With climate disasters piling up, global warming is getting worse – fast. We had better learn to embrace our despair, argues AFP’s environmental editor Marlowe Hood
As the planet reels from unprecedented heatwaves, floods, wildfires and droughts, you may be feeling a rising sense of unease or even panic.
My own “Oh Shit!” moment came in early 2009, two years after I began writing on the science and geopolitics of climate change for Agence France-Presse. I had reported on scores of peer-reviewed studies, talked to scientists, attended UN climate summits, and interviewed Pacific islanders whose tiny nations were sinking beneath the waves. But the knee-buckling realisation that unchecked global warming would upend civilisation had not yet hit me in the gut and left me gasping for air.
That sucker-punch came at a conference in Oxford where a wide range of experts were asked to imagine a planet that had warmed four degrees Celsius. The tableau that emerged was a waking nightmare. It left me feeling as if I were in possession of terrifying knowledge that others somehow failed to see.