36 ROLLING STONE
I
T’S 69 DEGREES FAHRENHEIT in Antarctica as I
write this — T-shirt weather in the coldest,
most remote place on Earth. Bush fires
are blazing in Australia — so far, 16 mil-
lion acres have been burned, and by one
count, a billion animals have been lost.
There is a marine heat wave in the Pacific
and devastating floods in Indonesia. You
probably know this. You might be freak-
ing out. If you are, it’s because you un-
derstand a central fact of 21st-century life: The
longer we wait to get off fossil fuels, the hotter
the world will get, and the faster climate chaos
will accelerate.
This is not about saving the planet. For one
thing, the planet itself is not at risk — in its 4.5-
billion-year history, the Earth has been through
much worse than anything we can throw at it. It’s
civilization as we know it today that’s in trouble.
Second, the whole notion of “saving” anything is
a flawed way to think about the crisis we are fac-
ing. Yes, it is more important than ever that we
eliminate fossil fuels and reduce suffering and
loss in a warming world. And, yes, the faster we
get off fossil fuels, the better chance we have to
make sure we don’t push the climate system past
irreversible tipping points, such as the collapse
of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which could raise
global sea levels by 10 feet.
But no matter how fast we act, we are not
going to “fix” the climate like a doctor fixes a
broken leg. “The Earth’s climate is not a bi-
nary system or a switch that you can toggle on
and off,” says Kate Marvel, a climate scientist at
NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Stud-
ies in New York. Even if we stopped burn-
ing fossil fuels tomorrow and stabilized
the Earth’s temperature where it is today,
we would still face several feet of sea-
level rise in the coming century, as well as col-
lapsing coral reefs and changing rainfall pat-
terns. “The notion that we can avoid climate
change is unequivocally false,” says Marvel.
“We’re at 1 degree of warming now, and we’re al-
ready seeing the impacts of climate change very
clearly with wildfires, flooding, and other ex-
treme weather events. But it’s also true that our
actions over the next decade very much matter.”
We have already crossed one of the most im-
portant thresholds of the climate crisis: We’ve
gone from “Is it happening?” to “What are we
going to do about it?” In this new world, there
are no solutions — only better and worse choices
about where we will live, how we will live, who
and what will survive, and who and what will be
lost. Above all, it’s a world that will be defined by
how hard we are willing to fight for our future.
“We might be living in a horror movie right
now, but we are the ones writing the script,” says
writer Mary Annaïse Heglar. “And we’re the ones
who will decide how this movie will end.”THE
ZERO
HOUR
BY JEFF GOODELL
There is no stopping climate change —
the seas and the temperatures will rise.
But how bad it gets is still up to usCLIMATE CRISIS