Heat Is Not a Metaphor

[And yet billions of dollars are being allocated to this effort. What does it say that spinning a story about humans moving into a radioactive vacuum resonates more strongly with many people than our chances of reducing greenhouse gas emissions?

until the climate was actually killing them, people had a tendency to deny it could happen.

Climate catastrophe is coming. We know this. What we don’t know is how bad it will be. In the best case scenario, an unprecedented global Green New Deal rapidly transitions the world economy off of carbon, holding global temperature rise under 3°C.61 This causes large-scale polar ice melt, 12 inches of sea level rise by 2050,62 and major habitat di

get was a slow accretion of awareness that was unlikely to achieve critical mass until our most vital time windows had closed. Then along came Covid. No, it wasn’t a climate event per se, but it was a global cataclysm that we all experienced together, viscerally, in our bodies and in our daily lives. Many of us lost loved ones. Millions died. (Over

Staring down the barrel of human-driven climate change, an astronomical cost of living, and a poor economic outlook, most people recognize that they are far closer in life to desperate refugees than they are to the politicians, war profiteers, and rapacious capitalists who create them.

Any news I might bring has already been brought. Thousands of scientific papers. Millions of newspaper column inches. Anyone who cares to pay attention already knows that we’ve broken Nature, and the world we know will soon end. This park, for one, is done for. This city I love, home to almost nine million, and one of humankind’s most extraordinary