brave NoiseCat
• Climate Darwinism Makes Disabled People Expendable , Imani Barbarin

Week 6: There Are No Heroes

• When the Hero is the Problem , Rebecca Solnit

Week 7: Out with the Guilt

• Who is the We in We Are Causing Climate Change , Genevieve Geunther
• In Defense of Eco-hypocrisy , Sami Grover
• On Being a Climate Person , Eric Holthaus

Week 8: The Great Impotence

• The End Times Are Here and I’m at Target , Hayes Brown
• What if We Stopped Pretending the Climate Apocalypse Can Be Stropped , Jonathan Franzen

Week 9: What Now?

• Home is Always Worth It , Mary Annaïse Heglar
• In 2030, We Solved the Climate Emergency. Here’s How , Eric Holthaus
• Loving a Vanishing World , Emily Johnston

Students interested in attending the reading group can reach out to Cynthia Thomson at [email protected] .

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This New Book of Essays Offers Hope for the Fight Against the Climate Crisis

By Emily Chan

For obvious reasons, there’s a lot of doom and gloom out there about the climate crisis. There’s no way of ignoring that the outlook is bleak, with the latest IPCC report suggesting we could surpass 1.5 degrees celsius of warming as early as the next decade. Meanwhile, climate-related disasters are on the rise: think of the extreme heatwaves in Europe last summer, or the devastating floods in Pakistan , or the ongoing drought that’s affecting millions in the Horn of Africa. 

Still, scientists are clear that it’s not too late to take action. That’s why writer Rebecca Solnit and digital storyteller Thelma Young Lutunatabua have edited a new book of essays, entitled Not Too Late: Changing The Climate Story From Despair To Possibility . “People think if you don’t win everything, you lose everything. They think it’s too late. They think nobody cares, that nobody’s doing anything,” Solnit tells  Vogue via Zoom from New Mexico. “We feel really strongly that people need good facts about the realities of climate change and what we can do about it.”

Bringing together climate scientists, activists, and communicators from all around the world (including the likes of Adrienne Maree Brown, Mary Annaïse Heglar, and Farhana Sultana), the collection is designed to be an entry-level tool kit to empower those who are concerned about the ecological crisis we’re facing, but don’t know what to do about it. “We wanted to help people find clarity through all the noise that exists out there, and through that clarity, feel they have power and that they can be a part of this fight,” Young Lutunatabua, who is based in Fiji, explains. 

Protestors marching against the Dakota Access Pipeline in Washington, D.C. in 2017. 

Opening with two essays penned by Solnit and Young Lutunatabua—titled “Difficult Is Not The Same As Impossible” and “Nothing Is Inevitable” respectively—the book takes readers through the solutions that exist (from defeating fossil fuels to adaptation and mitigation); the frameworks that will help us rethink our attitudes towards the climate crisis; and what the future could look like if we take action now. 

One important theme that runs throughout the book is the idea of hope. “Hope is not the guarantee that things will be okay,” Young Lutunatabua, a senior communications strategist at The Solutions Project , says. “It’s the recognition that there’s spaciousness for action, that the future is uncertain, and in that uncertainty, we have space to step into and make the future we want.”

The role that everyone has to play in shaping our future is another key message. That’s why Solnit and Young Lutunatabua have included an—“extremely incomplete“—list of climate victories in the book, many of which have been led by Indigenous activists and activists of color. “It’s so easy to throw up your hands in the air and say the climate is such a big issue, I don’t know what I can do,” Young Lutunatabua continues, her determination to fight the climate crisis shining through. “But we want to give people examples that show if you join together with other people, you can have power.“

Thelma Young Lutunatabua. 

Solnit is keen to emphasize that action on the climate crisis can have “indirect consequences”—pointing to the story of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as an example. While working as a bartender, the U.S. congresswoman joined the Standing Rock protests , which took place in response to the planned construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. Although the pipeline ultimately went ahead, the knock-on effects for the environmental movement were numerous—with Ocasio-Cortez later going on to propose the Green New Deal in Congress. 

“Another one of the frameworks people have that makes them feel defeatist is the idea that if you can’t see immediate, direct, obvious results from doing something, it had no impact,” Solnit says. “And yet, the way that change actually happens is often slow, indirect, unpredictable;  you have to stick around.“ 

Another common misconception that’s challenged in the book is the belief that tackling the climate crisis means adopting a scarcity mindset. “People think we live in an age of abundance and climate requires austerity,” Solnit explains, speaking with the same pinpoint clarity with which she writes. “We stand that on its head in so many ways. We live in an age of austerity: austerity of hope, austerity of community, austerity of clean air and water. We live in a world where more than eight million people a year die just from one aspect of fossil fuels, which is airborne particulates.“

Whether you’re already heavily involved in the climate movement or a complete newcomer, the essays are an energizing read that will undoubtedly give you hope—the active type, not the passive kind—for the future. The lasting message we should take away? “Fight like hell, and don’t give up,” Solnit concludes. 

Not Too Late , edited by Rebecca Solnit and Thelma Young Lutunatabua and published by Haymarket Books, is out now.  

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The Search for New Words to Make Us Care About the Climate Crisis

The reason we find ourselves verging toward planetary extinction is fairly simple: for quite some time, it’s been profitable for humans to behave this way. For business and government, it’s always been easier to toggle between plunder and neglect than to mind long-term, civilizational time lines. The actual conspiracy is that we are made to feel as though humanity’s fate were purely a matter of personal choice—our desire to buy this, that, or nothing at all, our collective willingness to recycle or compost. This isn’t to say that we possess no power at all. But the scale of the problem is difficult to comprehend, and discussions leave many of us feeling overwhelmed and paralyzed, reduced to myopic debates about whether we are too scared or not scared enough.

Perhaps, as Matthew Schneider-Mayerson and Brent Ryan Bellamy argue, our inability to imagine another path forward reflects a limited vocabulary. Their modest contribution is the recently published “ An Ecotopian Lexicon ,” a collection of essays that seeks to expand the language we use to describe the present-day crisis and its possibilities. At this point, as they note in their introduction, we know how bad it is out there. They are interested in the “struggle to understand,” at the level of both politics and emotions, how we might meaningfully respond to life in the Anthropocene, the term that scientists use to describe the present geologic epoch, where human activity has substantially influenced the climate and environment.

For Schneider-Mayerson, an assistant professor of environmental studies at Yale-NUS College, in Singapore, and Bellamy, an instructor at Trent University who specializes in science-fiction studies and energy humanities, our emerging reality requires a new language. They invited a range of writers, scholars, and artists to choose a word or phrase, mainly taken from the non-English-speaking world, that might help us understand this struggle anew. These are what linguists call loanwords, or “terms that are adopted into one language from another without translation.” Leaving the words in their original language—in this case, Thai, Gaeilge, Norwegian, and Luganda, among others—is a reminder of the histories and cultures embedded in everyday thought.

“An Ecotopian Lexicon” is part dream, part provocation. In his foreword, the writer Kim Stanley Robinson describes Schneider-Mayerson and Bellamy’s book as a “science fiction story in the form of a lexicon.” As Robinson notes, science-fiction writers often invent new words out of necessity, in order to describe new technologies or social formations. Some of the lexicon’s most provocative moments involve recent neologisms. A “blockadia,” Randall Amster writes, arises in the work of Naomi Klein, and it describes the “vast but interwoven web of campaigns” against the fossil-fuel industry. Today, activists see blockadia not as one place but more of a roving space of protest. A blockadia manifests wherever and whenever people use direct action to oppose resource extraction. Coming up with a single term broad enough to describe these movements around the world would help normalize these demonstrations. Rather than scattered fringe protests, they are part of a whole, constituting the last line of defense against new pipelines or fracking.

Sofia Ahlberg discusses “ fotminne ,” a term coined by the Swedish novelist Kerstin Ekman, which roughly translates to “foot memory.” “ Fotminne ,” Ahlberg writes, describes a kind of primeval awareness, a felt connection to all who have walked these grounds before and the ways they changed it. But it can also have a contractual dimension: our foot “strikes a deal with the ground” with each step we take. Daniel Worden writes of the “cibopathic,” a trait possessed by characters in the comic-book series “ Chew .” A “cibopath” is able to access the full history of something—where it was grown, how it was harvested—by tasting it.

Then again, as the book suggests, the intuitive, almost metaphysical link between time and place, past and present, isn’t so futuristic at all. For some, it’s an innate part of one’s identity. There are essays on the Luganda salutation “ gyebale ,” which Jennifer Lee Johnson translates as “thank you for the work you do,” and the ancient Maya greeting “ in lak’ech—a la k’inn ,” which John Esposito translates as “I’m another you. You’re another me.” Both suggest a kind of communal ethos baked into how two strangers might regard each another. Allison Ford and Kari Marie Norgaard discuss the Arabic word “ ghurba ,” a kind of melancholic longing for home. They try to explore how such a term would resonate in a time when we are “confronted with deep collective loss.” “What is special about our homelands that we fear losing? How might we mourn those aspects that will be lost? How might we bring aspects of home into the future, so that when we arrive there we do not have to feel like strangers?”

Perhaps this seems fatalistic. But feelings of instability will only grow more common as the climate crisis deepens, so maybe language that forces us to confront loss directly and thoughtfully might prevent the onset of total despair. Maybe it can lead us somewhere else altogether. Sam Solnick borrows the term “apocalypso” from the poet Evelyn Reilly. The “apocalypse” part is clear; the “calypso” part, not so much. Solnick is interested not in celebrating tumult but in describing that strange ecstasy one might feel among a crowd of strangers, resisting something together. “Apocalypso” offers a “fusion of joy and critique” that collects our diffuse energies rather than sending us off into our “individualist survival fantasies.”

Naturally, there is a risk that borrowing someone else’s language, terminology, or scraps of larger belief systems might feel like a fetishizing gesture. But as Schneider-Mayerson and Bellamy note early on, citing the environmental critic Ursula Heise, the current crisis is one that requires a new kind of global thinking, one that resists single languages or cultures. This is a globalization that seeks to destabilize the center, not absorb everything toward it.

There’s a wonky yet infectious hopefulness to “An Ecotopian Lexicon.” It highlights the cognitive gaps of English to think about the untranslatability of “ qi ,” the Chinese faith in a kind of all-governing, equilibrium-seeking, life-force energy. Reading these entries, each so careful and thoughtful about their small terrain in a larger debate, one can’t help but slow down. Perhaps not, as many contributors implore, to recalibrate to “plant time.” But to at least reassess the language we use, the sleek, clipped rhythms of modern life, or the disruptive clunk of “Anthropocene.” Think of the terms we use to capture the conveniences and efficiency of today, and how living a “wireless” life or embracing the minimalism of “cord-cutting” actually obscures, say, the vast amounts of electricity required to sustain the Internet. Finally, consider the difference between calling it “climate change” and a “crisis,” the entire history that lives between an organization called Greenpeace and a movement called Extinction Rebellion.

It’s easy to feel weighed down by the discourse, but maybe we’ve simply been using the wrong words. Perhaps, at a time of such stark extremes, there’s something meaningful about language that describes transition, a state of in-betweenness. “ Godhuli ,” Malcolm Sen explains, is a Bengali term. It means “twilight” but also “the fleeting moments that immediately follow sunset,” when the cows trample up dust and return from pasture. Sen treats “ godhuli ” as a kind of conceptual placeholder. It’s a mood, a metaphor, a prism through which to admire anew our relationship to “space and time, light and dust.” It’s a word that describes something ephemeral, that moment which invariably passes each day. “An Ecotopian Lexicon,” as Robinson notes, is a story. But it’s one with a dozen different endings, bound by a collective push to rethink what we resign to inevitability.

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By Elizabeth Kolbert

By Deborah Treisman

The climate crisis is real – but overusing terms like ‘crisis’ and ‘emergency’ comes with risk

Professor of Society & Environment, University of Technology Sydney

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Noel Castree does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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• Bahasa Indonesia

“Crisis” is an incredibly potent word, so it’s interesting to witness the way the phrase “climate crisis” has become part of the lingua franca .

Once associated only with a few “outspoken” scientists and activists, the phrase has now gone mainstream.

But what do people understand by the term “climate crisis”? And why does it matter?

The mainstreaming of crisis-talk

It’s not only activists or scientists sounding the alarm.

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres now routinely employs dramatic phrases like “digging our own graves” when discussing climate. Bill Gates advises us to avoid “climate disaster”.

This linguistic mainstreaming marks redrawn battle lines in the “climate wars”.

Denialism is in retreat. The climate change debate now is about what is to be done and by whom?

Scientists, using the full authority of their profession, have been key to changing the discourse. The lead authors of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports now pull no punches, talking openly about mass starvation, extinctions and disasters.

Read more: An official welcome to the Anthropocene epoch – but who gets to decide it's here?

These public figures clearly hope to jolt citizens, businesses and governments into radical climate action.

But for many ordinary folks, climate change can seem remote from everyday life. It’s not a “crisis” in the immediate way the pandemic has been.

Of course, many believe climate experts have understated the problem for too long.

And yet the new ubiquity of siren terms like climate “crisis”, “emergency”, “disaster”, “breakdown” and “calamity” does not guarantee any shared, let alone credible, understanding of their possible meaning.

This matters because such terms tend to polarise.

Few now doubt the reality of climate change. But how we describe its implications can easily repeat earlier stand-offs between “believers” and “sceptics”; “realists’ and "scare-mongerers”. The result is yet more political inertia and gridlock.

We will need to do better.

Four ideas for a new way forward

Terms like “climate crisis” are here to stay. But scientists, teachers and politicians need to be savvy. A keen awareness of what other people may think when they hear us shout “crisis!” can lead to better communication.

Here are four ideas to keep in mind.

1. We must challenge dystopian and salvation narratives

A crisis is when things fall apart. We see news reports of crises daily – floods in Pakistan, economic collapse in Sri Lanka, famine in parts of Africa.

But “climate crisis” signifies something that feels beyond the range of ordinary experience, especially to the wealthy. People quickly reach for culturally available ideas to fill the vacuum.

One is the notion of an all-encompassing societal break down, where only a few survive. Cormac McCarthy’s bleak book The Road is one example.

Central to many apocalyptic narratives is the idea technology and a few brave people (usually men) can save the day in the nick of time, as in films like Interstellar .

The problem, of course, is these (often fanciful) depictions aren’t suitable ways to interpret what climate scientists have been warning people about. The world is far more complicated.

2. We must bring the climate crisis home and make it present now

Even if they’re willing to acknowledge it as a looming crisis, many think climate change impacts will be predominantly felt elsewhere or in the distant future.

The disappearance of Tuvalu as sea levels rise is an existential crisis for its citizens but may seem a remote, albeit tragic, problem to people in Chicago, Oslo or Cape Town.

But the recent floods in eastern Australia and the heatwave in Europe allow a powerful point to be made: no place is immune from extreme weather as the planet heats up.

There won’t be a one-size-fits-all global climate crisis as per many Hollywood movies. Instead, people must understand global warming will trigger myriad local-to-regional scale crises.

Many will be on the doorstep, many will last for years or decades. Most will be made worse if we don’t act now. Getting people to understand this is crucial.

3. We must explain: a crisis in relation to what?

The climate wars showed us value disputes get transposed into arguments about scientific evidence and its interpretation.

A crisis occurs when events are judged in light of certain values, such as people’s right to adequate food, healthcare and shelter.

Pronouncements of crisis need to explain the values that underpin judgements about unacceptable risk, harm and loss.

Historians, philosophers, legal scholars and others help us to think clearly about our values and what exactly we mean when we say “crisis”.

4. We must appreciate other crises and challenges matter more to many people

Some are tempted to occupy the moral high ground and imply the climate crisis is so grand as to eclipse all others. This is understandable but imprudent.

It’s important to respect other perspectives and negotiate a way forward. Consider, for example, the way author Bjørn Lomborg has questioned the climate emergency by arguing it’s not the main threat.

Lomborg was widely pilloried. But his arguments resonated with many. We may disagree with him, but his views are not irrational.

We must seek to understand how and why this kind of argument makes sense to so many people.

Words matter. It’s vital terms like “crisis” and “calamity” don’t become rhetorical devices devoid of real content as we argue about what climate action to take.

Read more: Mass starvation, extinctions, disasters: the new IPCC report’s grim predictions, and why adaptation efforts are falling behind

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New book makes a case for climate optimism

Asu's center for science and the imagination launches book of science fiction, essays from international group of writers.

One of a series of images created for “The Climate Action Almanac” by João Queiroz, a digital artist based in Brazil who describes his work as Amazofuturist and solarpunk. This image depicts “agroforestry,” showing a small plot of crops grown ensconced in the surrounding forest ecosystem, rather than destroying it. 

It’s a novel idea: recruit acclaimed authors, artists, academics and environmental advocates from around the world and ask them to write positive stories about climate change.

Titled “ The Climate Action Almanac ,” this new collection seeks to spark positive change by reimagining the future as dynamic, decarbonized and shaped by climate action that grows and spreads up and out from local realities and grassroots efforts.

“The stories and essays in this volume remind us that the effects of the climate crisis are as diverse as the communities and ecosystems under threat, all over the world,” says  Joey Eschrich , managing editor for ASU’s  Center for Science and the Imagination  and assistant director for  Future Tense , and one of the book’s editors. “Our contributors dramatize how effective climate action must respond to environmental conditions on the ground, while also resonating with the values and unique needs of real people and actual places. These visions of the future expand our sense of what climate futures are possible, if we think of climate action as starting with complexities and opportunities at the local level.”

The book is presented by the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University, in partnership with the MIT Press, and supported by a grant from the ClimateWorks Foundation. It’s edited by Eschrich and Ed Finn, director of the Center for Science and the Imagination, with original illustrations by  João Queiroz .

The Center for Science and the Imagination is planning a book launch on Jan. 16, hosted with Future Tense, the ClimateWorks Foundation and ASU’s Convergence Lab.  Register  for the virtual launch, which starts at 1 p.m. Arizona time.

“For many, and especially for young people, climate change is a source of anxiety or even despair,” said  Finn , who is also an associate professor at ASU’s  School for the Future of Innovation in Society . “With this book, we’re hoping to invite communities around the world to envision their own positive climate futures. We need to practice hope and imagine futures we want, futures we can get excited about and work towards in the present.”

The almanac’s editors sought out narratives about what positive climate futures might look like for communities around the world. The book, which is free to read online, features perspectives on climate futures from authors based in a range of places, each considering their own unique opportunities and challenges for climate action: from China to Wales, Germany to Nigeria, Sri Lanka to Mexico, Malaysia, India, the United States and more.

Vandana Singh, who hails from India but is a professor at Framingham State University in Massachusetts, is one of 26 writers who contributed to the “The Climate Action Almanac.” She saw the book as a “defiant resolve that acknowledges the grim reality” of an existential threat to humanity.

“The powerful elite have already co-opted the climate discourse. What can so-called ordinary people do?” said Singh, who contributed the short story “Mina’s Dream,” about a rooftop vegetable garden in a middle-class neighborhood in Delhi that becomes the foundation for a wide-ranging social and environmental movement, as well as “Three-World Cantata,” a novelette about a mixed-reality experience built by a global collective of scientists and activists, meant to model possible pathways to different climate futures.

“My stories are a study of the contrast between two very different visions of the future — the elitist dream of power and control, and the far more democratic, messy, diverse kaleidoscope of dreams that people at the frontlines of climactic change might have.”

Nalini Chhetri , a clinical professor at ASU’s School for the Future of Innovation in Society and  School of Sustainability , also approached the book as an opportunity to share her insights about the climate crisis as a scholar and citizen.

“Writing fascinates me, but I think it is hard to write an interesting and compelling story. I thought that if I had a real experience to offer that it would make for an authentic narrative,” said Chhetri, whose essay blends scientific fact with personal experience to explore the past, present and possible futures in the foothills of the Himalayas, where she was raised.

“I have taught and done a lot of work on climate for many years. So Joey knew this, and when he approached me, I did not say no. I thought, ‘This is an opportunity – let me take it.’”

The result was “Landslides, Terror, and Resilience in the Himalayas,” which chronicles the reality of the extreme weather of Chhetri’s native country. She said the region suffers from monsoons, heavy rainfall, frequent landslides and flooding, as well as triple-digit heat during the summer.

“It can be terrifying because in Phoenix you can duck into an air-conditioned room. That is not an option when you have rain-saturated land and torrential rainfall, and hope your home will not be swept away,” Chhetri said. “Anthropogenic climate change and inequalities can harm us, certainly. But we — humanity — created them both, and we have the power and wherewithal to address them and to bring us back from the brink.”

Benjamin Ong also saw his essay, “The Village Within,” as an opportunity to reflect creatively and critically on the modernization of Malaysia, where he grew up.

“My essay dwells on this question: Is there a future in which we can bring some of the past with us instead of discarding it as backward, and can we be a little less heavy-handed in our design and management of urban landscapes,” said Ong, an ecologist, educator and nature writer currently pursuing a PhD at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. “I think there’s a sense that climate action must come from stories because we’re working towards a future that is ‘not yet.’”

Ong admits that he sees facts and figures about climate change as “anxiety-inducing,” but said a positive story by experts as something that could turn things around.

“Futures — good, bad and everything in between — come from the stories we tell ourselves and share with each other every day,” Ong said. “Who knows where a positive story might lead?”

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A sunnier outlook

How bad is the climate crisis? No doubt, it’s grim. But there are reasons for cautious optimism. EU climate bank experts explain.

• 7 February 2022

By Edward Calthrop and Chris Hurst 1

The 2020s are often described as the ‘’critical’’ decade. This is a shorthand to remind us that if we are to avoid the worst effects of global warming, global emissions must fall rapidly in the next ten years. In fact, they must be cut by half if we are to limit warming to 1.5 degrees by the end of the century.

This simple metric provides a useful way to think about 2021, the first year of this critical decade. Amongst all the noise around climate policy and finance throughout the year, what real signals have emerged? Should we start 2022 upbeat because the world has shifted focus to a 1.5˚C pathway? Or should we follow Greta Thunberg and dismiss many of the headlines as ‘’blah blah blah’’ from the global north?

It is easy to be skeptical. Global emissions in 2021 rebounded to pre-pandemic levels, the pricing of fossil fuels remains stubbornly inefficient, and many of the most recent net-zero pledges are light on detail, to put it generously. This is worrying. But it is equally important to recognize the progress being made. This article highlights three elements from 2021 that provide grounds for cautious optimism about the quick reduction of global emissions. In doing so, it highlights some of the key themes for climate finance likely to dominate the next year or two.

Tragic impact 

Any assessment of 2021 can only start by acknowledging the tragic impact of extreme weather events last year. The list of events in 2021 is lengthy 2 . In Europe, extreme rainfall hit parts of Western Europe in mid-July, with some regions experiencing more than 90 mm of rainfall in a single day – around one tenth of the annual average. The resulting floods killed at least 240 people, mostly in Germany and Belgium. This was followed swiftly by record-high temperatures. Sicily reached a new record of 48.8 degrees in early August and devastating fires swept across Greece and Turkey.

Extreme weather events were not limited to Europe. To give one example, in July, torrential rains in the Chinese province of Henan caused massive floods and the death of 302 people. In Zhengzhou, the capital of the province, approximately 620 mm of rain fell in three days – equal roughly to the annual average for the region. In one tragic event, rapidly rising water trapped evening rush hour metro passengers. Emergency services scrambled to cut off the roof of the train in time. 500 people were successfully evacuated. 12 people did not make it.      

The link between global warming and extreme weather events has been understood for many years. In 2021, in the first part of its sixth assessment report , the IPCC systematically reviews the latest evidence – and has become bolder in its language around the causal connection. At a regional level in particular, the risk of extreme weather events is increasingly well understood and quantifiable. Events in 2021 are consistent with the scientists have been saying for decades. The need to cut global emissions over the next decade is abundantly clear.

1. Emissions on the rise; prices still sending the wrong signal

With this in mind, the first question is therefore what happened to global emissions during 2021? The answer is depressingly predictable. Global emissions have rebounded to near pre-pandemic levels. As shown in Figure 1, emissions for 2021 are forecast 3 at 36.4 GtCO 2 . That is, just over 7% of the available 1.5˚C carbon budget 4 .  Put differently, at this rate, we will exceed our global budget within 13 years. We are not yet “bending the emissions curve” – indeed it is not even clear from the Figure that we have yet broken the historic trend of inexorable year-on-year  increases in global emissions , except for a periodic economic crisis.

Figure 1. CO2 emissions continue to rise in 2021

This increase is perhaps not surprising. Much inertia remains in the global energy system. Tellingly, global fossil fuels remain underpriced – with governments providing either explicit subsidies to producers, or failing to correct for external costs associated with consumption/combustion. As shown in Figure 2, based on an assessment by the IMF , nearly 90% of the world’s consumption of coal is priced at less than 20% of the full social cost, which  includes the costs of global warming, local air pollution and other externalities. Coal is the most extreme, but underpricing is also a pervasive feature in global consumption of natural gas and oil (as road transport fuels).  This holds even in the context of the large current increase in the producer price for natural gas. Climate policy clearly requires more than pricing reform alone. But it is equally very hard to see how consumer and producer behavior will change radically this decade without more efficient price signals.

Figure 2. Actual versus efficient fossil fuel pricing globally

The critical decade requires global economic growth to be fully decoupled from emissions. This has not happened yet – and may still take several years. In this sense, Greta Thunberg has a point. Not all hope is lost, however. Several trends that emerged in 2021 are grounds for cautious optimism about structural change.

2. Reasons for cautious optimism

Three elements stand out from the last year. Firstly, the sheer scope of net-zero pledges across the world. Secondly, the move of sustainable finance into the very centre stage of capital markets. And, finally, the growing appreciation of adaptation at the heart of the international climate finance discussion. These elements will dominate climate finance and policy over the coming years.

Theme 1: Net zero pledges cover (most of) the globe – EU shows the way to be credible

Many countries adopted net-zero pledges in the course of 2021. To be precise, 140 countries have now announced or are considering net zero targets, covering 90% of global emissions 5 . To those of us who remember the failure of international negotiations at COP21 in 2015, this is truly extraordinary. At that time, most projections were for warming at around 3.7˚C by 2100. With the 2030 NDCs in place, we are now on course for 2.4˚C, and with a shot at 1.8˚C under an optimistic scenario (see Glasgow’s 2030 credibility gap ). This is not enough, but COP26 should be seen as a successful round in this larger process, ratcheting up pressure by a notch on global leaders.

Of course, questions can be asked about the credibility of such targets. The European Union has shown the way in this regard. On 29 July 2021, the European Climate Law came into force. It sets a legally binding target of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. It sets out the necessary steps to deliver the target, notably with a new target for 2030 to reduce emissions by at least 55% compared to 1990 levels and a series of proposals to revise all relevant policy instruments to deliver this target. It also lays out a process for setting a 2040 target.

The law provides a general framework. Much EU political capital will be spent in the coming years to agree the detail. This is not surprising given what is at stake, and the potentially important impacts on different parts of society. But the destination is clear. This sends a strong message to markets, as demonstrated vividly in 2021 through the sharp rise in the price 6  of emitting a tonne of carbon dioxide within the EU Emissions Trading Scheme to over €80 per tonne. Prices will inevitably fluctuate in the short term, but the expectation of high and rising carbon prices (compared to pre-2020 levels) is now firmly embedded in market expectations.

This price expectation begins to change the economics 7  of several technologies likely required to meet net-zero targets, such as carbon capture, utilisation and storage 8 , or the production of hydrogen 9  through electrolysis. Conversely, all companies currently emitting significant quantities of greenhouse gases within the Emissions Trading Scheme bubble need to articulate a growth strategy to investors in a world with a sustained, high carbon price. Leading European companies are doing precisely this – with detailed and credible decarbonisation plans. As many chief financial officers now readily admit, disclosure around corporate sustainability is increasingly central to minimizing the corporate cost of capital.

This is now also the case in terms of accessing European Investment Bank funding. In 2021, the EU bank put forward a comprehensive counterparty framework , notably for corporates engaged in high-emitting activities, or at significant risk from current or future climate change. The framework sets out the minimum requirements the Group expects from corporate alignment plans, including activities that are difficult to reconcile with the goals of the Paris agreement.

In short, for governments that are serious about building credibility, the EU climate law provides a template. The UK and Japan have taken a similar approach. Some may take a different approach – but the very act of having committed to a target will invariably be used to hold future leaders to account by citizens, consumers and voters alike. If there is one country that could do more – simply by virtue of its historic responsibility for emissions – it is the US. It continues to send a mixture of messages. If you are in doubt, watch the sobering testimony given by Carl Sagan to the US Congress in 1985. Then fast forward 36 years to COP26 to see the US unable to join with 23 other countries  to commit to phase out coal power.

Theme 2: sustainable finance finally moves to centre stage

In 2021, the EU adopted the EU Taxonomy. The idea is simple and powerful. Deepen the internal EU capital market with clear criteria to label activities as sustainable. In doing so, root out greenwashing. This is achieved through a conceptually simple framework: develop technical criteria to establish that an activity makes a substantial contribution to one environmental objective (e.g. climate mitigation), whilst doing no significant harm to any other environmental objective (climate change adaptation, protection of water resources, circular economy, pollution prevention, protection of biodiversity).

Agreeing on the concept is one thing. Agreeing on actual criteria is, of course, something else. The EU successfully achieved this in late 2021 through the adoption of the first Climate Delegated Act . In doing so, it has certainty caught the attention of the market – as witnessed through the 46,589 responses to the Commission’s consultation exercise . It is also likely to have a direct impact upon project development. In a world with tight financing margins, and against the backdrop of inflationary pressure, developers will explore all channels to reduce their cost of capital. Having a project displaying the EU Taxonomy badge will undoubtedly help. Details will matter, so property developers may well start to pay more attention to performing air tightness tests; or windfarm developers will look more closely at the recycling of key components or resilience to future climate change. Banks and financial advisors are already asking questions. Auditors and the consultancy industry are warming up. This particular train most definitely left the station in 2021.

Having robust definitions for green finance is one thing. But it doesn’t help very much if financiers continue to support other types of investment that is difficult to reconcile with the temperature goals of the Paris Agreement. This concept of alignment is increasingly being put into practice, perhaps best demonstrated at COP26 by the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero , an initiative from signatories overseeing $130 trillion to set clear targets and timelines for green investments. This includes 98 banks across 40 countries with 43% of global banking assets, or $66 trillion. This scale matters 10 : The International Energy Agency estimates global annual investment to meet net zero at around $5 trillion.

The rise of sustainable finance is to be welcomed. But we should not get too carried away yet – much work remains. In November, the European Central Bank published a supervisory review of banks’ approaches to managing climate and environmental risks. The result? Based on a self-assessment conducted by 112 significant institutions, not one is close to aligning fully their practices with the supervisory expectations.

Figure 3: The state of Climate and Environment risk management in the banking sector

The good news is that virtually all institutions that performed a thorough assessment expect climate risks to have a material impact on their risk profile in the coming three to five years. In other words, the problem is universally recognized. The ECB concludes that, while steps are being taken to adapt policies and procedures, few institutions have yet put into place risk practices with a discernible impact on their strategy and risk profile. Figure 3 gives an impression of the challenge ahead. It notes that “most institutions have a blind spot for physical climate risk and other environmental risk drivers, such as biodiversity loss and pollution.” All in all, whilst welcoming the enormous progress, our feet should remain firmly on the ground.

Theme 3: recognition of adaptation at the heart of international climate finance

In Glasgow, developed countries agreed to a goal of doubling the amount of adaptation finance provided to developing countries by 2025 – expected to amount to around $40 billion per year. This is the first time an adaptation-specific financing goal has been agreed. It sits within the wider context of the Glasgow Climate Pact that charts a course for increased climate finance – for adaptation, mitigation, sustainable development.  

This is good news. Failure by the developed world to deliver on the commitment to fund $100 billion per year by 2020 was understandably perceived by the developing world as a breach of trust. The Climate Finance Delivery Plan and the resulting Pact helps put the show back on the road. In addition, the Pact puts a clearer focus on adaptation and thus addresses a long-running point of contention for many developing countries. Developing countries bear almost zero historic responsibility for climate change. Yet, they need to integrate resilience to current and future climate change into their core development strategies.

Adaptation investment is central to a stronger, cleaner, more resilient and more inclusive growth model. Blessed with high solar radiation and – in parts – strong wind speeds, together with hydro and geothermal, significant parts of the African continent have a comparative advantage in producing baseload renewable energy. In 2021, Namibia advanced on its ambitious plan to produce hydrogen from baseload green power and then export this to Europe as green ammonia.  Whilst many challenges remain,  the agreements  signed last year with Germany, Belgium and the Port of Rotterdam are testimony to the seriousness in the market.   

This type of green development is not possible without investment in basic resilience to future climate change. The agriculture sector – amounting to 60% of African GDP and 80% of Africa’s food supply – needs to be able to withstand more prolonged periods of drought. Long-term urban and regional planning needs to grapple with rising sea levels, an increase in water stress, higher temperatures. Infrastructure development requires well-judged design standards – based on forward-looking climate data and complemented by robust maintenance schemes during operation. This is a relatively new field, and yet it needs to be introduced in a context of limited public sector capacity and financial resources.   

Public banks and development agencies have an important role to play in promoting adaptation investment. In its first ever dedicated Climate Adaptation Plan , the EIB has set out an ambition to work more closely with the Global Center on Adaptation and the African Development Bank in the context of the Africa Adaptation Acceleration Program . This initiative, approved by the African Union and launched at the 2021 Climate Adaptation Summit, focuses on improving food security through the roll out of digital technology to farmers. It helps to improve the resilience of existing infrastructure through targeted adaptation investment and targets the development of appropriate financing models. 

Adapting to future climate change gives rise to challenging public policy issues, particularly where the opportunity cost of public funds is high. Strong technical analysis is needed to identify and prioritise cost-efficient investments in an environment characterised by significant long-term uncertainty. Consider making a decision on an adaptation investment in a local hospital. Investment A costs €100 and provides a benefit of €2000, if temperatures remain at 1.5 degrees, but is rendered ineffective if temperatures exceed 2 degrees. By contrast, investment B costs €300 and provides a benefit of €2000 at all temperatures up to and even beyond 2 degrees. Which one do you choose? A sure return of €1700 or a higher return of €1900 if temperatures remain below 1.5 degrees?  The willingness to pay (by the international community) to mitigate risk to some of the most vulnerable parts of the world will be tested these next years.

2021 saw a stronger recognition of the importance of adaptation finance in the context of developing countries. The challenge for the development finance community – including multilateral development banks – is to help use this fixed resource to maximum effect and in doing so spur a new model of development.

A final word

2021 was the first year of the critical decade. In emission terms, global emissions rebounded to pre-pandemic levels. Despite all the progress in scaling up renewable technologies, net zero pledges, policy reforms. The inertia, the sunk costs, the sheer legacy of the industrial revolution means we have not yet even bent the global curve – at best, we are just about flattening it.

Cause for despair? No. Looking back over 2021, there at several reasons for optimism. Cautious optimism perhaps – but optimism nonetheless. The adoption of net zero pledges by over 90% of the global economy – unthinkable even a few years ago – sends an unambiguous message about the direction of travel. You can argue about the speed at which demand for fossil fuels declines – but the end game is clear. 

As we learnt from the solar industry, things can happen quickly once markets reach inflection points.  Still not convinced? In 2019, 3.1% of Germany car sales were fully electric. In 2021, it was 25%. Climate policy is now industrial policy and the race is on.

Chris Hurst is Director-General of the Projects Directorate at the European Investment Bank. Edward Calthrop is head of the climate policy unit in that directorate.

• Chris Hurst is the Director General of the Projects Directorate at the European Investment Bank. Edward Calthrop is head of the climate policy unit within that directorate. The authors would like to thank all EIB Group staff who have been involved in stimulating discussions on climate policy over the last year, with particular appreciation to colleagues from the Environment, Climate and Social Office.
• Christian Aid has recently published a report highlighting the ten most financially devastating events for 2021, from hurricanes in the US, China and India to floods in Australia, Europe and Canada. In addition, it highlights five events with enormous human impacts such as drought in Africa and Latin America.
• Emissions in 2021 are likely to be higher than this forecast given the surge in use of coal for power generation in key global markets over the last two quarters, reflecting in part the very substantial increase in the price of natural gas. The surge reflects in particular emissions in the US and China – see Coal-Fired Power – Analysis - IEA .
• In their sixth assessment report, the IPCC estimates that we have a remaining global budget from the beginning of 2020 of 500 GtCO 2 to have a 50% chance to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees. (Table SPM.2)
• See Climate Action Tracker .
• In the beginning of 2018, ETS prices lingered below 10 euros per tonne. Due to a number of reforms, by early January 2021, prices had broken the 30 euros per tonne mark. However, during 2021, prices rose sharply, breaking the 80 euros per tonne mark by early December. Current prices reflect both long-term fundamentals – it is proposed to reduce the number of allowances by 4.2% per year - as well as shorter-term dynamics, such as recent switch in the power sector from gas to coal.
• ETS prices alone will not drive investment in highly capital-intensive new technologies. Dedicated policy support – such as the EU Innovation Fund – are required to help to incentivize corporates make final investment decisions in capital intensive technologies. The results of the first call for large-scale projects was published on 16 November 2021. Seven projects aim to bring breakthrough technologies to the market in energy-intensive industries (hydrogen, CCUS) as well as renewable energy production.
• For instance, recent analysis by the IEA suggests a carbon price of USD 40-120/t CO 2 is required to cover the costs of carbon capture in industrial processes with diluted emissions streams, such as cement production.  The price range is significantly lower – in the USD 15-25/t CO 2 range - for industrial processes with highly concentrated CO 2 streams (such as ethanol production or natural gas processing). The costs of transport and storage need to be added – though these are likely to vary enormously on a case-by-case basis.
• The production of hydrogen from renewables begins to be competitive with fossil fuels (i.e. steam methane reforming) at around 100 euros per tonne of carbon according to one recent analysis .
• Some caution is required here. It is unclear how much of the USD 130 trillion will be shifted to green activities. The headline double counts assets under management and owned. The timeline is unclear. Nevertheless, it provides evidence of increased focus on alignment by a significant part of the global financial sector.   

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• 10 April 2024

What happens when climate change and the mental-health crisis collide?

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Climate change can cause anxiety — researchers need to work out when that requires specialist help. Credit: Kyle Grillot/Bloomberg/Getty

Nearly one billion people worldwide — including one in seven teenagers — have a mental disorder. A growing body of research suggests that climate change is worsening people’s mental health and emotional well-being . Acute heatwaves, droughts, floods and fires fuelled by climate change cause trauma, mental illness and distress. So can chronic effects of global warming, such as water and food insecurity, community breakdown and conflict, as we report in a News feature .

The rise of eco-anxiety: scientists wake up to the mental-health toll of climate change

Surveys are revealing that experiencing the effects of climate change — and awareness of the threat — can lead to psychological responses such as a chronic fear of environmental doom, known as eco-anxiety. Eco-distress, climate anxiety and climate grief are other terms used. In a 2021 survey of 10,000 people aged 16–25 in 10 countries, nearly 60% of respondents were highly worried about climate change, and more than 45% said their feelings about climate change affected their daily lives, such as their ability to work or sleep 1 .

Make the problem visible

Such reactions to an existential threat are expected, and many people can handle these feelings on their own — but some need specialist help. Although there is anecdotal evidence that people with eco-anxiety are increasingly going to clinics, the psychological toll of climate change tends to be invisible — one reason why it has been neglected.

Researchers and governments need better ways to measure the wide-ranging extent of climate change’s effects on mental health. Data scientists, climate scientists and climate-attribution researchers, among others, should join mental-health researchers in furthering the underlying science. Mental-health professionals also need training and support to provide help. Mental illness is already underdiagnosed and stigmatized, and mental health care in most countries is shockingly insufficient. Climate change makes the case for addressing this crisis even more urgent.

Greener cities: a necessity or a luxury?

One key challenge for researchers is measuring the mental-health burden attributable to climate change and tracking it over time. Most research so far has been conducted in high-income countries, despite low- and middle-income countries experiencing the harshest effects of the warming planet. The day-to-day experiences of people in marginalized groups and Indigenous communities must also be captured.

Much research on climate and mental health has focused on one end of the spectrum of mental health — such as clinical diagnoses, emergencies or suicides 2 . But when around half the global population lives in nations with one psychiatrist per 200,000 people, it is no surprise that many conditions are undiagnosed and undocumented. Better monitoring and sharing of clinical mental-health data are needed. Researchers must develop and track standardized ways to measure milder or more fleeting forms of eco-anxiety and distress that fall outside standard diagnoses, and work out when interventions are needed.

A call to action

Some steps are already being taken. Researchers are, for instance, trying to develop global mental-health indicators that can be linked to weather and climate data, as part of the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change , a collaboration of specialists from more than 50 academic institutions and United Nations agencies. The group welcomes collaborators to further this work, says Kelton Minor, a research scientist at Columbia University’s Data Science Institute in New York City who is leading the collaboration’s effort on climate and mental health.

Making cities mental health friendly for adolescents and young adults

A top priority must be developing and evaluating ways to effectively reduce climate change’s mental-health burden while strengthening the resilience of communities that are particularly at risk. Existing tools and treatments — such as cognitive behavioural therapy, which helps people to challenge unhelpful thoughts and behaviours — will be part of the solution. Some studies suggest that, for individuals, taking action to combat climate change could also help to manage their eco-anxiety 3 : a double win.

The problem amounts to a call to action on all fronts. The constant drip of research adding to evidence of a climate crisis — as well as leaders’ inaction — is itself probably a source of eco-anxiety and frustration. More than 55% of young people in the 2021 survey said that climate change made them feel powerless, and 58% that their government had betrayed them and future generations 1 .

Those who experience debilitating effects on their mental health caused by climate change need help from specialists. The many others who are scared or angry, but otherwise not unwell, need to know that these feelings are normal — and if they can harness their unease to spur action, they could help themselves, others and the world.

At the same time, it must also be recognized that world leaders’ inaction is a cause of distress — and action by governments is what is needed to soothe it.

Nature 628 , 235 (2024)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-00993-x

Hickman, C. & Marks, E. Lancet Planet. Health 5 , e863–e873 (2021).

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Nori-Sarma, A. et al. JAMA Psychiatry 79 , 341–349 (2022).

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Lawrance, E., Thompson, R., Fontana, G. & Jennings, N. Briefing Paper No. 36 (Grantham Inst. on Climate Change and the Environment, 2021).

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The Feminist Self-Defense Practice That Could Give the Climate Crisis a Beatdown

It’s time to train ourselves to transform our fear and anger into action.

Illustration by Be Boggs .

by Janet O’Shea | September 22, 2021

The climate breakdown, which so many of us assumed lay far in the future, is upon us now.

Extreme weather conditions abound—drought, wildfires, super storms, floods. A recent and terrifying report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggests that more of the same is inevitable, and that the window to avoid the most horrific outcomes is rapidly closing. Only by reducing emissions by 45 percent by 2030 and reaching net-zero emissions by 2050 can we limit the temperature rise to 1.5 Celsius, the panel concluded. Even that best case scenario involves devastation—such as an Arctic region that sees a month every year without sea ice—and damage that is irreversible. Still, world leaders ignore pleas for action.

In this situation it makes sense to be scared—and to take a cue from empowerment self-defense (ESD), a feminist self-defense practice that pays close attention to the relationships among fear, anger, and action. By harnessing the power of fear, ESD shows a path forward for climate activism, too.

It’s worth thinking about the benefits of fear . In the home, in public spaces, and on a global scale, fear is an emotional and cognitive response that expresses itself through physical states: hair standing on end, a tightness in the chest, an accelerated heart rate, a queasy feeling. These signals appear as the brain picks up on sensory cues that the conscious mind might miss. Together, they form what we call our intuition, and they fuel self-protection and survival. Fear helps us figure out which threats to respond to and how quickly, and what obstacles are mere annoyances that we can safely ignore.

And yet, modern society teaches us to second guess our fears, to allow our minds to slip into denial in the face of potential danger. So it’s no wonder that some politicians, journalists, and scientists urge restraint in how we talk about the climate crisis. Scientific reticence has, until recently, encouraged climate researchers to speak in the bland language of parts per million, and of change rather than breakdown, allowing scientific skepticism to blur into climate denial . Journalists have adopted neutral-sounding terms for ecological catastrophe such as “global warming” rather than “global heating,” and “climate change” rather than “climate crisis.” Even some climate activists suggest that fear can only motivate people in destructive ways .

In fact, a healthy dose of fear might motivate us to work harder—and empowerment self-defense shows how and why. For instance, ESD teaches us to confront denial, a common response to interpersonal violence (and to environmental breakdown). When a person encounters a stranger’s violence—a grab, a slap, a shove to the ground—the defender often spends precious response time thinking “this can’t be happening.” Many of us, especially those of us raised as girls, are taught that our safety is someone else’s responsibility and that a bystander or an expert will intervene and save us.

Empowerment self-defense confronts this kind of withdrawal directly, replacing the denialist statement “this isn’t happening” with a question: “What’s going on?” ESD students practice actively enlisting the support of bystanders, through specific instructions or requests. These strategies replace a dependence on others with the ability to actively engage them, acknowledging fear and confronting it head-on.

An insidious form of climate denial contends that someone else—politicians, scientists, or entrepreneurs—will solve the problem for us, or that individual, incremental change alone—energy-efficient lightbulbs, carpooling, recycling—will avert disaster. By using ESD methods, we can train ourselves to respond more actively to the environmental crisis, replacing “I can’t believe this is happening” with “This is happening, and it’s occurring more quickly than expected. What can we do about it? And how can I mobilize others to tackle this problem?”

ESD provides a roadmap for that mobilization. When women, the feminine-identified, and non-binary people train in self-defense, they fight social norms that tell them to be polite and accommodating at all costs, and to doubt their physical strength and cognitive skill. ESD normalizes the resistance of women and other marginalized groups to violence and makes the unimaginable—a society that celebrates their autonomy—achievable. Because it brings together threat appraisal, social critique, and the expansion of our options, empowerment self-defense demonstrates that individual, self-protective action can support systemic change. We can replace a justification—“I’m just one person; what can I do?”—with a provocation: “What can I do?”

In climate action, too, our personal choices can be springboards for larger interventions. We can ride the bus and we can lobby city leaders to make public transit more efficient, welcoming, and comfortable. We can choose a plant-based meal and convince our workplace eatery to shift its menu toward a plant-forward approach. We can forego one airplane ride and encourage our employers to offer extra vacation days to employees who chose ground over air travel. Personal choices show us what is possible. They also remind us where constructive action remains difficult, thus illustrating where we need structural change.

In a situation of harassment, aggression, or even outright assault, ESD acknowledges, many people are so unwilling to make a fuss that they quietly convince themselves that a situation can’t be urgent if others are allowing it. The psychologist and climate activist Margaret Klein Salamon makes a similar point about environmental collapse: People look to one another for cues as to how to behave. If everyone around us just shrugs and moves on, we assume that we are alone in our assessment of the situation, a phenomenon known as pluralistic ignorance.

Salamon offers a solution to pluralistic ignorance, one that is familiar within empowerment self-defense: Get loud. This can mean joining a climate march or participating in a climate strike—or talking to friends, families, and elected officials about the life and death nature of this crisis. When we make noise, literally and metaphorically, we also give others permission to put forward their demands for a safer, cleaner, more just world.

Fighting, in ESD training, refers to literal, combative action. But fighting also includes complete commitment. It entails using all the resources we have at hand: If one thing doesn’t work, try another, and don’t give up. Research on ESD suggests that active resistance works . Activism is effective when the improbable becomes normalized; personal and small group actions make such alternatives conceivable. Smaller efforts can encourage us to question a broader economic and political system built on the burning of fossil fuels and on industrial, animal-based agriculture.

In order to protect life on our planet, we need to treat the climate crisis as the self-defense situation that it is. We do not fear climate catastrophe enough . When we cut through our denial, resist climate doom, call attention to the crisis, and recognize that we can make a difference, we can reshape our world, and push our leaders to enact better policies. Heeding our immediate responses to environmental breakdown—the surge of adrenaline and cortisol that can accompany images of disaster, the unease in the realization that our home or our neighborhood could be next, and the accompanying sense that we need to do something—can motivate us to save our environment. The key is reacting to these responses before we rationalize them away.

Effective self-defense harnesses fear and anger to generate an appropriate response. It focuses on the many things we can do, not on the one or two things we should do. Empowerment self-defense shows us that when we fight we expand our world rather than narrow it. And this is the most exciting lesson of all for the environmental movement: When we fight, we can win.

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Amitav Ghosh: where is the fiction about climate change?

The climate crisis casts a much smaller shadow on literary fiction than it does on the world. We are living through a crisis of culture – and of the imagination

I t is a simple fact that climate change has a much smaller presence in contemporary literary fiction than it does even in public discussion. As proof of this, we need only glance through the pages of literary journals and book reviews. When the subject of climate change occurs, it is almost always in relation to nonfiction; novels and short stories are very rarely to be glimpsed within this horizon. Indeed, it could even be said that fiction that deals with climate change is almost by definition not of the kind that is taken seriously: the mere mention of the subject is often enough to relegate a novel or a short story to the genre of science fiction . It is as though in the literary imagination climate change were somehow akin to extraterrestrials or interplanetary travel.

There is something confounding about this peculiar feedback loop. It is very difficult, surely, to imagine a conception of seriousness that is blind to potentially life-changing threats. And if the urgency of a subject were indeed a criterion of its seriousness, then, considering what climate change actually portends for the future of the Earth, it should surely follow that this would be the principal preoccupation of writers the world over – and this, I think, is very far from being the case. But why?

Why does climate change cast a much smaller shadow on literature than it does on the world? Is it perhaps too wild a stream to be navigated in the accustomed barques of narration? But the truth, as is now widely acknowledged, is that we have entered a time when the wild has become the norm: if certain literary forms are unable to negotiate these waters, then they will have failed – and their failures will have to be counted as an aspect of the broader imaginative and cultural failure that lies at the heart of the climate crisis.

Clearly, the problem does not arise out of a lack of information: there are surely very few writers today who are oblivious to the current disturbances in climate systems the world over. Yet, it is a striking fact that when novelists do choose to write about climate change it is almost always outside fiction. A case in point is the work of Arundhati Roy : not only is she one of the finest prose stylists of our time, she is passionate and deeply informed about climate change. Yet all her writings on these subjects are in various forms of nonfiction.

When I try to think of writers whose imaginative work has communicated a more specific sense of the accelerating changes in our environment, I find myself at a loss; of literary novelists writing in English only a handful of names come to mind: Margaret Atwood , Kurt Vonnegut Jr, Barbara Kingsolver, Doris Lessing, Cormac McCarthy, Ian McEwan and T Coraghessan Boyle. No doubt many other names could be added to this list, but even if it were to be expanded to 100, or more, it would remain true, I think, that the literary mainstream, even as it has become more engagé on many fronts, remains just as unaware of the crisis on our doorstep as the population at large.

I have been preoccupied with climate change for a long time, but it is true of my own work as well, that this subject figures only obliquely in my fiction. I have come to be convinced that this discrepancy is not the result of personal predilections: it arises out of the peculiar forms of resistance that climate change presents to what is now regarded as serious fiction.

In his seminal essay “The Climate of History”, Dipesh Chakrabarty observes that historians will have to revise many of their fundamental assumptions and procedures in this era of the Anthropocene, in which “humans have become geological agents, changing the most basic physical processes of the Earth”. I would go further and add that the Anthropocene presents a challenge not only to the arts and humanities, but also to our common sense understandings and beyond that to contemporary culture in general.

There can be no doubt, of course, that this challenge arises in part from the complexities of the technical language that serves as our primary view of climate change. But neither can there be any doubt that it derives also from the practices and assumptions that guide the arts and humanities. To identify how this happens is, I think, a task of the utmost urgency: it may well be the key to understanding why today’s culture finds it so hard to deal with climate change. Indeed, this is perhaps the most important question ever to confront culture in the broadest sense – for let us make no mistake: the climate crisis is also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination.

Culture generates desires – for vehicles and appliances, for certain kinds of gardens and dwellings – that are among the principal drivers of the carbon economy. A speedy convertible excites us neither because of any love for metal and chrome, nor because of an abstract understanding of its engineering. It excites us because it evokes an image of a road arrowing through a pristine landscape; we think of freedom and the wind in our hair; we envision James Dean and Peter Fonda racing toward the horizon; we think also of Jack Kerouac and Vladimir Nabokov . When we see an advertisement that links a picture of a tropical island to the word paradise, the longings that are kindled in us have a chain of transmission that stretches back to Daniel Defoe and Jean-Jacques Rousseau: the flight that will transport us to the island is merely an ember in that fire. When we see a green lawn that has been watered with desalinated water, in Abu Dhabi or southern California or some other environment where people had once been content to spend their water thriftily in nurturing a single vine or shrub, we are looking at an expression of a yearning that may have been sparked by the novels of Jane Austen . The artefacts and commodities that are conjured up by these desires are, in a sense, at once expressions and concealments of the cultural matrix that brought them into being.

This culture is, of course, intimately linked with the wider histories of imperialism and capitalism that have shaped the world. But to know this is still to know very little about the specific ways in which the matrix interacts with different modes of cultural activity: poetry, art, architecture, theatre, prose fiction and so on. Throughout history these branches of culture have responded to war, ecological calamity and crises of many sorts: why, then, should climate change prove so peculiarly resistant to their practices?

From this perspective, the questions that confront writers and artists today are not just those of the politics of the carbon economy; many of them have to do also with our own practices and the ways in which they make us complicit in the concealments of the broader culture. For instance, if contemporary trends in architecture, even in this period of accelerating carbon emissions, favour shiny, glass-and-metal-plated towers, do we not have to ask, what are the patterns of desire that are fed by these gestures? If I, as a novelist, choose to use brand names as elements in the depiction of character, do I not need to ask myself about the degree to which this makes me complicit in the manipulations of the marketplace?

In the same spirit, I think it also needs to be asked, what is it about climate change that the mention of it should lead to banishment from the preserves of serious fiction? And what does this tell us about culture writ large and its patterns of evasion?

In a substantially altered world, when sea-level rise has swallowed the Sundarbans and made cities such as Kolkata, New York and Bangkok uninhabitable, when readers and museum-goers turn to the art and literature of our time, will they not look, first and most urgently, for traces and portents of the altered world of their inheritance? And when they fail to find them, what can they do other than to conclude that ours was a time when most forms of art and literature were drawn into the modes of concealment that prevented people from recognising the realities of their plight? Quite possibly, then, this era, which so congratulates itself on its self-awareness, will come to be known as the time of the Great Derangement.

On the afternoon of March 17, 1978, when I was 21, I was stuck in the middle of the first tornado to hit Delhi in recorded meteorological history. As is often the case with people who are waylaid by unpredictable events, for years afterwards my mind kept returning to my encounter with the tornado. Why had I walked down a road that I almost never took, just before it was struck by a phenomenon that was without historical precedent? To think of it in terms of chance and coincidence seemed only to impoverish the experience: it was like trying to understand a poem by counting the words. I found myself reaching instead for the opposite end of the spectrum of meaning –for the extraordinary, the inexplicable, the confounding. Yet these too did not do justice to my memory of the event.

Novelists inevitably mine their own experience when they write. No less than any other writer have I dug into my own past while writing fiction. It is certainly true that storms, floods and unusual weather events do recur in my books, and this may well be a legacy of the tornado. Yet oddly enough, no tornado has ever figured in my novels. Nor is this due to any lack of effort on my part. Indeed, I have returned to the experience often over the years, hoping to put it to use in a novel, only to meet with failure at every attempt.

On the face of it there is no reason why such an event should be difficult to translate into fiction; after all, many novels are filled with strange happenings. Why then did I fail, despite my best efforts, to send a character down a road that is imminently to be struck by a tornado?

In reflecting on this, I find myself asking, what would I make of such a scene were I to come across it in a novel written by someone else? I suspect that my response would be one of incredulity; I would be inclined to think that the scene was a contrivance of last resort. Surely only a writer whose imaginative resources were utterly depleted would fall back on a situation of such extreme improbability?

Before the birth of the modern novel, wherever stories were told, fiction delighted in the unheard-of and the unlikely. Narratives such as those of The Arabian Nights , Journey to the West and The Decameron proceed by leaping blithely from one exceptional event to another. Novels too proceed in this fashion, but what is distinctive about the form is precisely the concealment of those exceptional moments that serve as the motor of narrative. This is achieved through the insertion of what Franco Moretti, the literary theorist, calls “fillers”. According to Moretti, “fillers function very much like the good manners so important in Austen: they are both mechanisms designed to keep the ‘narrativity’ of life under control – to give a regularity, a ‘style’ to existence”. It is through this mechanism that worlds are conjured up, through everyday details, which function “as the opposite of narrative”.

It is thus that the novel takes its modern form, through “the relocation of the unheard-of toward the background ... while the everyday moves into the foreground”. As Moretti puts it, “fillers are an attempt at rationalising the novelistic universe: turning it into a world of few surprises, fewer adventures, and no miracles at all”.

This regime of thought imposed itself not only on the arts but also on the sciences. That is why Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle , Stephen Jay Gould’s brilliant study of the geological theories of gradualism and catastrophism is, in essence, a study of narrative. In Gould’s telling of the story, the catastrophist recounting of the Earth’s history is exemplified by Thomas Burnet’s Sacred Theory of the Earth (1690) in which the narrative turns on events of “unrepeatable uniqueness”. As opposed to this, the gradualist approach, championed by James Hutton (1726‑97) and Charles Lyell (1797–1875), privileges slow processes that unfold over time at even, predictable rates. The central credo in this doctrine was: “Nothing could change otherwise than the way things were seen to change in the present.” Or, to put it simply: “Nature does not make leaps.”

The trouble, however, is that Nature does certainly jump, if not leap. The geological record bears witness to many fractures in time, some of which led to mass extinctions and the like: it was one such, in the form of the Chicxulub asteroid, that probably killed the dinosaurs. It is a fact that catastrophes waylay both the Earth and its individual inhabitants at unpredictable intervals and in the most improbable ways.

Distinctive moments are no less important to modern novels than they are to any other forms of narrative, whether geological or historical. It could not, of course, be otherwise: if novels were not built upon a scaffolding of exceptional moments, writers would be faced with the Borgesian task of reproducing the world in its entirety. But the modern novel, unlike geology, has never been forced to confront the centrality of the improbable: the concealment of its scaffolding of events continues to be essential to its functioning. It is this that makes a certain kind of narrative a recognisably modern novel.

Here, then, is the irony of the “realist” novel: the very gestures with which it conjures up reality are actually a concealment of the real. What this means in practice is that the calculus of probability that is deployed within the imaginary world of a novel is not the same as that which obtains outside it; this is why it is commonly said, “If this were in a novel, no one would believe it”. Within the pages of a novel an event that is only slightly improbable in real life – say, an unexpected encounter with a long-lost childhood friend – may seem wildly unlikely: the writer will have to work hard to make it appear persuasive.

If that is true of a small fluke of chance, consider how much harder a writer would have to work to set up a scene that is wildly improbable even in real life. For example, a scene in which a character is walking down a road at the precise moment when it is hit by an unheard-of weather phenomenon?

To introduce such happenings into a novel is in fact to court eviction from the mansion in which serious fiction has long been in residence; it is to risk banishment to the humbler dwellings that surround the manor house – those generic out-houses that were once known by names such as the gothic, the romance or the melodrama, and have now come to be called fantasy, horror and science fiction.

So far as I know, climate change was not a factor in the tornado I experienced. But the thing it has in common with the freakish weather events of today is its extreme improbability. And it appears that we are now in an era that will be defined precisely by events that appear, by our current standards of normality, highly improbable: flash floods, hundred-year storms, persistent droughts, spells of unprecedented heat, sudden landslides, raging torrents pouring down from breached glacial lakes, and, yes, freakish tornadoes.

This, then, is the first of the many ways in which the age of global warming defies both literary fiction and contemporary common sense: the weather events of this time have a very high degree of improbability. Indeed, it has even been proposed that this era should be named the “catastrophozoic” (others prefer such phrases as “the long emergency” and “the penumbral period”). It is certain in any case that these are not ordinary times: the events that mark them are not easily accommodated in the deliberately prosaic world of serious prose fiction.

Poetry, on the other hand, has long had an intimate relationship with climatic events: as Geoffrey Parker points out, John Milton began to compose Paradise Lost during a winter of extreme cold, and “unpredictable and unforgiving changes in the climate are central to his story. Milton’s fictional world, like the real one in which he lived, was ... a ‘universe of death’ at the mercy of extremes of heat and cold.” This is a universe very different from that of the contemporary literary novel.

I am, of course, painting with a very broad brush: the novel’s infancy is long past, and the form has changed in many ways over the last two centuries. Yet, to a quite remarkable degree, the literary novel has also remained true to the destiny that was charted for it at birth. Consider that the literary movements of the 20th century were almost uniformly disdainful of plot and narrative; that an ever greater emphasis was laid on style and “observation”, whether it be of everyday details, traits of character or nuances of emotion – which is why teachers of creative writing now exhort their students to “show, don’t tell”.

Yet fortunately, from time to time, there have also been movements that celebrated the unheard-of and the improbable: surrealism for instance, and most significantly, magical realism, which is replete with events that have no relation to the calculus of probability.

There is, however, an important difference between the weather events that we are now experiencing and those that occur in surrealist and magical realist novels: improbable though they might be, these events are neither surreal nor magical. To the contrary, these highly improbable occurrences are overwhelmingly, urgently, astoundingly real. The ethical difficulties that might arise in treating them as magical or metaphorical or allegorical are obvious.

But there is another reason why, from the writer’s point of view, it would serve no purpose to approach them in that way: because to treat them as magical or surreal would be to rob them of precisely the quality that makes them so urgently compelling – which is that they are actually happening on this Earth, at this time.

• Amitav Ghosh
• Climate crisis

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