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to capture in models, and have a big impact on
the Earth’s temperature (high thin clouds trap
heat, while low thick clouds shade and cool the
Earth). Hausfather points out that the latest cli-
mate models, which use more-sophisticated
cloud-modeling techniques, are showing a high-
er climate sensitivity, with potential warming
of as much as 5 C if we dou-
ble the CO2 in the atmosphere.
These new climate-model runs
are still in progress and, thus,
inconclusive, but this is defi-
nitely not good news.
The other big uncertainty
about our climate future has to
do with tipping points. The lat-
est research is showing some
Earth systems may be more
resilient than most people
thought. The Gulf Stream sys-
tem, for example, “has been
slowing down in recent dec-
ades,” says Gavin Schmidt,
head of NASA’s Goddard Insti-
tute for Space Studies. “But I
don’t think anyone is worried
about it shutting down anytime
soon.” It’s the same with the
melting of the permafrost in the
Arctic: The more the perma-
frost warms, the more methane
it releases, the more it warms the atmosphere —
but none of the climate scientists I talked to be-
lieve there is a point when it runs away with it-
self. Similarly with the Amazon rainforest: As
warming combines with deforestation, parts of
it may turn into more of a savannah-like ecosys-
tem. “But it’s not like there is a sudden crash and
the entire Amazon disappears,” says Hausfather.
On the other hand, the more scientists learn
about what’s happening with the West Antarctic
Ice Sheet, the more unstable it looks. Earlier this
year, researchers in Antarctica found evidence of
warm water directly beneath the glacier, which
is not good news for the stability of the system.
Eric Rignot, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion
Laboratory and one of the top ice scientists in
the world, believes that the West Antarctic Ice
Sheet is beyond its tipping point and in the midst
of an irreversible collapse. As Rignot put it re-
cently, “The fuse has been blown.”WHEN YOU LOOK at images of the bush fires in Aus-
tralia or the cracking ice shelves in Antarctica,
it’s easy to think that it’s too late to do anything
about the climate crisis — that we are, for all in-
tents and purposes, fucked. And it’s true, it’s too
late for 182 people who died from exposure to ex-
treme heat in Phoenix in 2018, or for 1,900 peo-
ple in northern India who were swept away in ex-
treme floods in 2019, or the 4 million people who
die each year around the world from particulateair pollution caused by our dependence on fos-
sil fuels. And the way things are going, it’s prob-
ably too late for the glaciers on Mount Kiliman-
jaro, for large portions of the Great Bar rier Reef,
and for the city of Miami Beach as we know it.
But the lesson of this is not that we’re fucked,
but that we have to fight harder for what is left.Too Late-ism only plays into the
hands of Big Oil and Big Coal and
all the inactivists who want to drag
out the transition to clean energy as
long as possible. Too Late-ism also
misses the big important truth that,
buried deep in the politics and emo-
tion of the climate crisis, you can see the birth
of something new emerging. “The climate crisis
isn’t an ‘event’ or an ‘issue,’ ” says futurist Alex
Steffen, author of Snap Forward, an upcoming
book about climate strategy for the real world.
“It’s an era, and it’s just beginning.”
This new era might be arriving more quickly
than most people think. According to a new poll
from the Yale Program on Climate Change Com-
munication, nearly six in 10 Americans are now
“alarmed” or “concerned” about global warm-
ing. Political support for the Green New Deal
is rising as fast as the price of clean energy is
falling. Greta Thunberg and Rep. Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez have inspired a new generation
of climate activists who see the crisis as an op-
portunity to create a fairer, more equitable so-
ciety. Germany, the industrial powerhouse of
Europe, plans to shut down all coal plants by- In the U.S., the coal industry is in free-
fall. Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock, the fi-
nancial giant that manages about $7 trillion in
assets, acknowledged in a letter to sharehold-
ers that climate change is now “on the edge of a
fundamental reshaping of finance.” Jim Cramer,
CNBC’s notoriously cranky Wall Street guru, said
in January, “I’m done with fossil fuels.... We’re
in the death-knell phase.... The world has
turned on them. It’s actually kind of happening
very quickly.”
“I don’t have any doubt that we will take ac-
tion on climate,” says Stef-
fen. “But it won’t be the
old-fashioned version of so-
cial change. It won’t be an or-
derly transition. It won’t be
the climate version of the civil-
rights movement. It will be
more like the Industrial Revo-
lution — a huge social and cul-
tural and economic transition,
which will play out over dec-
ades, and with no clear leader-
ship and nobody in control.” In
Steffen’s view, climate doomers
are as blind as climate deniers.
“The apocalyptic is in its very
heart a refusal to see past the
end of an old worldview, into
the new possibilities of the ac-
tual world.”
I think Steffen is right. When-
ever I feel like we’re fucked, I
talk to landscape architects like
Susannah Drake, who recently
completed a preliminary rede-
sign of the National Mall Tidal
Basin in Washington, D.C., that
will help restore a more natu-
ral ecosystem and embrace the
rising waters of the Potomac
River. I talk to entrepreneurs
like Bill Gross, who has figured out a technol-
ogy that uses mirrors to concentrate sunlight
hot enough to manufacture concrete and steel.
I talk to kids on school climate strikes who are
determined to hold polluters and politicians ac-
countable for trashing their future. Writer Mary
Annaïse Heglar, who grew up in Alabama and
Mississippi, sees the climate fight as part of a
centuries-long battle for racial and social jus-
tice. “I don’t care how bad it gets,” she tweeted
recently. “I don’t care how many thresholds we
pass. Giving up is immoral.”
Like many people on the front lines of the
climate fight, Heglar bristles at lazy questions
about what gives her hope. “I think hope is re-
ally precious, and the most precious thing about
it is that you have to earn it,” she tells me. “So,
usually when people are asking me what gives
me hope, what they really mean is, ‘Give me
hope,’ and I can’t do that for you. No one can do
that for you. You have to go out and make your
own hope. And so that means I hope you get in-
volved. The type of hope I have is that I hope you
SCOTT OLSON/GETTY IMAGES get off your ass.”
Hamburg, Iowa:
Historic flooding,
due to climate
change, rocked
the Midwest last
spring.