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But to cause an extinction event on the scale of those seen millions of years ago, in which more than 75 percent of species disappeared, we would have to lose all our threatened species within a century and then keep losing species at that same super-high rate for between 240 and 540 more years. In other words, the concept assumes that we won’t save anything, ever, and that hundreds of years into the future, we will still be as inept at protecting biodiversity as we are now.

That’s just not true. As of today, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List, the conservation status of 128,918 species has been assessed. Of those, 902 have gone extinct since the year 1500. This is absolutely too many. One is too many.

this study actually looked at the average decline of a given population (not species) of wild animal. So severe declines in small populations disproportionately increase the average decline.

You might have also heard that we’ve lost something like 60 percent of wild animals since the 1970s? Surely this suggests that a lot more extinctions are imminent?

More recently, a new analysis of the data showed that, indeed, the 60 percent average decline was driven by very severe crashes in a very small number of vertebrate populations. For example, one small population of Australian waterfall frogs declined 99.5 percent over two years. This decline became one data point, which was averaged with 14,000 others, many from stable or increasing populations.

Really, less than 3 percent of vertebrate populations are crashing

This means that declines are not the rule everywhere. It means that the specific populations in crisis can be identified and helped. And we have the knowledge to save them, if we can marshal the will and resources.

This targeted approach works for environmental policy too. The Trump administration pushed for more than 100 rollbacks of pollution standards, land protections, and other green policies,

Jill Tauber, the vice president of litigation for climate and energy at Earthjustice, told me that her organization has more than 100 lawsuits pending against the Trump administration and that so far, once cases pass any procedural hurdles, her side is winning more than 80 percent of them

The U.S. could spend about what it already spends on energy—a mere 4 to 6 percent of gross domestic product—and still reach this goal, according to a new report out of Princeton University.

as the cost of key technologies such as solar panels and batteries has fallen, the price tag to move the country to net-zero emissions by 2050—as President Joe Biden has pledged—has also dropped

The necessary changes would have to start immediately, and they aren’t minor. Visualize a huge build-out of solar, wind, and transmission lines, for starters

What they need to be able to say clearly to politicians is: ‘I value this; this is an important priority to me.’

To make it happen, though, American citizens must “create a demand for the policy,”

On Wednesday, Biden signed an executive order on climate, which sets a goal of conserving at least 30 percent of the country by 2030, launches a Civilian Climate Corps, and hits pause on fossil-fuel development on public lands

“If we don’t keep up that demand for policy, then it is just not going to happen,”

Jenkins also rejects the idea that if we fail to keep warming under 1.5 degrees Celsius, the key target in an influential United Nations report, all is lost. “Any time you see a round number like 2.0 or 1.5 or 20 percent by 2020, that is a political number,” he said. “The reality is that every 10th of a degree matters.” There is no threshold after which it is not worth fighting.

climate change and extinction have been ongoing problems for as long as many of us can remember, feeling that they’re impossible to engage with right now is only natural.

But many of our problems are so thoroughly tangled up with one another that we may not need to fight them separately.

So fighting for racial or economic justice, or against voter suppression, still can mean fighting for the environment.

Not everything can be saved. But 2021 can be better than 2020, and 2031 can be much, much better than 2021, if we demand it.

U.S. government scientists announced that 2020 was one of the two hottest years in recorded history. The other hottest year was 2016: fittingly, the year that the United States elected Donald Trump president, a disaster for the environment as well as democratic norms

scientists sounding the alarm about high extinction rates, and in the years that followed, the idea that we are in the midst of one of the planet’s greatest mass-extinction events

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One very good reason to feel overwhelmed is that everything seems screwed up at once.  As a country, we’re facing climate change, the pandemic, racial injustice, the threat of dangerous fascist elements

Environmental destruction disproportionately harms people of color and lower-income people. And people of color are, on average, significantly more concerned about climate change than white people. A leading cause of inaction on climate change is the hoarding of power by some of the world’s wealthiest people, who profit from planetary destruction that they don’t have to deal with personally. They can simply crank up the air conditioner, pay more for the last remaining champagne and oysters, or fly to their New Zealand bunker, so they have no incentive to change unsustainable systems that they benefit from. When political power is more fairly distributed, the environment will benefit.

83 percent of Americans, including 61 percent of Republicans and 86 percent of independents, say that if nothing is done to reduce emissions, global warming will be a very or somewhat serious problem in the future.

over the past year, President Obama has proposed a series of Environmental Protection Agency regulations intended to reduce carbon pollution from coal-fired power plants, which Republicans in Congress have attacked as a "war on coal."

77 percent of Americans say that the federal government should be doing a substantial amount to combat climate change, the support was greatest among Democrats and independents. Ninety percent of Democrats, 78 percent of independents and 48 percent of Republicans said the government should be fighting climate change.

the number of Americans who believe that climate change is caused by human activity is growing. In a 2011 Stanford University poll, 72 percent of people thought climate change was caused at least in part by human activities. That grew to 81 percent in the latest poll. By party, 88 percent of Democrats, 83 percent of independents and 71 percent of Republicans said that climate change was caused at least in part by human activities.

– 71 percent — expect that they will be personally hurt by climate change, although to different degrees.

the problem for many Republicans is how to carve out a position on climate change that does not turn off voters like Mr. Becker, but that also does not alienate powerful conservative campaign donors. In particular, advocacy groups funded by the billionaire brothers Charles G. and David H. Koch have vowed to ensure that Republican candidates who advocate for climate change action will lose in primary elections.

Republican Senator Inhofe, who in 2011 “co- sponsored legislation that would prevent the federal government from ‘promulgating any regulation concerning, taking action relating to, or taking into consideration the emission of a greenhouse gas to address climate change.’”

Based on his research, the historian believes that “in the twenty- first century, as in the seventeenth, coping with [large] catastrophes . . . requires resources that only central governments command.”

he faults the “deep-seated fear of ‘Big Government,’” manifested by Inhofe and others, “that any attempt by a Federal agency to mitigate or avert damaging climate change represents a ‘power grab’ by Washington that must at all costs be resisted.”

Although White believes that historians’ scholarship and public outreach concerning climate change will continue to improve, he is still “concerned that few historians—even environmental historians—are actively working to address what is likely to become the single most urgent public issue of the 21st century.

Few examine the historical factors and decisions that led us to fossil-fuel dependence, climate change denial, and political and diplomatic gridlock on climate policy, with an eye to identifying changes that might bring us out of our current impasse. Moreover, public discussions about climate change impacts, mitigation, and adaptation rarely discuss insights from historical research.”

They have been grappling with record crop losses caused by frost, hail and higher temperatures, all spurred by climate change. These extreme weather conditions, which have compounded over the past five years, have led to despair and suicides in the region, as locals worry about how they will maintain the unique properties of their wines when their grape harvests persistently fail.

“This year we had terrible frost in April, then hail in June, followed by a horrible cold summer with lots of rain that caused disease in the vineyards and rotted the grapes,”

Climate Change Threatens Wine, and a Way of Life, in Jura

it is our great collective misfortune that the scientific community made its decisive diagnosis of the climate threat at the precise moment when those elites were enjoying more unfettered political, cultural, and intellectual power than at any point since the 1920s.

Very little, however, has been written about how market fundamentalism has, from the very first moments, systematically sabotaged our collective response to climate change.

The core problem was that the stranglehold that market logic secured over public life in this period made the most direct and obvious climate responses seem politically heretical

How, for instance, could societies invest massively in zero-carbon public services and infrastructure at a time when the public sphere was being systematically dismantled and auctioned off

How could governments heavily regulate, tax, and penalise fossil fuel companies when all such measures were being dismissed as relics of “command and control” communism?

And how could the renewable energy sector receive the supports and protections it needed to replace fossil fuels when “protectionism” had been made a dirty word?

With hindsight, it’s hard to see how it could have turned out otherwise. The twin signatures of this era have been the mass export of products across vast distances (relentlessly burning carbon all the way), and the import of a uniquely wasteful model of production, consumption, and agriculture to every corner of the world (also based on the profligate burning of fossil fuels)

That’s a big ask. But it gets bigger. Because of our endless procrastination, we also have to pull off this massive transformation without delay. The International Energy Agency (IEA) warns that if we do not get our emissions under control by a rather terrifying 2017, our fossil fuel economy will “lock-in” extremely dangerous warming.

so much carbon has been allowed to accumulate in the atmosphere over the past two decades that now our only hope of keeping warming below the internationally agreed-upon target of 2C is for wealthy countries to cut their emissions by somewhere in the neighbourhood of eight to 10% a year. The “free” market simply cannot accomplish this task. Indeed, this level of emission reduction has happened only in the context of economic collapse or deep depressions.

our economy is at war with many forms of life on earth, including human life. What the climate needs to avoid collapse is a contraction in humanity’s use of resources; what our economic model demands to avoid collapse is unfettered expansion. Only one of these sets of rules can be changed, and it’s not the laws of nature.

, it is eminently possible to transform our economy so that it is less resource-intensive, and to do it in ways that are equitable, with the most vulnerable protected and the most responsible bearing the bulk of the burden. Low-carbon sectors of our economies can be encouraged to expand and create jobs, while high-carbon sectors are encouraged to contract. The problem, however, is that this scale of economic planning and management is entirely outside the boundaries of our reigning ideology. The only kind of contraction our current system can manage is a brutal crash, in which the most vulnerable will suffer most of all.

So we are left with a stark choice: allow climate disruption to change everything about our world, or change pretty much everything about our economy to avoid that fate. But we need to be very clear: because of our decades of collective denial, no gradual, incremental options are now available to us. Gentle tweaks to the status quo stopped being a climate option when we supersized the American Dream in the 1990s, and then proceeded to take it global

a landmark report. It stated that, “in the face of an absolutely unprecedented emergency, society has no choice but to take dramatic action to avert a collapse of civilization. Either we will change our ways and build an entirely new kind of global society, or they will be changed for us.”

Climate change presents a profound challenge to this cautious centrism because half measures won’t cut it: “all of the above energy” program, as US president Barack Obama describes his approach, has about as much chance of success as an all-of-the-above diet, and the firm deadlines imposed by science require that we get very worked up indeed.

we need to think differently, radically differently, for those changes to be remotely possible. A worldview will need to rise to the fore that sees nature, other nations, and our own neighbours not as adversaries, but rather as partners in a grand project of mutual reinvention.

Because of those decades of hardcore emitting, exactly when we were supposed to be cutting back, the things we must do to avoid catastrophic warming are no longer just in conflict with the particular strain of deregulated capitalism that triumphed in the 1980s. They are now in conflict with the fundamental imperative at the heart of our economic model: grow or die.

“The door to reach two degrees is about to close. In 2017 it will be closed forever.” In short, we have reached what some activists have started calling “Decade Zero” of the climate crisis: we either change now or we lose our chance

But $555 billion in climate programs remained.

If enacted, it would be the largest action ever taken by the United States to address climate change.

Buyers of electric vehicles would also benefit, receiving up to $12,500 in tax credits — depending on what portion of the vehicle parts were made in America.

Scientists say that nations must quickly and deeply cut emissions from burning oil, gas and coal to avert the most harrowing impacts of climate change.

a program that would have rewarded power companies that moved from fossil fuels to clean energy, and penalized those that did not.

One group of moderate House Democrats even suggested that Democrats not worry about offsetting climate spending with tax increases.

At the same time, a new generation of climate activists has been advising the president on his agenda, and warning lawmakers that they risk losing young voters if they do not act.

“Folks, we all have that obligation, an obligation to our children and to our grandchildren,” Mr. Biden said.

Showing up empty-handed would damage the United States’ credibility on the world stage.

That measure withered in the Senate after Democrats could not summon enough votes from their own party to bring the bill to the floor for a vote.

“Today, we have every major agricultural group, and food companies, and researchers supporting a climate bill.

The past two years have only underscored that case: there were 22 climate disasters that cost at least $1 billion each in the United States in 2020, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

a plan that would have eliminated the country’s greenhouse gas emissions by the end of the decade.

As soon as Democrats on Capitol Hill secured a razor-thin majority in early 2020, their leaders began laying the groundwork for a climate plan.

Mr. Schumer tasked Democrats on the Senate committees responsible for tax policy to craft climate-related tax legislation that could be bundled into a larger budget bill.

they used the software to quickly identify replacement programs that would achieve similar levels of emissions cuts.

At the same time, he demanded that the overall bill be slashed, from $3.5 trillion to roughly $1.5 trillion.

Since then, it has struggled to assert itself as a credible vehicle for truly mass mobilisation.

Many significant organisations and movements have emerged in its wake. The most attention-grabbing have been from the recent, even more radical flank of the UK’s climate movement – first Insulate Britain and then Just Stop Oil – who have blocked the M25, stopped test matches and much more.

many in the broader climate movement now feel that action that disrupts the general public has become counterproductive – as XR came to learn

Citizens already feel the alarm has been raised. Right now, they don’t need further reminders: they need a journey into positive, effective action that they feel includes them.

I moved on from XR in 2020, judging it likely that it had achieved most of what it was capable of achieving (a huge raising of climate consciousness – not to mention a parliamentary declaration of climate and environment emergency, a net zero law, and a parliament-backed citizens’ assembly on climate).

what is now plainly obvious is that the most important achievement of XR may turn out to be the space it opened up for a new, moderate flank in the climate movement to emerge.

XR successfully dragged the whole eco-agenda into the light of day

this has made it both necessary and possible for a wave of novel organisations and initiatives to fill the vacuum; groups such as Wild Card, Community Climate Action, Lawyers for Net Zero, Purpose Disruptors and Zero Hour.

many of the successes of historical movements that inspired XR (the Suffragettes, for instance) followed a similar pattern: an agenda-shift prompted by radical-flank initiatives paving the way for actual political success by more moderate agents of change.

in order to make any real impact on the desperate situation we are slipping into, movements must now unite people in campaigns that they can actually get on board with. That means acting with others where they live, or work or pray – and within the law.

XR itself knows this is the way forward, and seems to have learned from past mistakes. As of 2023, it will no longer disrupt the public

XR’s new strategy, optimistically titled “Here comes everyone”, plans to build on the clearest success of the movement so far. In April, it mobilised about 60,000 people – considerably more than at any previous moment in its history – in a peaceful march on the climate crisis

If there is to be any chance of achieving a transformative adaptation to the self-imposed threat of ecological collapse, it’s going to require not just a minority, but most of us, to step up.

In decades to come, the only question our children will have any real interest in is: now that it’s becoming clearer what can effectively achieve change, how will you act? And once you knew, what did you do?

Countries’ commitments should reflect “equity and the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities in the light of different national circumstances and in the context of sustainable development and efforts to eradicate poverty.”

It’s indisputable that poor nations should be allowed to develop and to eradicate poverty. Countries, obviously, can contribute to the global effort only to the extent of their capabilities

equity brings up a different, more slippery matter. What’s the just allocation of responsibility? What’s fair?

Countries, it turns out, have rather different takes on this question, potentially complicating efforts to make progress against climate change.

Consider the intended “nationally determined contributions” to battle climate change that various countries announced after the climate summit in Paris in 2015

One interesting study examined the notions of justice underpinning each national proposal. They were all over the map.

Critically, none of those experts considered the consequences of applying their logic to all countries across the board.

The aggregate notions of fairness did not add up to a solution. The countries that claimed responsibility for a small share of global emissions actually accounted for about a quarter of the total. Countries with per capita emissions ranging from 0.5 tons of carbon dioxide to 25 tons of CO2, roughly five times the global average, used this variable to justify modest plans.

The idea of an equitable and just distribution of responsibility might seem essential to achieve the shared goal of preventing a climate catastrophe

I can’t put precise odds on members of Congress accepting that the United States must bear one-fourth of the worldwide burden to cut greenhouse gas emissions because of the actions of long-dead Americans who had no idea they were causing damage. But the probability is quite low.

It seems only fair that countries such as the United States, which accounts for about a quarter of the greenhouse gases emitted by humanity since before the Industrial Revolution, should bear a much bigger share of the burden than, say, Brazil, which accounts for only 1 percent of historical emissions.

The United States, moreover, is quite rich and was made that way largely thanks to abundant and cheap fossil fuel.

Yet parsing how equity is to be achieved can get complicated

Should the goal be to equalize emissions per person, which today tilt heavily toward rich countries? (The United States emits some 18 tons per person; for India, the number is less than 3.

Or should we first cut emissions associated with the production of luxury goods and services that are mostly consumed in rich countries? Shouldn’t the emissions from producing the made-in-China toy you bought on Amazon accrue to the United States, where it is being played with?

They are in tension with the strategies championed by most rich countries, which are more sympathetic to the idea that historical emissions should be grandfathered in — not counted against them — and that they should be reduced in the future wherever reducing them is cheapest, which happens to be mostly in the developing world.

Many countries cannot afford the necessary mitigation pathways, either because they don’t have the resources to finance the new technologies needed to abandon fossil fuels, or because the resources they have are best deployed toward, say, buying air conditioning units or otherwise raising the standard of living.

There are essential truths that the world must acknowledge:

These countries are likely to face the gravest risks from climate change — whether measured in devastated crops, destroyed communities or people’s lives. Rich nations owe it to the world to ensure that resources and technologies are available for sufficient mitigation, adaptation and disaster relief

— not because they emitted a lot of greenhouse gases in the past, but because the task of preventing climate change and limiting its damage cannot be avoided, and they can afford it.

Many defended the fairness of their offer by pointing out that they accounted for a “small share” of global greenhouse gas emissions; others referred to their low per capita emissions. Many based their arguments on their vulnerability to climate change.

Consider the political ramifications of some climate justice arguments.

And that’s even without pointing out that China, today, emits more than double the amount of greenhouse gases the United States does.

Or consider how one research paper apportioned the remaining emissions budget — the greenhouse gases that can still be emitted in the future without breaching the warming ceiling (which in this estimate was set at 2 degrees Celsius)

It calculated nations’ responsibility for emissions starting only in 1992, when the world became aware of climate change, and assumed that each citizen of the world is entitled to the same budget since then. On this basis, it concluded that the United States would be entitled to 4.4 percent of the remainder, less than a fifth of its historic share.

That is fair. But it is also only 50 billion tons, or roughly nine years’ worth of emissions, at the nation’s current rate. I can’t imagine an administration that agreed to this surviving for long

The argument from guilt — built on the assumption that rich nations’ past development and emissions have incurred a moral debt to the rest of the world — will likely short-circuit the best case for action.

Better to draw on a different moral principle: to expect results from nations according to their capabilities and to assist them according to their needs. That frame could allow the job to get done.

Climate scientists generally agree that the Atlantic circulation will decline this century, but there’s no consensus on whether it will stall out before 2100.

the new findings were reason enough not to regard a shutdown as an abstract, far-off concern. “It’s now,” she said.

As humans warm the atmosphere, however, the melting of the Greenland ice sheet is adding large amounts of fresh water to the North Atlantic, which could be disrupting the balance of heat and salinity that keeps the overturning moving. A patch of the Atlantic south of Greenland has cooled conspicuously in recent years, creating a “cold blob” that some scientists see as a sign that the system is slowing.

Abrupt thawing of the Arctic permafrost. Loss of the Amazon rain forest. Collapse of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets. Once the world warms past a certain point, these and other events could be set into swift motion, scientists warn, though the exact thresholds at which this would occur are still highly uncertain.

In the Atlantic, researchers have been searching for harbingers of tipping-point-like change in a tangle of ocean currents that goes by an unlovely name: the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC (pronounced “AY-mock”).

These currents carry warm waters from the tropics through the Gulf Stream, past the southeastern United States, before bending toward northern Europe. When this water releases its heat into the air farther north, it becomes colder and denser, causing it to sink to the deep ocean and move back toward the Equator. This sinking effect, or “overturning,” allows the currents to transfer enormous amounts of heat around the planet, making them hugely influential for the climate around the Atlantic and beyond.

adds to a growing body of scientific work that describes how humankind’s continued emissions of heat-trapping gases could set off climate “tipping points,” or rapid and hard-to-reverse changes in the environment.

Much of the Northern Hemisphere could cool. The coastlines of North America and Europe could see faster sea-level rise. Northern Europe could experience stormier winters, while the Sahel in Africa and the monsoon regions of Asia would most likely get less rain.

Scientists’ uncertainty about the timing of an AMOC collapse shouldn’t be taken as an excuse for not reducing greenhouse-gas emissions to try to avoid it, said Hali Kilbourne, an associate research professor at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science.

scientists’ most advanced computer models of the global climate have produced a wide range of predictions for how the currents might behave in the coming decades, in part because the mix of factors that shape them is so complex.

Dr. Ditlevsen’s new analysis focused on a simple metric, based on sea-surface temperatures, that is similar to ones other scientists have used as proxies for the strength of the Atlantic circulation. She conducted the analysis with Peter Ditlevsen, her brother, who is a climate scientist at the University of Copenhagen’s Niels Bohr Institute. They used data on their proxy measure from 1870 to 2020 to calculate statistical indicators that presage changes in the overturning.

“Not only do we see an increase in these indicators,” Peter Ditlevsen said, “but we see an increase which is consistent with this approaching a tipping point.”

They then used the mathematical properties of a tipping-point-like system to extrapolate from these trends. That led them to predict that the Atlantic circulation could collapse around midcentury, though it could potentially occur as soon as 2025 and as late as 2095.

Their analysis included no specific assumptions about how much greenhouse-gas emissions will rise in this century. It assumed only that the forces bringing about an AMOC collapse would continue at an unchanging pace — essentially, that atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations would keep rising as they have since the Industrial Revolution.

they voiced reservations about some of its methods, and said more work was still needed to nail down the timing with greater certainty.

Susan Lozier, a physical oceanographer at Georgia Tech, said sea-surface temperatures in the North Atlantic near Greenland weren’t necessarily influenced by changes in the overturning alone, making them a questionable proxy for inferring those changes. She pointed to a study published last year showing that much of the cold blob’s development could be explained by shifts in wind and atmospheric patterns.

Scientists are now using sensors slung across the Atlantic to directly measure the overturning. Dr. Lozier is involved in one of these measurement efforts. The aim is to better understand what’s driving the changes beneath the waves, and to improve projections of future changes.

Still, the new study sent an urgent message about the need to keep collecting data on the changing ocean currents,

Were the circulation to tip into a much weaker state, the effects on the climate would be far-reaching, though scientists are still examining their potential magnitude.

“It is very plausible that we’ve fallen off a cliff already and don’t know it,” Dr. Kilbourne said. “I fear, honestly, that by the time any of this is settled science, it’s way too late to act.”

This shift has made it impossible to pass any legislation through Congress to help deal with the problem. That has forced President Obama to adopt a different approach

After the 2010 defeat in the Senate of the so-called cap-and-trade strategy, which was originally a Republican idea, Mr. Obama has taken to using the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulatory powers under the Clean Air Act, circumventing Congress entirely.

Is it possible to turn the Republican Party around?It won’t be easy. Republican leaders like Mitch McConnell of Kentucky are wedded to defending a declining coal industry and advancing the interests of oil companies, most clearly in their support for the Keystone pipeline. Many of the party’s lawmakers and presidential candidates get a lot of money from people like the Koch brothers, who have multimillion-dollar contributions for anybody who will stand against efforts to curb the use of fossil fuels.

there is more than money to the story. For many Republicans, climate change poses an existential quagmire. “To them it sounds like, ‘Everything we’ve been doing since the Industrial Revolution is going to kill us; the response must be a big government response and, by the way, it has to be international,’” said Mr. Goldston.

even Senator McCain has now walked away from his previous self, mocking President Obama for “saying that the biggest problem we have is climate change.”

climate change denial has never been particularly strong among street-level Republicans. Recent polls find that even conservative Republicans believe the climate is changing and humans are, to some extent, to blame.

Straight denial is getting tougher as the scientific consensus strengthens. And China’s efforts to cut emissions have defanged the argument that it is pointless for the United States to act alone.

In this context, the Obama administration’s strategy of using the Clean Air Act to force emissions cuts could help change the politics.

“Some Republican governors will start taking action because the alternative is for the federal government to impose something,” Mr. Goldston said. “This will change the politics

Mankiw, George W. Bush’s former top economic adviser, argues that putting a price on carbon emissions — the preferred prescription of economists across the political spectrum— could fit well within the Republican canon.

“People are afraid this is an excuse to raise taxes and expand government generally,” Professor Mankiw said. “We need to convince them this not a tax increase but a tax shift,” using revenue from a carbon tax to reduce, say, the Social Security payroll tax, while keeping the overall tax burden roughly the same.

The poll by The Post and Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) is the first major survey of teenagers’ views since the explosion of the youth climate movement last year.

This week, in the run-up to a major United Nations summit, hundreds of thousands of school kids plan to abandon their classrooms to demand more aggressive measures to protect the planet.

“People feel very guilty when a child says, ‘You are stealing my future.’ That has impact,” Thunberg told The Post. “We have definitely made people open their eyes.”

More than 7 in 10 teenagers and young adults say climate change will cause a moderate or great deal of harm to people in their generation,

Both Lopez and Graham said thinking about climate change makes them afraid, an emotion they share with 57 percent of teens nationwide. Fewer than a third of teens say they are optimistic.

most say they rarely or never discuss the issue with family and friends.

Adults “think: ‘Oh you’re so young, you don’t know what you’re talking about,’” he said. “But I know the facts, and I know what the most drastic consequences will be. I know that people aren’t doing what needs to be done.”

Roughly a third of both teenagers and adults say the issue is “extremely important” to them personally

Just under half believe the United States must drastically reduce its fossil fuel use in the next few years to avoid the worst effects of climate change.

Adults, he said, don’t seem to take the issue as seriously, or as personally, as people his age

Teenagers also share adults’ questions and misconceptions about the ways the world is warming. In both age groups, no more than 2 in 10 say they know “a lot” about the causes of climate change and ways to reduce it

fewer than half say they’ve taken action to reduce their own carbon footprints

nd roughly 4 in 10 say mitigating the effects of warming will require major sacrifices from ordinary Americans.

the number of teenagers who say they’re being taught in school how to mitigate climate change appears to be on the decline

Fourteen percent say they have learned “a lot” about the subject, down from 25 percent in 2010

“It’s terrible,” said Sam Riley, 17, of Boston. “It’s hardly ever brought up at my school.”

The high school junior said he learned nearly everything he knows about climate change from reading the news and searching the Internet

Riley, who is black, believes that minorities and people in low income communities will be most severely impacted by warming, because they are more likely to live in vulnerable areas and less likely to be able to insulate themselves.“The wealthier you are, the more protection you have,”

black and Hispanic teens express a greater sense of urgency around climate change; 37 percent and 41 percent, respectively, say people need to act in the next year or two, compared with 24 percent of white teens.

About 4 in 10 of those under 18 call climate change a “crisis.” But unlike adults, most teenagers say they don’t feel helpless. More than half — 54 percent — say they feel motivated.

But,” she said, “this generation — we’re fighters. And we’re going to win.”

Climate change will make those threats even worse, as floods, drought, storms and other types of extreme weather threaten to disrupt, and over time shrink, the global food supply

food shortages could lead to an increase in cross-border migration.

A particular danger is that food crises could develop on several continents at once

“The potential risk of multi-breadbasket failure is increasing,” she said. “All of these things are happening at the same time.”

The report also offered a measure of hope, laying out pathways to addressing the looming food crisis, though they would require a major re-evaluation of land use and agriculture worldwide as well as consumer behavior

Proposals include increasing the productivity of land, wasting less food and persuading more people to shift their diets away from cattle and other types of meat.

“One of the important findings of our work is that there are a lot of actions that we can take now. They’re available to us,” Dr. Rosenzweig said. “But what some of these solutions do require is attention, financial support, enabling environments.”

activities such as draining wetlands — as has happened in Indonesia and Malaysia to create palm oil plantations, for example — is particularly damaging. When drained, peatlands, which store between 530 and 694 billion tons of carbon dioxide globally, release that carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere.

Between 2010 and 2015 the number of migrants from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras showing up at the United States’ border with Mexico increased fivefold, coinciding with a dry period that left many with not enough food and was so unusual that scientists suggested it bears the signal of climate change

As a warming atmosphere intensifies the world’s droughts, flooding, heat waves, wildfires and other weather patterns, it is speeding up the rate of soil loss and land degradation, the report concludes.

Higher concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere

will also reduce food’s nutritional quality, even as rising temperatures cut crop yields and harm livestock

In some cases, the report says, a changing climate is boosting food production because, for example, warmer temperatures will mean greater yields of some crops at higher latitudes. But on the whole, the report finds that climate change is already hurting the availability of food because of decreased yields and lost land from erosion, desertification and rising seas

Overall if emissions of greenhouse gases continue to rise, so will food costs, according to the report, affecting people around the world.

“You’re sort of reaching a breaking point with land itself and its ability to grow food and sustain us,”

agriculture itself is also exacerbating climate change.

the window to address the threat is closing rapidly

Every 2.5 acres of peatlands release the carbon dioxide equivalent of burning 6,000 gallons of gasoline

And the emissions of carbon dioxide continues long after the peatlands are drained. Of the five gigatons of greenhouse gas emissions that are released each year from deforestation and other land-use changes, “One gigaton comes from the ongoing degradation of peatlands that are already drained,”

(By comparison, the fossil fuel industry emitted about 37 gigatons of carbon dioxide last year, according to the institute.)

cattle are significant producers of methane, another powerful greenhouse gas, and an increase in global demand for beef and other meats has fueled their numbers and increased deforestation in critical forest systems like the Amazon

each year, the amount of forested land that is cleared — much of that propelled by demand for pasture land for cattle — releases the emissions equivalent of driving 600 million cars

The authors urge changes in how food is produced and distributed, including better soil management, crop diversification and fewer restrictions on trade

They also call for shifts in consumer behavior, noting that at least one-quarter of all food worldwide is wasted

But protecting the food supply and cutting greenhouse emissions can also come into conflict with each other, forcing hard choices. For instance, the widespread use of strategies such as bioenergy — like growing corn to produce ethanol — could lead to the creation of new deserts or other land degradation

The report also calls for institutional changes, including better access to credit for farmers in developing countries and stronger property rights

The same is true for planting large numbers of trees (something often cited as a powerful strategy to pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere), which can push crops and livestock onto less productive land

But it would also increase food prices as much as 80 percent by 2050.

“We cannot plant trees to get ourselves out of the problem that we’re in,

“The trade-offs that would keep us below 1.5 degrees, we’re not talking about them. We’re not ready to confront them yet.”

Preventing global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius is likely to require both the widespread planting of trees as well as “substantial” bioenergy to help reduce the use of fossil fuels

“Above 2 degrees of global warming there could be an increase of 100 million or more of the population at risk of hunger,” Edouard Davin, a researcher at ETH Zurich and an author of the report, said by email. “We need to act quickly

Planting as many trees as possible would reduce the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere by about nine gigatons each year

“Agricultural practices that include indigenous and local knowledge can contribute to overcoming the combined challenges of climate change, food security, biodiversity conservation, and combating desertification and land degradation,”

an average of three people were killed per week defending their land in 2018, with more than half of them killed in Latin America.

the longer policymakers wait, the harder it will be to prevent a global crisis. “Acting now may avert or reduce risks and losses, and generate benefits to society,” the authors wrote. Waiting to cut emissions, on the other hand, risks “irreversible loss in land ecosystem functions and services required for food, health, habitable settlements and production.”

the broader economic and cultural landscape is so different now than it was just a few years ago that public investments of even this somewhat smaller scale appear poised to make an enormous difference.

That’s because those public investments are being made not against dirty-energy headwinds but with the support of much broader tailwinds

Thanks to technological change and the plunging cost of renewables, a growing political and cultural focus on decarbonization and increasing awareness of the public health costs of pollution and market trends for things like electric vehicles and heat pumps, it’s genuinely a whole new world out there. Not that long ago, the upfront cost of a green transition looked almost incalculably large. Today it seems plausible that quite dramatic emissions gains can be achieved for just, say, $369 billion

For 90 percent of the world, clean energy is now cheaper than dirty alternatives, and while countries like Spain are boasting about more than tripling solar power capacity by 2030, in Texas, solar output has grown 39-fold in just six years. Globally, renewable output has grown fourfold in the past decade

Ten years ago, when the United States endeavored to tackle the problem of climate change, it tried to do so largely by punishing the cost of dirty energy with a cap-and-trade system. This time, it’s giving a kick-start, or a boost of momentum, to an already ongoing green transition.

this strategic choice of carrots rather than sticks has received some deserved praise: It’s better and more popular to subsidize cheap, clean energy than it is to make the bad stuff more expensive

A “fair share” analysis suggests the United States — today the world’s second largest emitter, and historically the largest by far — should be moving faster than any nation in the world.

The models may ultimately prove optimistic, given the complications of infrastructure build-out

it is fair to wonder about the uncertain economics of some of the bill’s technological bets, like carbon capture and storage, which could allow emissions from industry and power generation to be trapped and sequestered, and which some climate activists and environmental justice advocates distrust

Jesse Jenkins, who leads the REPEAT Project, says he believes that the tech problems of C.C.S. have been solved and that, with tax credits, the bill will address its cost problem, leading to a dramatic scale-up in use. Julio Friedmann, a former Obama-era Energy Department official turned carbon removal advocate, says that a rapid scale-up of C.C.S. would be, while miraculous, also plausible.

the fact that this much climate progress appears even remotely possible for less than the annualized budget of the State Department, as Ben Dreyfuss recently put it, is a remarkable reflection of the state of green energy today, even without the new law. When it comes to emissions, we are no longer fighting an uphill battle, at least in the United States and many other countries like it. We are deciding how quickly to race downhill.

at the risk of playing Pollyanna, I think it is also possible to see the size of the bill — its relative smallness — as at least a mark of good news

The headline projection of the I.R.A. impact appears, if inadequate by the standards of the Paris agreement, nevertheless impressive: a 40 percent reduction in just eight years

already today the United States has reduced emissions 20 percent from 2005 levels, and was projected to reduce them further even without the benefit of the I.R.A. As recently as a few weeks ago, before the bill was revived, it might have felt like the United States was permanently stalled on climate action, but in fact the country was already moving to decarbonize, if not fast enough.

peed really matters; as the writer and activist Bill McKibben put it, when it comes to warming, “winning slowly is the same as losing.” Simply moving in the right direction isn’t enough, and too much time has been squandered — within the United States and globally — to avoid what was once described as a catastrophic climate future.

If the United States achieves that 40 percent reduction, that’s still well short of the country’s target of a 50-52 percent reduction by 2030. The gap may seem relatively small, but it represents more than half a billion tons of carbon each year. That’s a lot.

the I.R.A. is a compromise, obviously and outwardly, tying new leases for wind power development to new ones for oil and gas, only moderately reducing the country’s demand for oil and gas over the next decade and investing less in environmental justice measures than Biden himself promised not too long ago

But its basic bet — that many of these markets and technologies are close enough to tipping points that relatively small public support can get them racing toward inevitability — also means the ultimate impacts could be larger and far-reaching.

The effects on prices and markets could make state and local action cheaper and easier, and even federal regulation more palatable

the bill includes some unheralded provisions to help retire coal power more quickly, as Keane Bhatt, the policy director for the Progressive Caucus, has pointed out, as well as an under-discussed “stick” in the form of a fee for methane

The impact of its “green bank” and Energy Department loans could be quite large — some estimates have suggested they could run into the hundreds of billions, and the $27 billion handed to the Green Bank could catalyze ten times as much private capital

because much of the I.R.A.’s top-line “investment” comes in the form of tax credits, its outlays — and impacts — could ultimately grow substantially if certain sectors (wind, solar and C.C.S., for instance) really do take off.

This might not ultimately be just a $369 billion package, in other words, but something quite a bit bigger. Enough to get us to 50 percent by 2030? “I think we have a pretty good chance,” Jenkins says.

it is striking that, given where we were not that long ago, such a proposition seems credible at all. Here’s hoping.

The provisions tying future auctions for wind power to leases for oil and gas development have been called “poison pills,” because they appear to lock in future emissions. But the ultimate impact is likely to be quite small. (Energy Innovation estimates at most 50 million tons of additional annual carbon emissions, compared with a billion in reductions from other measures in the bill.)

Whichever way you cut it, global warming is already happening too fast to generously support life, which our prior climate did quite well. As a feebly supportive climate devolves into an unsupportive one, it won’t matter who forecasted the timing right, only that we missed our chance at the good version of Earth.

The scientist James Hansen, famous for his early warnings about climate change, suggested in a paper released last week with a suite of high-level colleagues that warming is accelerating more rapidly than is presently understood: In their view, that the Earth could exceed 1.5 degrees of warming this decade is practically assured, and 2 degrees by 2050 is likely unless the world eliminates fossil-fuel use far faster than planned.

One expert who worked on the UN report called this “insanity,” a “climate disaster of our own making.” The climate math is not adding up.

the loss of much of West Antarctica’s ice sheet is now virtually inevitable. Even if future emissions are drastically curtailed, enough warming is probably locked in to wash the bulk of the sheet away. At best, she says, we are on the brink of its total loss becoming assured

by one estimate, the West Antarctic ice sheet contains enough water to raise sea level globally by just over five meters, or 17 feet. At the very least, Naughten told me, she thinks it would be wise to plan for two to three meters of sea-level rise, or six to ten feet, in the next couple of centuries

I shudder to think what would happen if everyone living within two meters of sea level would be displaced,” she added. That “everyone” is projected to include some 410 million by 2100.

Previous studies have warned of the ice sheet’s collapse if emissions were not drawn down; hers now suggests that we’ve passed the point of no return, that even significant emissions cuts would be too late for this particular ice sheet. (The East Antarctic ice sheet, she said, is far more stable—and good thing, because it contains enough frozen water for 10 times the amount of sea-level rise as its western counterpart.

France, Ireland, Kenya, Spain, and 12 other countries have called for a global accord to phase out fossil-fuel production. There is little doubt that this is necessary; adding more fossil fuels to the pipeline is quite obviously counterproductive to slowing, then stopping, climate change.

Yet in the U.S. alone, a country responsible for at least 20 percent of historical emissions, the current buildout of liquified-natural-gas infrastructure, intended to export the country’s plentiful gas, is the largest fossil-fuel expansion proposed in the world—and it’s happening under a president who recently passed the most impactful climate legislation the country has ever seen

China, which is responsible for about 12 percent of historical emissions according to Alex Wang, who studies Chinese environmental governance at UCLA, has one of the largest clean-power programs in the world. But the country is at the same time dramatically expanding its coal production.

the difference between the world we have and the one we could have is buried in two contrasting modeling reports by two of the world’s most important energy-information organizations.

Whereas the International Energy Agency projected that we’d hit peak fossil-fuel use in 2030, the U.S. Energy Information Administration came to a very different conclusion: It saw demand for fossil fuels rising through at least 2050

If a policy is set to expire, the U.S. EIA treats it as expiring. It doesn’t take into account policies that countries have talked about but have had yet to implement. The international agency’s analysis, in contrast, assumes countries will follow through with more climate-friendly policies and renew the ones they already have on the books. “Look how different things could be,” Bowman said. The difference is night and day, despair and hope.

Policy, and only policy, appears to make that difference. It represents the choices that our leaders make about when to finally change course.

“climate is a spectrum; it isn’t an on/off switch.” Whenever we do make a different set of decisions, ones that make the math properly compute, we will be saving what we have left, preventing some layer of livability from being irrecoverably sloughed off and swept away.

“I get chills when I see those young people, especially at Fridays for Future. They are screaming and shouting and they’re generally terrified,” she said in an interview. “They don’t want the world to end.”

Naomi said she does not dispute that greenhouse gas emissions are warming the planet, but she argues that many scientists and activists have overstated their impact.AD“I don’t want to get people to stop believing in man-made climate change, not at all,” she said. “Are manmade CO2 emissions having that much impact on the climate? I think that’s ridiculous to believe.”

The German media have described her as sympathetic to the nationalist Alternative for Germany (AfD), the biggest opposition party in parliament, whose leaders have spoken of fighting “an invasion of foreigners.” Naomi says she is not a member of AfD — she describes herself as libertarian — but acknowledges speaking at a recent AfD event.

Naomi argues that other factors, such as solar energy, play a role — though the amount of solar energy reaching the Earth has actually declined since the 1970s, according to federal measurements

Founded in 1984 and funded largely by anonymous donors, Heartland has increasingly focused on climate change over the past decade. Its staff and researchers enjoy ready access to the Trump administration, and one of its senior fellows, William Happer, served as a senior director on the White House National Security Council between September 2018 and 2019.

An emeritus professor of physics at Princeton University, Happer has repeatedly argued that carbon emissions should be viewed as beneficial to society — not a pollutant that drives global warming. During his time with the Trump administration, he sought to enlist Heartland’s help in promoting his ideas and objected to a U.S. intelligence official’s finding that climate impacts could be “possibly catastrophic,”

Why would an American think tank want to get involved in German politics? Because it worries that Berlin’s strong stance on reducing greenhouse-gas emissions could be contagious, according to a recent investigation aired on German television.

For two decades, Germany has been a leader in pressing other nations to curb carbon output and shift to renewable energy. Though it is falling short of its ambitious goals, Germany has pledged to cut its greenhouse gas emissions this year by 40 percent compared to 1990 — and by up to 95 percent by mid-century.

The proposal described Naomi as “the star” of a “Climate Reality Forum” organized by Heartland during the Madrid talks. With “over 100,000 people viewing her talk on climate realism,” the proposal said, Naomi was well-positioned to fight German climate policies.

Taylor said the tendency to associate Naomi with Greta is “kind of natural” — and benefits Heartland’s message.“To the extent that Naomi is pretty much the same, just with a different perspective, yeah, I think that it’s good that people will look at the two as similar in many ways,” he said.

So extreme is inequality that the lowest-earning 50% of the world population – 4 billion people – account for as little as 12% of total emissions.

And those at the very bottom of the pile barely register at all. Mali’s per capita C02 emissions are about one-seventy-fifth of those in the US. Even if the lowest-earning third of the global population – more than 2.6 billion people – were to raise themselves above the $3.2-a-day poverty line, it would increase total emissions by a mere 5% – that is, one-third of the emissions of the richest 1%.

Half the world’s population, led by the top 10% of the income distribution – and, above all, by the global elite – drive a globe-spanning productive system that destabilises the environment for everyone

The worst effects are suffered by the poorest, and in the coming decades the impact will become progressively more extreme. And yet their poverty means they are virtually powerless to protect themselves.

This is the triple inequality that defines the climate global equation: the disparity in responsibility for producing the problem; the disparity in experiencing the impacts of the climate crisis; and the disparity in the available resources for mitigation and adaptation.

global heating will pose huge distributional problems. How will climate refugees be resettled? How will the economy adapt?

For fragile states such as Iraq, it may prove too much. The risk is that they will tip from just about coping into outright collapse, failing to provide water and the electricity for cooling – the bare essentials for survival in extreme heat

You might say, plus ça change. The poor suffer and the rich prosper. But the consequences of the climate triple inequality are radical and new

Rich countries have long traded on unequal terms with the poor. During the era of colonialism, they plundered raw materials and enslaved tens of millions. For two generations after decolonisation, economic growth largely bypassed what was then known as the third world.

As we run ever closer to the edge of the environmental envelope – the conditions within which our species can thrive – the development of the rich world systematically undercuts the conditions for survival of billions of people in the climate danger zone

The middle 40% of the world’s income distribution now account for 41% of global emissions, meaning they have achieved a considerable level of energy consumption. But this “global middle class”, concentrated above all in east Asia, crowds out the carbon budget remaining for those on the lowest incomes, and their growth inflicts irreversible damage on some of the poorest and most disempowered people in the world.

Since the 1980s, with the acceleration of China’s economic growth, the scope of development has dramatically widened.

They are not so much exploited or bypassed as victimised by the climactic effects of economic growth taking place elsewhere. This violent and indirect entanglement is new in its quality and scale

Violent and unequal relationships between groups usually involve some degree of interaction and can, as a result, be resisted. Workers can strike.

But arms-length ecological victimisation entails no such relationship and offers correspondingly fewer channels for resistance from within the system.

can we not hope for more constructive responses to the triple inequality?

This question is still what gives such huge importance to the global climate conferences such as Cop28, which starts on 30 November. They may seem like staid and ritualistic affairs, but it is in such venues that the lethal connection between oil, gas and coal production, rich-world consumption and the lethal risks facing those in the climate danger zone can be articulated in political form.

since then the resistance of US and European negotiators has hardened. As we approach Cop28, the organisation and the financing of the fund are yet

Such a fund is no solution to the problem of the triple inequality. For that we need a comprehensive energy transition and new models of truly inclusive and sustainable development

But a loss and damage fund does one essential thing. It recognises that the global climate crisis is no longer a problem of future development. We have entered the stage where the failure to urgently address the mounting crisis becomes an active process of victimisation. A victimisation that cries out, at least, for an admission of responsibility and adequate compensation.

Adam Tooze is a professor of history at Columbia University

The cost: The participating counties and municipalities are contributing to a $4bn statewide spend, including Miami Beach’s $400m Forever Bond, a $1bn stormwater plan and $250m of improvements to Broward county’s sewage systems to protect against flooding and seawater seepage. In the Keys, many consider the estimated $60m a mile cost of raising roads too expensive.

The threat: Saltwater from sea level rise is seeping further inland through Florida’s porous limestone bedrock and contaminating underground freshwater supplies, notably in the Biscayne aquifer, the 4,000-sq mile shallow limestone basin that provides drinking water to millions in southern Florida. Years of over-pumping and toxic runoff from farming and the sugar industry in central Florida and the Everglades have worsened the situation. The Florida department of environmental protection warned in March that “existing sources of water will not adequately meet the reasonable beneficial needs for the next 20 years”. A rising water table, meanwhile, has exacerbated problems with south Florida’s ageing sewage systems. Since December, millions of gallons of toxic, raw sewage have spilled on to Fort Lauderdale’s streets from a series of pipe failures.

The cost: The Everglades restoration plan was originally priced at $7.8bn, rose to $10.5bn, and has since ballooned to $16.4bn. Donald Trump’s proposed 2021 federal budget includes $250m for Everglades restoration. The estimated $1.8bn cost of the reservoir will be split between federal and state budgets.

Possible solutions

The cost: With homeowners and businesses largely bearing their own costs, the specific amount spent on “hurricane-proofing” in Florida is impossible to know. A 2018 Pew research study documented $1.3bn in hazard mitigation grants from federal and state funding in 2017, along with a further $8bn in post-disaster grants. Florida is spending another $633m from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development on resiliency planning.

Wildlife and habitat loss The threat: Florida’s native flora and fauna are being devastated by climate change, with the Florida Natural Areas Inventory warning that a quarter of the 1,200 species it tracks is set to lose more than half their existing habitat, and the state’s beloved manatees and Key deer are at risk of extinction. Warmer and more acidic seas reduce other species’ food stocks and exacerbate the deadly red-tide algal blooms that have killed incalculable numbers of fish, turtles, dolphins and other marine life. Bleaching and stony coral tissue disease linked to the climate crisis threaten to hasten the demise of the Great Florida Reef, the only living coral reef in the continental US. Encroaching saltwater has turned Big Pine Key, a crucial deer habitat, into a ghost forest.

As for the Key deer, of which fewer than 1,000 remain, volunteers leave clean drinking water to replace salt-contaminated watering holes as herds retreat to higher ground. A longer-term debate is under way on the merits and ethics of relocating the species to other areas of Florida or the US.

Coastal erosion The threat: Tourist brochures showcase miles of golden, sandy beaches in South Florida, but the reality is somewhat different. The Florida department of environmental protection deems the entire coastline from Miami to Cape Canaveral “critically eroded”, the result of sea level rise, historically high tides and especially storm surges from a succession of powerful hurricanes. In south-eastern Florida’s Palm Beach, Broward, Miami-Dade and Monroe counties, authorities are waging a continuous war on sand loss, eager to maintain their picture-perfect image and protect two of their biggest sources of income, tourism dollars and lucrative property taxes from waterfront homes and businesses.

In the devastating hurricane season just one year before, major storms named Harvey, Maria and Irma combined to cause damage estimated at $265bn. Scientists have evidence the climate crisis is causing cyclones to be more powerful, and intensify more quickly, and Florida’s position at the end of the Atlantic Ocean’s “hurricane alley” makes it twice as vulnerable as any other state.

With the other option abandoning beaches to the elements, city and county commissions have little choice but costly replenishment projects with sand replacement and jetty construction. Federal law prohibits the importation of cheaper foreign sand, so the municipalities must source a more expensive alternative from US markets, often creating friction with residents who don’t want to part with their sand. Supplementary to sand replenishment, the Nature Conservancy is a partner in a number of nature-based coastal defense projects from West Palm Beach to Miami.

benefited from 61,000 cubic yards of new sand this year at a cost of $16m. Statewide, Florida spends an average $50m annually on beach erosion.

The threat: “Climate gentrification” is a buzzword around south Florida, a region barely 6ft above sea level where land has become increasingly valuable in elevated areas. Speculators and developers are eyeing historically black, working-class and poorer areas, pushing out long-term residents and replacing affordable housing with upscale developments and luxury accommodations that only the wealthy can afford.

No study has yet calculated the overall cost of affordable housing lost to the climate crisis. Private developers will bear the expense of mitigating the impact on the neighborhood – $31m in Magic City’s case over 15 years to the Little Haiti Revitalization Trust, largely for new “green” affordable housing. The University of Miami’s housing solutions lab has a $300,000 grant from JPMorgan to report on the impact of rising seas to South Florida’s affordable housing stocks and recommend modifications to prevent it from flooding and other climate events. A collaboration of not-for-profit groups is chasing $75m in corporate funding for affordable housing along the 70-mile south Florida rail trail from Miami to West Palm Beach, with the first stage, a $5m project under way to identify, build and renovate 300 units.

Florida has long been plagued by political leadership more in thrall to the interests of big industry than the environment. As governor from 2011 to 2019, Rick Scott, now a US senator, slashed $700m from Florida’s water management budget, rolled back environmental regulations and enforcement, gave a free ride to polluters, and flip-flopped over expanding offshore oil drilling. The politician who came to be known as “Red Tide Rick”, for his perceived inaction over 2018’s toxic algae bloom outbreaks, reportedly banned the words “climate change” and “global warming” from state documents.

Last month, state legislators approved the first dedicated climate bill. It appears a promising start for a new administration, but activists say more needs to be done. In January, the Sierra Club awarded DeSantis failing grades in an environmental report card, saying he failed to protect Florida’s springs and rivers and approved new roads that threatened protected wildlife.

The cost: Florida’s spending on the environment is increasing. The state budget passed last month included $650m for Everglades restoration and water management projects (an instalment of DeSantis’s $2.5bn four-year pledge) and $100m for Florida Forever. A $100m bridge project jointly funded by the state and federal governments will allow the free flow of water under the Tamiami Trail for the first time in decades.

Florida has woken up to the threat of climate change but it is not yet clear how effective the response will be. The challenges are innumerable, the costs immense and the political will to fix or minimize the issues remains questionable, despite recent progress. At stake is the very future of one of the largest and most diverse states in the nation, in terms of both its population and its environment. Action taken now will determine its survival.

“I spent years debating quite strongly with climate sceptics, including people I assume were paid,” he added. “But there can be a real personal cost interacting over a long time with people who are abusing you.”McNeall said it was hard for scientists to work out how to cut through the false information on Twitter. “I just can’t tell if people are seeing disinformation or getting good scientific information about what is happening,” he said. “That’s really worrying.”

Ed Hawkins, professor of climate science at Reading University, who has 94,000 Twitter followers, said he had seen a “huge increase” in tweets from climate-denier accounts, often involving conspiracy theories or long-debunked topics. “A larger fraction of the comments are personal and abusive,” he said. “Any mildly popular tweet from a climate scientist is now targeted for a barrage of replies.”

Hawkins has noticed that many denier accounts have paid subscriptions to Twitter and therefore appear higher up in the replies. “It appears to be a coordinated effort [by climate change deniers] to make it appear as though climate denial is more prevalent than it really is,” he said.

Professor Richard Betts, chair of climate impacts at Exeter University and head of climate impacts at the Hadley Centre, said: “Outright hostility has increased in recent weeks. It’s mostly just people saying you’re talking rubbish. They don’t want a conversation.”

A survey of 468 international climate scientists published by campaign group Global Witness last month found that prominent scientists were the most likely to face abuse, with half of those who had published at least 10 papers reporting they had suffered online harassment as a result of their climate work. One in eight female scientists who reported abuse had been threatened with sexual violence.

Promotional materials for the event cite Greta as someone placed on the frontline of climate activism “by PR professionals seeking to bedevil the plant-nutrient carbon dioxide” and describe the AfD as “the only party in Germany not willing to back the supposed climate consensus”.

“The fact that many mainstream politicians from across the political divide in Germany supported a 16-year-old female activist who was virtually unknown until a few months ago, allowed the party to present belief in climate change as irrational, hysteria, panic, cult-like or even as a replacement religion. Attacking Greta, at times in fairly vicious ways, including mocking her for her autism, became a way to portray the AfD’s political opponents as irrational.”

“The AfD has been denying human-made climate change on its social media pages since 2016, and while it has not shifted its position it is clear that the party decided to communicate it more frequently.

“We are experiencing a shift to the right on social media and in society. In a short period of time, the new right has established its own counter-society on climate issues. With troll armies, agitating magazines and the support of climate sceptics like EIKE, it has created its own sphere that is massively underestimated.”

“Many people, I’d argue, are experiencing what I’d call a ‘latent’ form of climate anxiety or dread, in that they may not be talking about it much but they are feeling it.”

“The main thing is that we find ways to talk about what we are experiencing in a safe and nonjudgmental context, and to be open to listening. All too often, when anxiety or fear comes up, we all want to push it away and move into ‘solutions.’

The psychological weight of climate change can lead to feelings of helplessness and fear, and to climate disengagement. Not surprisingly, those directly impacted by climate-augmented disasters fare even worse

Another way I cope is by simply burning less fossil fuel. This eliminates internal cognitive dissonance by aligning my actions with my knowledge.

“It’s important to remember that inaction is rarely about a lack of concern or care, but is so much more complex,”

“Namely, that we westerners are living in a society that is still deeply entrenched in the very practices we now know are damaging and destructive. This creates a very specific kind of situation—what psychologists call cognitive dissonance. Unless we know how to work with this dissonance, we will continue to come up against resistance, inaction, and reactivity.

In general, suicide is projected to rise dramatically due to climate change; in addition to the psychological toll, our brains don’t respond well physically to excessive heat.

There are more people in my life talking openly about climate change. And that helps.

“we need to be careful not to make assumptions about other people’s relationships with these issues. Even if people may not be showing it, research shows again and again that it’s still on their minds and a source of discomfort or distress.”

Finally, I actively work to be hope-oriented

Modern climate change is completely different: It’s 100 percent human-caused, so it’s 100 percent human-solvable

this possibility leaves open a middle path, something between sweeping climate action and an unavoidable planetary collision—a rapid cultural shift, one that we all can contribute to through our conversations and our daily actions. And that’s a very hopeful thing.

Sometimes a wave of climate grief breaks over me. It happens unexpectedly

During these moments, I feel with excruciating clarity everything that we’re losing—but also connection and love for those things

Occasionally, however, I feel something quite different, a paralyzing sense of anxiety. This climate dread can last for days, even weeks. It can come with nightmare

n ever