Lessons From a Genocide Can Prepare Humanity for Climate Apocalypse

Catastrophic global climate change, however, is not an event at all, and we’re not waiting for it. We’re living it right now. In August 2018, in a summer of forest fires and shattered heat records, the strongest, oldest ice in the Arctic Sea broke up for the first time on record, presaging the final throes of the Arctic death spiral.

The fantasy version of apocalypse always begins with the longawaited event — a missile launch, escaped virus, zombie outbreak — and moves swiftly through collapse into a new, steady state. Something happens, and the morning after you’re pushing a squeaking shopping cart down a highway littered with abandoned Teslas, sawed-off shotgun at the ready. The event is key: it’s a baptism, a fiery sword separating past and present, the origin story of Future You.

In September 2018, the secretary general of the United Nations, António Guterres, gave a speech warning: “If we do not change course by 2020, we risk missing the point where we can avoid runaway climate change.” The months following saw the US government crippled by a fight over whether to build a wall on the southern border to keep out climate change refugees, news that greenhouse-gas emissions have not decreased but in fact have accelerated upward, and a populist revolt in France sparked by opposition to a gas tax.

Read the story from MIT Technology Review by Roy Scranton - “Lessons From a Genocide Can Prepare Humanity for Climate Apocalypse.”

'Broken record' about broken heat records

We hate to sound like a broken record, but we keep breaking heat records. Any way you slice it, last year was warm. Unusually so.

NOAA and NASA have both confirmed what scientists have been predicting for months: 2015 was globally the hottest year ever recorded (and the direct temperature records date back to 1880). But what else did scientists determine about the state of the climate in 2015? Here’s what else you need to know.

Read The Climate Reality Project Story - “2015 Crushed global heat records: three things you should know.”

Sure it's been chilly, but heat records have been tumbling

S

Sophie Lewis - Research
Fellow in the Geophysical
 Fluid Dynamics group
at the Research School
of Earth Sciences.

pring feels like a welcome relief from an Australian winter that felt very cold and very long. Melbourne has just shivered through its coldest winter in 26 years and Canberra hibernated through more cold nights than any winter since 1997.

But while it felt cold, it turns out we’ve just become accustomed to unusually warm conditions. My new study online in Geophysical Research Letters (with my colleague Andrew King) shows that Australia has been losing out on cold temperature records over the past 55 years.

Read Sophie Lewis’s report on The Conversation - “Sure, winter felt chilly, but Australia is setting new heat records at 12 times the rate of cold ones”.