I Want a Better Catastrophe: Navigating the Climate Crisis with Grief, Hope, and Gallows Humor

but not in a way that is consonant with an objective understanding of the situation. And by “objective” I don’t mean a cynical, realpolitik, business-as-usual understanding of the situation; I mean the cold scientific facts of even the most optimistic scenarios. So, if you’re hanging your hope on preventing catastrophe, you’re hanging your hope on

Whether these other apocalypses happen or not remains to be seen, but the climate apocalypse is already happening, and happening

Andrew: The subtitle of your blog is “Our days are numbered. Passionately pursue a life of excellence.”

The consequences of catastrophic climate change are daunting, almost too terrifying to contemplate, and denial can help us through it.

It’s confusing. It’s an absurdity. But hardly the only one: We fall in love. We know we are going to die. We do strange things like make art, and dream, and put each other in prison, and cut ourselves when we’re depressed.

If industry prevails and we stick with a business-as-usual scenario — and pretty much all data indicates this is what we are doing — we’ll blow through our carbon budget in less than seven years.9 Global temperature rise will continue on its trajectory of 3°C10 increase or worse by the end of the century, and, in environmentalist Bill McKibben’s wo

Meanwhile, the vast majority of people are still sitting on the sidelines.

We didn’t ask to be alive at this time in history. We didn’t ask to be responsible. But here we are, and we must find a way to live with what we know is coming. And, whether we find ourselves hopeful, hopeless, or something in between, we must find a way to act. In fact, maybe all our grieving has a secret purpose:

Consider the busy parent who’s just not paying attention.

As the foremost spokesperson for the view that abrupt climate change will result in near-term human extinction (NTHE), he was the Dark Prince of Climate.