Climate change in 2025: So, what now?
Some real talk for the new year, about where we now stand, and what the next years are going to look like.
(Still ends on a “be hopeful!! or else” kind of note, but definitely gets into some heavy truths about the meaning of recent events.)
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Obviously, between Trump's reelection at the Los Angeles fires, things are feeling a lot more precarious than they did just a few months ago. I know a lot of people are incredibly stressed. I know I'm certainly stressed.
But this isn't the end. This isn't the beginning of the end, either. We're not doomed.
Don't despair.
Yes, things are about to get harder. Yes, the effects of climate change are now becoming truly apparent.
But here's what you need to hold on to:
We have already cut expected warming in half.
More about that including sources here: (x) I'm not going to go into it again in detail, read the source for that. But it's true. In 2000, when I was a kid, they were predicting 4, 5, 6 degrees of warming, plus a runaway greenhouse effect that would boil the planet.
Now, scientists expect that global temperatures will likely land between 2 and 3 degrees.
Which is incredibly shitty, yes. But it's survivable.
And I have for a lot of reasons (check these masterposts on this) to believe with the confidence of knowing that we're going to get expected warming down even further.
And that's something to celebrate.
I’m not saying that the effects of warming aren’t already bad, or won’t get worse. I’m from California, I currently live in LA. My state’s been on fire for half my life. Natural disasters starting amping up early here (and we’re certainly in the middle of another historic number now). And yeah, it's fucking stressful right now.
But like I said, my state’s been breaking horrible disaster records constantly for the past ten years. I've done this before. And you know what? Natural disasters have been getting more and more survivable for years, largely thanks to faster warnings and better mass communication (x).
Does it suck how many natural disasters there are now? Yeah.
Does it suck how many more still there will be? Yeah.
Do we need to keep working our asses off to beat climate change? Yeah.
Are we going to need to organize and mobilize (both politically and especially community-wise) like never before to see as many people through these times as best as possible? Yeah.
But that doesn't mean we should despair. It absolutely does not mean that we've already lost.
An unknown number of the most optimistic futures were foreclosed when Trump won the US election. That’s painful but a reality.
But for twenty-ish of the past twenty-five years, the science said we weren’t going to survive climate change at all.
For most of my life, we were worried that we had set Earth on a course to become like fucking Venus (which is, on average, well over 800 degrees Farenheit). Even if it didn’t get that bad, we were so worried that global warming might wipe out all life on earth - except maybe the cockroaches.
(Literally, when I was a younger the kids at my church put on a play about that. It was like an adaptation of A Christmas Carol where the future only had talking cockroaches. I grew up so worried about this. (Not the cockroaches thing specifically. Mostly the general concept. Only a little about the cockroaches. Also yes my church was very granola why do you ask.))
But starting a few years ago, studies have shown that there wasn’t going to be a runaway greenhouse effect that could turn us into Venus; that earth is warming, yes, but we don’t seem to be in danger of that.
Between that and the fact that the adoption of renewables globally is too fast to be stopped, and we do have the technology and environmental science knowledge to eventually re-lower global temperatures by getting to net negative carbon emissions (x), and most countries and at least 73% of people in all countries for which there is data (x) actually care very much about the climate, yeah, we have closed the door on the lava planet future.
And yeah, I do think that’s worth celebrating.
That’s a massive fucking victory.
There's still more work to do, and I have every confidence that we're going to do it. I also think that, given the loss of the US election, there’s a really, really strong chance the developing world will be what saves us, and we’ll just be lucky to be along for the ride.
Most people have no idea of the kinds of amazing stories and statistics coming out of the developing world and Indigenous communities. The world is changing for the better on the environment, even as disasters (and the US) are getting worse. Solar power is going to revolutionize the fucking world, because it’s going to grant humanity universal access to electricity, and that’s going to revolutionize the world, especially the developing world (aka the global majority). And most people have no idea at all, much less how much it’s going to change.
So, yeah, natural disasters are going to keep getting worse.
But there’s a long, long long fucking way between “natural disasters are going to keep getting worse” and “the extinction of all of humanity and/or the vast majority of life on earth”
So, in the face of Trump, in the face of everything, I still choose to hope. I still choose to celebrate this as a true and profound accomplishment.
Because for over twenty years, I was afraid I’d never get to.
That difference is absolutely worth celebrating.
