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Not if the Seas Rise, but When and How High

BOOKS OF THE TIMES

 

Not if the Seas Rise, but When and How High

By Jennifer Senior

Nov. 22, 2017

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/22/books/review-water-will-come-jeff-goodell.html

 

Once you’ve read an excellent book about climate change, which Jeff Goodell’s “The Water Will Come” most certainly is, you can never unremember the facts. Elected officials may be busy arguing about whether global warming is real. But most scientists are having other arguments entirely — about whether danger is imminent or a few decades off; about whether our prospects are dire or merely grim.

 

“Sea-level rise is one of the central facts of our time, as real as gravity,” Goodell writes. “It will reshape our world in ways most of us can only dimly imagine.”

 

Goodell has little trouble imagining it. He opens “The Water Will Come” with a fictional hurricane whipping through Miami in 2037. It sweeps the Art Deco buildings of South Beach off their foundations, disgorges millions of gallons of raw sewage into Biscayne Bay and eats the last of the city’s beaches. Thousands scramble for bottled water dropped by the National Guard. Zika and dengue fever start to bloom (so much moisture, so many mosquitoes). Out rush the retirees and glamour pusses; in rush the lawyers and slumlords. Within decades, the place is swallowed whole by the ocean. What was once a vibrant city is now a scuba-diving destination for intrepid historians and disaster tourists.

 

The whole scenario seems indecently feasible by the book’s end.

 

After this year’s calamitous flooding in Houston and the Caribbean, “The Water Will Come” is depressingly well-timed, though I’m guessing all good books about this subject will be from now on. Political time now lags behind geological time: If we don’t take dramatic steps to prepare for the rising seas, hundreds of millions could be displaced from their homes by the end of the century, and the infrastructure fringing the coast, valued in the trillions of dollars, could be lost.

 

 

Unfortunately, human beings are uniquely ill-suited to prepare for disasters they cannot sense or see. “We have evolved to defend ourselves from a guy with a knife or an animal with big teeth,” Goodell writes, “but we are not wired to make decisions about barely perceptible threats that gradually accelerate over time.”

 

So we stick our heads in the sand. Until the sand disappears, anyway.

 

To give you an idea of why many climate scientists are so nervous: Over the course of the earth’s history, seas have risen drastically whenever ice sheets suddenly collapsed. And that’s precisely what’s happening now. Greenland is melting at a furious rate — by 2040, Goodell writes, we’ll be able to windsurf at the North Pole — and so are the ice shelves of Antarctica.

 

Many of our climate reports, including the one that formed the basis of the 2015 Paris Agreement, hadn’t predicted this. Their authors assumed that the most the sea could rise by 2100 was three feet, two inches. Now many scientists believe that estimate is too low. Some say the sea could rise as much as six feet; others say even more than that.

 

“For anyone living in Miami Beach or South Brooklyn or Boston’s Back Bay or any other low-lying coastal neighborhood,” Goodell writes, “the difference between three feet of sea level rise by 2100 and six feet is the difference between a wet but livable city and a submerged city.”

 

Goodell has been writing about climate change for many years. (His previous books include “Big Coal” and “How to Cool the Planet.”) He’s the real deal, committed and making house calls. In “The Water Will Come,” partly built on stories he’s written for Rolling Stone, he visits cities in peril around the globe: New York; Lagos, Nigeria; Norfolk, Va.; Miami; Venice; Rotterdam. He speaks to a great many politicians, including Barack Obama, eventually asking some version of, “Given what you know, aren’t you scared out of your wits?” (Obama’s response: “Yeah.”) At an art event, Goodell buttonholes an influential developer in Miami, Jorge Pérez, and asks several variations of the same question. Pérez insists he’s unworried. “Besides,” he adds, “by that time, I’ll be dead, so what does it matter?”

 

The full exchange is worth reading. It plays out like something from a Carl Hiaasen novel. All that’s missing are the twin blondes in the hot tub.

 

Of all the American cities in this book, Miami seems least equipped to handle a rise in sea level, founded as it is on pleasure, real estate and the inalienable right to not pay state income taxes. (When a local geologist undertook a larger project to show just how much fecal matter was in Biscayne Bay, the mayor of Miami Beach went ballistic.) But every coastal city faces its own obstacles to adaptation, and the problems each one faces are different.

 

Naval Station Norfolk, the largest navy base in the world, may have as few as 20 good years left. Yet it’s located in a climate-denial hot spot in Virginia, and it depends on more than a few climate-deniers in Congress for funding. “Many people in the military end up talking about climate in much the way eighth graders talk about sex — with code words,” Goodell writes.

 

New York City may have more climate-change realists doing its bidding and spending its dollars. But the barrier the city plans to build to protect Wall Street — you’ve got to protect Wall Street, right? — could deflect water into poorer neighborhoods. (And let’s not even discuss the fate of the subways.)

 

It is, perhaps, the world’s poor who will suffer most. Goodell devotes a good deal of this book to contemplating their fate. Salty soil has already destroyed the rice crops of the Mekong Delta and Bangladesh. If the sea rises high enough, whole island nations could be washed away. The slum-dwellers of Lagos, Jakarta and other coastal cities in the developing world could be chased from their homes, many of which are already on stilts. The International Organization for Migration estimates there will be 200 million climate refugees by 2050.

 

Yet even countries with means can’t get their citizens to focus on this problem. “The average American right now,” Obama tells Goodell, “even if they’ve gotten past climate denial, is still much more concerned about gas prices, getting back and forth from work, than they are about the climate changing.”

 

Water simply isn’t on their minds. They’ve got more pressing concerns to keep at bay.

‘The Fuse Has Been Blown,’ and the Doomsday Glacier Is Coming for Us All

 

‘The Fuse Has Been Blown,’ and the Doomsday Glacier Is Coming for Us All

 

New data suggests a massive collapse of the ice shelf in as little as five years. “We are dealing with an event that no human has ever witnessed,” says one scientist. “We have no analog for this”

 

By JEFF GOODELL

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/doomsday-glacier-thwaites-antarctica-climate-crisis-1273841/

 

One thing that’s hard to grasp about the climate crisis is that big changes can happen fast. In 2019, I was aboard the Nathaniel B. Palmer, a 308-foot-long scientific research vessel, cruising in front of the Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica. One day, we were sailing in clear seas in front of the glacier. The next day, we were surrounded by icebergs the size of aircraft carriers.

 

As we later learned from satellite images, in a matter of 48 hours or so, a mélange of ice about 21 miles wide and 15 miles deep had cracked up and scattered into the sea.

 

It was a spooky moment. Thwaites Glacier is the size of Florida. It is the cork in the bottle of the entire West Antarctic ice sheet, which contains enough ice to raise sea levels by 10 feet. The mélange that disintegrated was not part of the glacier itself, but a mix of icebergs and sea ice that had cozied up next to it. Still, the idea that it could just fall apart overnight was mind-blowing.

 

The research vessel ‘Nathaniel B. Palmer’ was surrounded overnight by icebergs while exploring the Thwaites Glacier in 2019.

 Alex Mazur

 

As it turns out, the ice breakup I witnessed was not a freak event. A few weeks ago, scientists participating in the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration, a $25 million five-year-long joint research program between the National Science Foundation in the U.S. and the Natural Environment Research Council in the U.K., presented their latest research. They described the discovery of cracks and fissures in the Thwaites eastern ice shelf, predicting that the ice shelf could fracture like a shattered car window in as little as five years. “It won’t scatter out into sea as quickly as what you saw when you were down there,” Erin Pettit, a glaciologist at Oregon State University and one of the lead principal investigators in the ITGC, later told me. “But the basic process is the same. The ice shelf is breaking up and could be gone in less than a decade.”

 

Given the ongoing war for American democracy and the deadly toll of the Covid pandemic, the loss of an ice shelf on a far-away continent populated by penguins might not seem to be big news. But in fact, the West Antarctic ice sheet is one of the most important tipping points in the Earth’s climate system. If Thwaites Glacier collapses, it opens the door for the rest of the West Antarctic ice sheet to slide into the sea. Globally, 250 million people live within three feet of high tide lines. Ten feet of sea level rise would be a world-bending catastrophe. It’s not only goodbye Miami, but goodbye to virtually every low-lying coastal city in the world.

 

But predicting the breakup of ice sheets and the implications for future sea level rise is fraught with uncertainty. Depending on various emissions scenarios in the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, we could have as little as one foot of sea level rise by the end of the century, or nearly six feet of sea level rise (of course, rising seas won’t stop in 2100, but that date has become a common benchmark). “The difference between those [models] is a lot of lives and money,” says Richard Alley, a glaciologist at Penn State University and one of the great ice scientists of our time. Alley adds: “The most likely place to generate [the worst scenario] is Thwaites.”

 

Or to put it more urgently: “If there is going to be a climate catastrophe,” Ohio State glaciologist Ian Howat once told me, “it’s probably going to start at Thwaites.”

 

The problem is, understanding what’s going on at Thwaites is fiendishly complex. As I wrote in 2017:

 

The trouble with Thwaites, which is one of the largest glaciers on the planet, is that it’s also what scientists call “a threshold system.” That means instead of melting slowly like an ice cube on a summer day, it is more like a house of cards: It’s stable until it is pushed too far, then it collapses.

 

Thwaites is very different from other big glaciers, such as those in Greenland. For one thing, it is not melting from above, due to warmer air temperatures. It’s melting from below, due to warmer ocean water eating away at its underbelly. More importantly, the terrain beneath the West Antarctic ice sheet is peculiar. “Think of it as a giant soup bowl filled with ice,” Sridhar Anandakrishnan, an expert in polar glaciology at Penn State University, once told me. In the bowl analogy, the edge of the glacier — the spot where a glacier leaves the land and begins to float — is perched on the lip of the bowl 1,000 feet or more below sea level. Scientists call that lip the “grounding line.” Below the lip, the terrain falls away on a downward slope for hundreds of miles, all the way to the Transantarctic Mountains that divide East and West Antarctica. At the deepest part of the basin, the ice is about two miles thick.

 

What this means is that once the warm water gets below ice, it can flow down the slope of the bowl, weakening the ice from below. Through a mechanism called “marine ice-cliff Instability,” you can get what amounts to a runaway collapse of the ice sheet that could raise global sea levels very high, very fast.

 

That’s why, when I wrote my 2017 Rolling Stone story about Thwaites, I dubbed it “The Doomsday Glacier.” (The name stuck — if you type the phrase into Google now, you get half a million hits.)

 

In a worst-case scenario, how fast could Thwaites collapse? No one knows. The IPCC data is the best guide for sea level rise for the rest of this century, although Alley cautions me that even six feet of sea level rise by 2100 is not the worst-case scenario.

 

“We just don’t know what the upper boundary is for how fast this can happen,” Alley says. “We are dealing with an event that no human has ever witnessed before. We have no analog for this.”

 

In the past few years, scientists have made a lot of progress in understanding the dynamics of Thwaites. On our 2019 cruise, scientists discovered troughs in the seabed that allowed warm water to flow underneath the ice shelf. Scientists have mapped the underside of the glacier itself, tracked crevasses in the ice shelf, and located pinning points that might slow the retreat of the ice. The change has been dramatic: “The net rate of ice loss from Thwaites Glacier is more than six times what it was in the early 1990s,” says Rob Larter, a geophysicist with the British Antarctic Survey who was the chief scientist on my trip to Antarctica in 2019.

 

The recent news about Thwaites’ eastern ice shelf breaking up in the next five years was not really a surprise to anyone who has been tracking the science closely. After the sudden disintegration of the Larsen B ice shelf in 2002, scientists realized that Antarctica was far less stable than many had believed. The discovery of cracks and fissures at Thwaites further underscore just how dynamic the changes already underway are.

 

A newly discovered fissure in the Thwaites ice shelf. Scientists predict the shelf could crack like a car window in five years.

 Erin Pettit

 

To be clear, there is a big difference between an ice shelf and the glacier itself. The ice shelf is like a thumbnail that grows out from the glacier and floats on the ocean. Because it is already floating, when it melts it doesn’t in itself contribute to sea level rise (just as when ice cubes melt in your glass, they don’t raise the level of liquid).

 

But ice shelves are important because they buttress glaciers. Like the flying buttresses of Notre Dame, they give the walls of ice stability. And when they break up, the land-based glacier is free to flow much faster into the sea. And that does raise sea levels.

 

So yeah, if Thwaites loses a significant part of its ice shelf in five years, that’s a big deal.

 

But even if a big part of the ice shelf does crack up, there is a lot of unknown complexity in how it will play out. “A first question is, if the ice-shelf breakage continues, will the whole ice shelf be lost, or will a short ice shelf remain, at least in some places?” Richard Alley emailed me. “Almost all ice-shelf ice is buttressing, generating friction that holds back the non-floating ice, so loss of part, most or all of the ice shelf will increase flow of non-floating ice into the ocean. But the most-important buttressing tends to arise closest to the grounding zone, so if a short ice shelf does remain, it may still provide important buttressing, and the speedup of flow and thinning will be smaller than they could be with full ice-shelf loss.”

 

Here you see the problem. Even predicting how the crackup of the ice shelf will impact the flow of the glacier is difficult to estimate.

 

And this is only one of the uncertainties that scientists face when trying to predict whether or not Miami will be underwater by 2100. There is further uncertainty in exactly where and when the ice will fracture, how much warm water will be pushed up beneath the glacier by changing winds and ocean currents, how the character of the bed the glacier rests on will speed up or slow down the glacier’s slide into the sea. Whether the bed is hard rock or muddy till can have a big impact on the velocity of the glacier, just as the texture of snow affects how fast you ski down a mountain. “Ice is alive,” says Pettit. “It moves and flows and breaks in ways that are difficult to anticipate.”

 

Paradoxically, the more scientists learn about what’s going on at Thwaites, the more divergent the latest climate models have become about its future. Consider the results of two models by highly respected scientists published side by side in Nature earlier this year. One model suggests that Thwaites stays fairly stable until temperatures rise above 2 C of warming. Then all hell breaks loose. Thwaites begins to fall into the sea like a line of dominoes pushed off a table and soon takes the rest of the West Antarctic ice sheet with it. And once the collapse begins, according to this model, it will be impossible to stop — at least on any human time scale. In a century or so, global sea levels could rise 10 feet, which would swamp South Florida and Bangladesh and many other low-lying regions of the world.

 

In the other model, global sea level rise only differs by 4½ inches between a 1.5 C global temperature rise and a 3 C temperature rise (which is a little above where we are headed with under current emissions scenarios). And much of that comes from increased melt in Greenland and mountain glaciers. As for Antarctica, the paper says explicitly: “No clear dependence on emissions scenario emerges for Antarctica.”

 

So what to make of all this?

 

“The current divergence among model predictions is actually a good sign because it means that scientists are probing different parameterizations, representations of processes, and hypotheses,” writes Jeremy Bassis, a geophysicist at the University of Michigan. Bassis suggests not focusing so much on the long-term uncertainty and highlighting instead what scientists know about the next few decades. “The skill of models in predicting sea level change on decadal time scales is high, and we already have actionable projections on these time scales. We should be emphasizing that fact in discussions with community members, stakeholders, and decision-makers, so they can move ahead with important adaptation and mitigation planning.”

 

But in the long run, it is not clear that the dynamics of ice sheet collapse that are underway at Thwaites can be stopped. As glaciologist Eric Rignot put it in 2015, in Antarctica, “the fuse has been blown.” Even if we cut carbon emissions to zero tomorrow, warm water will continue to flow beneath the ice sheet for decades, destabilizing the ice and further pushing the glacier toward eventual collapse. This doesn’t means that cutting carbon pollution to zero isn’t an important goal — nothing, in fact, is more important or more urgent. “We may have a small safety margin in Antarctica, but not a large one,” says Alley. Even if the fuse is blown, cutting emissions fast could slow it all down to a millennium-long crack-up that will give us more time to adapt. One way or another, our future is written in ice.

 

Contributing editor Jeff Goodell has written extensively about the Doomsday Glacier. You can listen to an audio account of his trip to Thwaites here.

‘Doomsday Glacier’: Experts Raise Alarms About Cracking Antarctic Ice Shelf

DON'T LOOK UP | I’m a climate scientist. Don’t Look Up captures the madness I see every day

Don’t Look Up review: Jennifer Lawrence is back to business in this punchy, funny climate change satire

 

The same facet of her personality that made her Hollywood’s ‘cool girl’, obsessed over and ridiculed in equal measure, has also proven to be her greatest strength as an actor

 

Clarisse Loughrey

Friday 24 December 2021 12:03

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/reviews/dont-look-up-review-netflix-stream-b1981973.html

 

If anyone’s the right person to deliver the news that the world is ending, it’s Jennifer Lawrence. There’s always something firm and direct about her performances – free of florid mannerisms, or the impulse to romanticise suffering. The same facet of her personality that made her Hollywood’s “cool girl”, obsessed over and ridiculed in equal measure, has also proven to be her greatest strength as an actor. In short, Lawrence doesn’t bullsh**t. Neither does her character in Adam McKay’s punchy, funny satire Don’t Look Up.

 

Kate Dibiasky is an astronomy grad student who’s desperately trying to convince the world that a comet is about to hit the Earth and destroy all human life. There’s nothing particularly flashy about the role – the big, awards-bait monologue goes to her co-star Leonardo DiCaprio, who plays Kate’s professor with the kind of twitchy feverishness that he’s always excelled in. But as the heavily publicised return from her acting sabbatical, it’s perfect. Kate faces person after person unwilling to accept their impending doom. The look of disgust that creeps over Lawrence’s face, as if someone were slowly lowering her hand into a bucket of pond slime, made me realise exactly how much I’ve missed watching her on screen.

 

When Kate goes to the White House with photographic evidence that the comet she discovered will hit Earth and trigger an extinction-level event, do they immediately pull an Armageddon and muster a crew to nuke the thing into oblivion? Of course not. The midterms are coming up, and with President Janie Orlean (Meryl Streep) already trying to manage the blowback from her controversial Supreme Court nominee, news of an apocalypse won’t reflect well in her numbers. “Let’s sit tight and assess,” she ultimately rules, in an exquisitely painful sequence where McKay amplifies the tension by intermittently zooming in on DiCaprio’s panic-stricken baby blues and Streep’s elegant hands brushing back hair. And though the impulse might be to look for a Trump comparison, Orlean is really some hideous hybrid of every modern president, Democrat and Republican, all of them guilty at some point of bowing to self-interest.

 

No one else is of much help – the media’s fixation on commodifying the truth is captured in the ghoulish hyena cackles of daytime talk-show hosts Brie Evantee (Cate Blanchett) and Jack Bremmer (Tyler Perry). Mark Rylance’s timorous, Willy Wonka-adjacent tech CEO Peter Isherwell inevitably starts to wonder whether the comet can be monetised. His presentations begin with a warning to the audience that there should be no direct eye contact, coughing, or negative facial expressions. Who could he possibly be based on?

 

There’s nothing subtle about Don’t Look Up. It’s a clear-cut metaphor for the climate crisis – hence the use of DiCaprio, a well-known activist in the field. It also applies somewhat to the pandemic. But obviousness has been the mark of McKay as a filmmaker since he switched from straight comedies, like Anchorman and Step Brothers, to the political didacticism of The Big Short and Vice. Those last two played a little too much like slideshow lectures on the financial crisis and War on Terror – occasionally smug or patronising in tone. Don’t Look Up is an ideal middle ground, detached enough from reality that it can function as pure satire, with the obviousness of it all only further fuelling the absurdity. The film pitches a small group of sensible protagonists – Lawrence, DiCaprio, Rob Morgan’s coolheaded Nasa official, and Timothée Chalamet’s skateboarding GenZer – against some of the most terrifying veneers ever put on film, all puffed-up parodies of the capitalistic drive. And it does very well to capture the feeling that the entire world is losing its mind.

 

Though the impulse might be to look for a Trump comparison, Janie Orlean (Meryl Streep) is really some hideous hybrid of every modern president, Democrat and Republican

 

Ariana Grande pops up at one point, essentially playing herself, and delivers a song that features the chorus “We’ve really f***ed up.” There’s something oddly satisfying about the way McKay's film lets us laugh at our own doom.

 

‘Don’t Look Up’ is out on Netflix now

I’m a climate scientist. Don’t Look Up captures the madness I see every day

Peter Kalmus

 

A film about a comet hurtling towards Earth and no one is doing anything about it? Sounds exactly like the climate crisis

 

‘The Earth system is breaking down now with breathtaking speed.’

 

Wed 29 Dec 2021 14.08 GMT

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/dec/29/climate-scientist-dont-look-up-madness

 

The movie Don’t Look Up is satire. But speaking as a climate scientist doing everything I can to wake people up and avoid planetary destruction, it’s also the most accurate film about society’s terrifying non-response to climate breakdown I’ve seen.

 

The film, from director Adam McKay and writer David Sirota, tells the story of astronomy grad student Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) and her PhD adviser, Dr Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio), who discover a comet – a “planet killer” – that will impact the Earth in just over six months. The certainty of impact is 99.7%, as certain as just about anything in science.

 

The scientists are essentially alone with this knowledge, ignored and gaslighted by society. The panic and desperation they feel mirror the panic and desperation that many climate scientists feel. In one scene, Mindy hyperventilates in a bathroom; in another, Dibiasky, on national TV, screams “Are we not being clear? We’re all 100% for sure gonna fucking die!” I can relate. This is what it feels like to be a climate scientist today.

 

The two astronomers are given a 20-minute audience with the president (Meryl Streep), who is glad to hear that impact isn’t technically 100% certain. Weighing election strategy above the fate of the planet, she decides to “sit tight and assess”. Desperate, the scientists then go on a national morning show, but the TV hosts make light of their warning (which is also overshadowed by a celebrity breakup story).

 

By now, the imminent collision with comet Dibiasky is confirmed by scientists around the world. After political winds shift, the president initiates a mission to divert the comet, but changes her mind at the last moment when urged to do so by a billionaire donor (Mark Rylance) with his own plan to guide it to a safe landing, using unproven technology, in order to claim its precious metals. A sports magazine’s cover asks, “The end is near. Will there be a Super Bowl?”

 

But this isn’t a film about how humanity would respond to a planet-killing comet; it’s a film about how humanity is responding to planet-killing climate breakdown. We live in a society in which, despite extraordinarily clear, present, and worsening climate danger, more than half of Republican members of Congress still say climate change is a hoax and many more wish to block action, and in which the official Democratic party platform still enshrines massive subsidies to the fossil fuel industry; in which the current president ran on a promise that “nothing will fundamentally change”, and the speaker of the House dismissed even a modest climate plan as “the green dream or whatever”; in which the largest delegation to Cop26 was the fossil fuel industry, and the White House sold drilling rights to a huge tract of the Gulf of Mexico after the summit; in which world leaders say that climate is an “existential threat to humanity” while simultaneously expanding fossil fuel production; in which major newspapers still run fossil fuel ads, and climate news is routinely overshadowed by sports; in which entrepreneurs push incredibly risky tech solutions and billionaires sell the absurdist fantasy that humanity can just move to Mars.

 

World leaders underestimate how rapid, serious and permanent ecological breakdown will be if humanity fails to mobilize

 

After 15 years of working to raise climate urgency, I’ve concluded that the public in general, and world leaders in particular, underestimate how rapid, serious and permanent climate and ecological breakdown will be if humanity fails to mobilize. There may only be five years left before humanity expends the remaining “carbon budget” to stay under 1.5C of global heating at today’s emissions rates – a level of heating I am not confident will be compatible with civilization as we know it. And there may only be five years before the Amazon rainforest and a large Antarctic ice sheet pass irreversible tipping points.

 

The Earth system is breaking down now with breathtaking speed. And climate scientists have faced an even more insurmountable public communication task than the astronomers in Don’t Look Up, since climate destruction unfolds over decades – lightning fast as far as the planet is concerned, but glacially slow as far as the news cycle is concerned – and isn’t as immediate and visible as a comet in the sky.

 

Given all this, dismissing Don’t Look Up as too obvious might say more about the critic than the film. It’s funny and terrifying because it conveys a certain cold truth that climate scientists and others who understand the full depth of the climate emergency are living every day. I hope that this movie, which comically depicts how hard it is to break through prevailing norms, actually helps break through those norms in real life.

 

We need stories that highlight the many absurdities that arise from knowing what’s coming while failing to act.

I also hope Hollywood is learning how to tell climate stories that matter. Instead of stories that create comforting distance from the grave danger we are in via unrealistic techno fixes for unrealistic disaster scenarios, humanity needs stories that highlight the many absurdities that arise from collectively knowing what’s coming while collectively failing to act.

 

We also need stories that show humanity responding rationally to the crisis. A lack of technology isn’t what’s blocking action. Instead, humanity needs to confront the fossil fuel industry head on, accept that we need to consume less energy, and switch into full-on emergency mode. The sense of solidarity and relief we’d feel once this happens – if it happens – would be gamechanging for our species. More and better facts will not catalyze this sociocultural tipping point, but more and better stories might.

 

Peter Kalmus is a climate scientist and author of Being the Change: Live Well and Spark a Climate Revolution