‘We’re in a New Era’: How Climate Change Is Supercharging Disasters

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

In the 1990s, pyroCbs were a disturbing but exhilarating novelty wondered at, and discussed by, a small group of meteorologists. Now, they are not only a signature of major wildfires, they are actively growing in size and frequency—to the point that they are mimicking volcanoes, previously Earth’s most rapid and powerful climate-changing agents. Py

Its relentless trajectory: To bring it on, all we have to do is, um, nothing. Its overwhelming complexity: To fix it, not only do we have to do something, but, as Naomi Klein has said, we pretty much have to “change everything” about how our economy and society operates. Its asymmetries of power: Those of us most historically responsible for causin

I kept coming across a similar pattern: events, well-documented in the historic record, that showed how rising and falling precipitation levels contributed to the increase, decrease, and sometimes the complete removal of populations — and ultimately species — from the planet. This was some of the earliest work of its kind.

of succeeding, according to a recent study based on current emissions trends, are one in 20. If by some miracle we are able to limit warming to two degrees, we will only have to negotiate the extinction of the world’s tropical reefs, sea-level rise of several meters and the abandonment of the Persian Gulf. The climate scientist James Hansen has cal