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The Earth itself is our greatest ally in this effort. Ecosystems like California’s kelp forests absorb about half of the greenhouse gases humans emit, studies show. Without them, warming would be even worse. Nature shields us from the worst consequences of our own actions, forgiving the sins we refuse to repent.

If we hope to solve climate change, humanity must also address this biodiversity crisis — restoring ecosystems and the creatures that inhabit them.

One way to revitalize ecosystems: protect the ground they grow from.Think of the soft, spongy soil of an old-growth woodland. Here, a towering oak tree draws up water and nutrients via threadlike fungi attached to its roots. In exchange, the fungi take sugar from the oak, funneling carbon from the air into the ground.Now imagine a leaf from that oak drifting slowly to the forest floor. Perhaps it becomes food for an earthworm. Then microbes attack the earthworm’s droppings, breaking down the residue further still.Eventually, the carbon that was once a leaf can become trapped in clods of earth. Other atoms may form strong chemical bonds with minerals like iron, which prevents them from reacting with oxygen and returning to the air. Under the right conditions, carbon might stay locked away in dense, dark earth for centuries. Soils contain more carbon than the entire atmosphere and all the world’s plants combined.

This makes soil both a ticking time bomb and an overlooked climate solution

“And because soil is such an important reservoir,” Berhe said, “a small change in the release of that carbon can lead to a big change in the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.”

A 2020 analysis in the journal Nature Sustainability found that better soil stewardship could reduce emissions by at least 5.5 gigatons of carbon dioxide each year — about 15 percent of current annual emissions.

“Once that happens,” Berhe said, “it’s not just the carbon status of the soil that’s improved. The soil literally becomes softer. It holds more water and nutrients. It’s easier for plants to grow in … and serve as a home for the most abundant and diverse group of organisms that we know of.

Enhancing carbon in soils is just the beginning. In 2017, an international team of scientists set out to determine how much carbon the planet could pull out of the atmosphere, if humans would only give it a chance. In a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), they concluded natural climate systems are capable of storing almost 24 gigatons of carbon dioxide per year — roughly two thirds of what people emit.

About half of that sequestration would be cost-effective, meaning enacting the necessary protections would cost less than the consequences of keeping that carbon in the air.

Of the climate solutions they studied, few delivered more carbon bang per buck than mangroves — lush systems of salt-tolerant shrubs and trees that thrive where freshwater rivers spill into the sea. Though these forests occupy just 0.5 percent of the Earth’s shorelines, they account for 10 percent of the coast’s carbon storage capacity.

But the unique ecosystems are too often dismissed as unproductive swamps, good for no one but the mosquitoes. In the past half-century, more than a quarter of the world’s mangroves have been destroyed — drained for development, converted for shrimp farms, poisoned by fertilizer and drowned by dammed-up streams.

Yet the Earth cannot compensate for all of humanity’s pollution, said William Schlesinger, former dean of Duke University’s School of the Environment and a co-author on the 2017 PNAS study. Unless people also reduce the amount of greenhouse gases we emit, no amount of ecological restoration will save us.

“The bottom line is we’ve got to get off of using fossil fuels in transportation and heating and lighting and everything else,”

In public talks, he puts it this way: “It’s easier to patch a hole in a bag than to pick up the marbles that fall out.”

Since the end of the last ice age, the frozen expanse at the top of the world has acted as a protective shield. During the summer, when the sun shines 24 hours a day, Arctic sea ice reflects about two-thirds of the light that hits it back into space. By contrast, the dark open ocean absorbs the majority of the sun’s heat.

If the Arctic loses its perpetual ice cover, it would add half a degree Celsius of warming to the global average temperature, studies suggest. The world is hurtling toward that milestone. Since 1979, the volume of ice left at the end of the summer has shrunk about 75 percent.

There is just one way to save it, she said: by stopping global warming. Only by ending the use of fossil fuels and eliminating greenhouse gas emissions can people prevent the Arctic from heating further and give the ice a chance to recover.

If we do nothing, models indicate, it will be a matter of decades before the summertime Arctic is ice-free for the first time in human history. Sea levels will surge, coastal communities will be deluged, and we will no longer have the planet’s air conditioning unit to help us cool our world down.

Our species evolved and our civilization was built under fairly stable climate conditions. When things changed, they changed slowly, giving us time to adapt.

The rapid transformation of our planet doesn’t just endanger ecosystems; humanity will suffer. People have never lived on a planet without mangroves, or peatlands, or summertime ice. We’ve never had to go without the benefits the Earth provides.

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.

it turns out that the way we move largely determines the way we live.

gadgets cumulatively contribute only a fraction of what we save by living in a walkable neighborhood. It turns out that trading all of your incandescent lightbulbs for energy savers conserves as much carbon per year as living in a walkable neighborhood does each week.

“gizmo green”; the obsession with “sustainable” products that often have a statistically insignificant impact on the carbon footprint when compared to our location. And, as already suggested, our location’s greatest impact on our carbon footprint comes from how much it makes us drive.

study made it clear that, while every factor counts, none counts more than walkability. Specifically, it showed how, in drivable locations, transportation energy use consistently tops household energy use, in some cases by more than 2.4 to 1. As a result, the most green home (with Prius) in sprawl still loses out to the least green home in a walkable neighborhood.

because it’s better than nothing, LEED — like the Prius — is a get-out-of-jail-free card that allows us to avoid thinking more deeply about our larger footprint. For most organizations and agencies, it is enough. Unfortunately, as the transportation planner Dan Malouff puts it, “LEED architecture without good urban design is like cutting down the rainforest using hybrid-powered bulldozers.”

10 to 20 units per acre is the density at which drivable suburbanism transitions into walkable urbanism.

“We are a destructive species, and if you love nature, stay away from it. The best means of protecting the environment is to

The average New Yorker consumes roughly one-third the electricity of the average Dallas resident, and ultimately generates less than one-third the greenhouse gases of the average American.

the American anti-urban ethos remained intact as everything else changed. The desire to be isolated in nature, adopted en masse, led to the quantities and qualities we now call “sprawl,” which somehow mostly manages to combine the traffic congestion of the city with the intellectual culture of the countryside.

New York consumes half the gasoline of Atlanta (326 versus 782 gallons per person per year). But Toronto cuts that number in half, as does Sydney — and most European cities use only half as much as those places. Cut Europe’s number in half, and you end up with Hong Kong

Paris is one place that has determined that its future depends on reducing its auto dependence. The city has recently decided to create 25 miles of dedicated busways, introduced 20,000 shared city bikes in 1,450 locations, and committed to removing 55,000 parking spaces from the city every year for the next 20 years. These changes sound pretty radical, but they are supported by 80 percent of the population.

increasing density from two units per acre to 20 units per acre resulted in about the same savings as the increase from 20 to 200.

New York is our densest big city and, not coincidentally, the one with the best transit service. All the other subway stations in America put together would not outnumber the 468 stops of the MTA. In terms of resource efficiency, it’s the best we’ve got.

most communities with these densities are also organized as traditional mixed-use, pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods, the sort of accommodating environment that entices people out of their cars. Everything above that is icing on the cake.

unless we hit a national crisis of unprecedented severity, it is hard to imagine any argument framed in the language of sustainability causing many people to modify their behavior. So what will?

The gold standard of quality-of-life rankings is the Mercer Survey, which carefully compares global cities in the 10 categories of political stability, economics, social quality, health and sanitation, education, public services, recreation, consumer goods, housing, and climate.

the top 10 cities always seem to include a bunch of places where they speak German (Vienna, Zurich, Dusseldorf, etc.), along with Vancouver, Auckland, and Sydney. These are all places with compact settlement patterns, good transit, and principally walkable neighborhoods. Indeed, there isn’t a single auto-oriented city in the top 50. The highest-rated American cities in 2010, which don’t appear until No. 31, are Honolulu, San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, Washington, New York, and Seattle.

Our cities, which are twice as efficient as our suburbs, burn twice the fuel of these European, Canadian, and Aussie/Kiwi places. Yet the quality of life in these foreign cities is deemed higher than ours by a long shot.

if we pollute so much because we are throwing away our time, money, and lives on the highway, then both problems would seem to share a single solution, and that solution is to make our cities more walkable. Doing so is not easy, but it can be done, it has been done,

That may not sound like much, but scientists say even the smallest increase causes the seawater to eat away more aggressively at the shoreline in calm weather, and leads to higher tidal surges during storms. The sea-level rise of decades past thus explains why coastal towns nearly everywhere are having to spend billions of dollars fighting erosion.

The evidence suggests that the sea-level rise has probably accelerated, to about a foot a century, and scientists think it will accelerate still more with the continued emission of large amounts of greenhouse gases into the air. The gases heat the planet and cause land ice to melt into the sea.

The official stance of the world’s climate scientists is that the global sea level could rise as much as three feet by the end of this century, if emissions continue at a rapid pace. But some scientific evidence supports even higher numbers, five feet and beyond in the worst case.

the land in this part of the world is sinking. And that goes back to the last ice age, which peaked some 20,000 years ago.

s a massive ice sheet, more than a mile thick, grew over what are now Canada and the northern reaches of the United States, the weight of it depressed the crust of the earth. Areas away from the ice sheet bulged upward in response, as though somebody had stepped on one edge of a balloon, causing the other side to pop up. Now that the ice sheet has melted, the ground that was directly beneath it is rising, and the peripheral bulge is falling.

Up and down the Eastern Seaboard, municipal planners want to know: How bad are things going to get, and how fast?

People considering whether to buy or rebuild at the storm-damaged Jersey Shore, for instance, could be looking at nearly a foot of sea-level rise by the time they would pay off a 30-year mortgage, according to the Rutgers projections. That would make coastal flooding and further property damage considerably more likely than in the past.

Even if the global sea level rises only eight more inches by 2050, a moderate forecast, the Rutgers group foresees relative increases of 14 inches at bedrock locations like the Battery, and 15 inches along the New Jersey coastal plain, where the sediments are compressing. By 2100, they calculate, a global ocean rise of 28 inches would produce increases of 36 inches at the Battery and 39 inches on the coastal plain.

Conversations about climate change have broken into everyday life, to the top of the headlines and to center stage in the presidential campaign.

The questions are profound and urgent. Can this be reversed? What can be done to minimize the looming dangers for the decades ahead? Will the destruction of recent weeks become a moment of reckoning, or just a blip in the news cycle?

“It’s as if we’ve been smoking a pack of cigarettes a day for decades” and the world is now feeling the effects

But, she said, “we’re not dead yet.”

Climate change is more a slope than a cliff, experts agreed. We’re still far from any sort of “game over” moment where it’s too late to act. There remains much that can be done to limit the damage to come, to brace against the coming megafires and superstorms and save lives and hold onto a thriving civilization.

The effects of climate change evident today are the results of choices that countries made decades ago to keep pumping heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at ever-increasing rates despite warnings from scientists about the price to be paid.

Nations, including the United States, have dithered so long in cutting emissions that progressively more global warming is assured for decades to come, even if efforts to shift away from fossil fuels were accelerated tomorrow.

Things are on track to get “twice as bad” as they are now, he said, “if not worse.”

it may be time to flip that chronological framing, and consider today the new starting point.

“Don’t think of it as the warmest month of August in California in the last century,” he wrote. “Think of it as one of the coolest months of August in California in the next century.”

Their most sobering message was that the world still hasn’t seen the worst of it. Gone is the climate of yesteryear, and there’s no going back.

“It’s not that it’s out of our control. The whole thing is in our control.”

Managing climate change, experts said, will require rethinking virtually every aspect of daily life

how and where homes are built, how power grids are designed, how people plan for the future with the collective good in mind.

It will require an epochal shift in politics in a country that has, on the whole, ignored climate change

The fires, along with others in places including Colorado, Oregon and Washington, destroyed entire towns and sent smoke tens of thousands of feet high. San Francisco, Portland and Seattle have suffered some of the unhealthiest air quality on the planet, beating cities such as Beijing and New Delhi for the title. Smoke spread all the way across the continent, with particles coloring sunsets on the East Coast.

Evidence of global warming — which, scientists said, helps drive a rise in wildfire activity by creating hotter and drier conditions — was hanging visibly in the air.

For a long time, “there was so much focus on how climate change would affect the most vulnerable, like low-lying island nations or coral reefs — things that don’t dramatically affect the economic powerhouses of the world,”

“There’s often been this arrogant assumption that wealth provides protection.”

“we’re all in this together.”

Again and again, climate scientists have shown that our choices now range from merely awful to incomprehensibly horrible.

every coal plant in China, every steel mill in Europe, every car and truck in the United States.

It’s a staggering task. It means reorienting a global economy that depends on fossil fuels

Even if we start radically slashing emissions today, it could be decades before those changes start to appreciably slow the rate at which Earth is warming. In the meantime, we’ll have to deal with effects that continue to worsen.

“Seriously, it is not reversible.”

First, experts broadly agreed, if we want to stop the planet from relentlessly heating up forever, humanity will quickly need to eliminate its emissions of planet-warming greenhouse gases.

Whether Americans can adopt that mentality remains an open question.“We’ve often heard the argument that it will be too expensive to cut emissions and it will just be easier to adapt,” said Noah Diffenbaugh, a climate scientist at Stanford University. But we’ve now had decades of warnings, he said, “and we’re not even adapted to the present climate.”

Failure to do so doubles or triples that number.

If we act now, sea levels could rise another 1 to 2 feet this century.

If we don’t, Antarctica’s ice sheets could destabilize irreversibly and ocean levels could keep rising at an inexorable pace for centuries, making coastal civilization all but unmanageable.

The best hope is to slow the pace of warming enough to maintain some control for humanity.

“In our research, we’ve found that most systems can cope with a 1.5-degree or 2-degree world, although it will be very costly and extremely difficult to adapt

“But in a 4-degree world, in many cases, the system just doesn’t work anymore.”

So, even as nations cut emissions, they will need to accelerate efforts to adapt to the climate change they can no longer avoid.

“The human capacity for adaptation is extraordinary — not unlimited, but extraordinary,”

“I’m much more concerned for the future of the nonhuman than I am for the future of humans, precisely because we’re just very, very good at adaptation.”

adaptation is usually a reactive measure, not a preventive one

Adapting to climate change means envisioning bigger disasters to come — again, flipping the framing away from history and into the future.

“Humans have difficulty imagining things that we haven’t experienced yet,”

It’s hard to visualize the entire West Coast aflame until you actually see it. And if we can’t see it, we tend to discount the risk.”

And there’s the moral hazard problem, which is when people are shielded from the costs of their decisions and thus make bad ones.

Cascading Disasters

Adaptation can quickly become bogged down in a tangle of competing motivations and unintended consequences.

Proposals for stricter building codes or higher insurance premiums face opposition from builders and voters alike.

If we cut emissions rapidly, about one-seventh of the world’s population will suffer severe heat waves every few years.

as climate change intensifies, it increases the risk of “compound hazards,” when numerous disasters strike simultaneously, as well as the risk that one disaster cascades into another.

Experts also noted that climate change is an accelerant of inequality. Those most affected, globally and in the United States, tend to be the most vulnerable populations.

One concern is that adaptability will not be a collective effort. Wealthier people may find ways to protect themselves, while others are left fending for themselves

A Lifetime of Clues

For well over a century, science has provided us with powerful clues that this was coming.

As early as the 1850s, researchers realized that greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide could trap heat on Earth. This came at the dawn of the Industrial Age,

“I feel like the climate scientists have kind of done our job,” said Dr. Kalmus, the Los Angeles-based scientist. “We’ve laid it out pretty clearly, but nobody’s doing anything. So now it’s kind of up to the social scientists.”

ne 2017 study found that people who experience extreme weather are more likely to support climate adaptation measures than before. But the effect diminished over time. It may be that people mentally adjust to unusual weather patterns, updating their perception of what they consider normal.

“There’s too much complexity and, frankly, too much that needs to be changed, that we’re flitting from one concern to another,”

“What’s beautiful about the human species is that we have the free will to decide our own fate,” said Ilona Otto, a climate scientist at the Wegener Center for Climate and Global Change. “We have the agency to take courageous decisions and do what’s needed,” she said. “If we choose.”

Before this study, continuous temperature record reconstruction only went back about 2,000 years. The temperature trend produces a line shaped like a "hockey stick" with a sudden spike after what had been a fairly steady line. That data came from tree rings, ice cores and lake sediments.

the general downward trend of temperatures that reversed 100 years ago seemed to indicate the Earth was heading either toward another ice age or little ice age from about 1550 to 1850. Or it was continuing to cool naturally until greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuels changed everything.

"We have, through human emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases, indefinitely delayed the onset of the next ice age and are now heading into an unknown future where humans control the thermostat of the planet,

 The committee's model calculations, while exploratory and highly uncertain, indicate that the benefits of making the transition, i.e. energy cost savings, improved vehicle technologies, and reductions in petroleum use and greenhouse gas emissions, exceed the additional costs of the transition over and above what the market is willing to do voluntarily."

Improving the efficiency of conventional vehicles is, up to a point, the most economical and easiest-to-implement approach to saving fuel and lowering emissions, the report says.  This approach includes reducing work the engine must perform -- reducing vehicle weight, aerodynamic resistance, rolling resistance, and accessories -- plus improving the efficiency of the internal combustion engine powertrain.

Improved efficiency alone will not meet the 2050 goals, however.  The average fuel economy of vehicles on the road would have to exceed 180 mpg, which, the report says, is extremely unlikely with current technologies.  Therefore, the study committee also considered other alternatives for vehicles and fuels, including:

Although driving costs per mile will be lower, especially for vehicles powered by natural gas or electricity, the high initial purchase cost is likely to be a significant barrier to widespread consumer acceptance

Wide consumer acceptance is essential, however, and large numbers of alternative vehicles must be purchased long before 2050 if the on-road fleet is to meet desired performance goals.  Strong policies and technology advances are critical in overcoming this challenge.

While corn-grain ethanol and biodiesel are the only biofuels to have been produced in commercial quantities in the U.S. to date, the study committee found much greater potential in biofuels made from lignocellulosic biomass -- which includes crop residues like wheat straw, switchgrass, whole trees, and wood waste.  This "drop-in" fuel is designed to be a direct replacement for gasoline and could lead to large reductions in both petroleum use and greenhouse gas emissions; it can also be introduced without major changes in fuel delivery infrastructure or vehicles.  The report finds that sufficient lignocellulosic biomass could be produced by 2050 to meet the goal of an 80 percent reduction in petroleum use when combined with highly efficient vehicles

By the end, Safina is nearly a contrarian. Fertilizer runoff from the Mississippi, he concludes, causes the gulf more harm than did BP, while the fishing ban that went into force just after the spill might have helped marine wildlife more than the oil hurt it.

Safina concludes that greenhouse gases from routine fossil fuel use — “That spill is invisible” — are far more worrisome than what happened in the gulf. He asserts that true market pricing of gasoline to reflect its cost in atmospheric harm — that is, a carbon tax — would be a better response to the gulf spill than cleaning birds.

“The Earth’s climate is unequivocally undergoing a long-term warming trend, as established by decades of scientific measurements and multiple, independent lines of evidence,”

“Climate change effects could undermine important international systems on which the U.S. is critically dependent, such as trade routes, food and energy supplies, the global economy and domestic stability abroad.”

Science has explained the problem: Certain gases in the atmosphere trap heat at the Earth’s surface. More of those gases in the atmosphere will trap more heat, unleashing a cascade of unpredictable effects.

As always with science, the unlocked knowledge reveals more mysteries to be plumbed. How will Earth’s complex climate react, and how quickly? And how will Earth’s most creative and adaptable species, human beings, react to shape the outcome?

The challenge of climate change demands an urgent response but not an apocalyptic one

For example: It has become common in certain circles for people to say they won’t have children because of the impending hellscape of drought, fire, flood and tempest that will ruin future lives. How common? A celebrity member of Congress gave an endorsement

“Basically, there’s a scientific consensus that the lives of children are going to be very difficult,” said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). She added: “And it does lead, I think, young people to have a legitimate question: Is it okay to still have children?

This is not the language of science. That gloomy “consensus” has no scientific claim

Instead, with so much still to be learned and such a powerful tool in science, optimism is the attitude worthy of the work ahead.

We scoff at the ignorance of our elders who searched comets for portents of The End. But how different are we?

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.

“People’s lives will be affected by a massive pressure for migration,” said Pete Smith, a professor of plant and soil science at the University of Aberdeen and one of the report’s lead authors. “People don’t stay and die where they are. People migrate.”

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

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

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

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

“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.”

Still, we should do something. We need to learn how much, if at all, we can influence emissions.

Politics is present-oriented.

Most nations aren’t willing to scrap the energy status quo — the very basis of modern civilization — before having a practical substitute

a “carbon dividend” plan. This would be a good start.

That’s a standard carbon tax. What defines the “carbon dividend” plan is that all the money collected would be rebated to households.

Under one proposal, the government would slap a $43 tax on each ton of CO2. That would equal about 38 cents on a gallon of gasoline

It would raise about $180 billion in the tax’s first year, he says. If the “dividend” — the tax rebate — were distributed evenly, that would be about $1,400 per household.

Without the tax, projected CO2 emissions would be 5.4 billion metric tons in 2035. With the tax, the total would be 3.6 billion metric tons, a 33 percent decline

the initial increase in gasoline prices of 38 cents a gallon is within normal market fluctuations. The rebate would sweeten the tax. Consumers who cut fossil fuel use would come out ahead.

The tax has another advantage. It decentralizes decision-making to individual companies and people

None of this has changed my long-standing skepticism that, without some major technological breakthrough (safer nuclear power?), it will be exceedingly hard to halt the increase in atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases. The required changes in lifestyle and economic activity are simply too great.

For the 5.4 million people who live in Russia’s permafrost zone, the new climate has disrupted their homes and their livelihoods. Rivers are rising and running faster, and entire neighborhoods are falling into them. Arable land for farming has plummeted by more than half, to just 120,000 acres in 2017.

As the permafrost thaws, animals and plants frozen for thousands of years begin to decompose and send a steady flow of carbon dioxide and other gases into the atmosphere — accelerating climate change.

Siberians who grew up learning to read nature’s subtlest signals are being driven to migrate by a climate they no longer understand.

This migration from the countryside to cities and towns — also driven by factors such as low investment and spotty Internet — represents one of the most significant and little-noticed movements to date of climate refugees. The city of Yakutsk has seen its population surge 20 percent to more than 300,000 in the past decade.

In Yakutia, an area one-third the size of the United States, cattle and reindeer herding have plunged 20 percent as the animals increasingly battle to survive the warming climate’s destruction of pastureland.

Winters, though still brutal, turned milder — and shorter. Fed by the more rapidly thawing permafrost, rivers started flooding more, leaving some communities inaccessible for months and washing others away, along with the ground beneath them.

a booming cottage industry in mammoth hunting has taken hold

ornithologists in the region have identified 48 new bird species in the past half century, an increase of almost 20 percent in the known diversity of bird life.

“It used to be man was in control,” said Pyotr Kaurgin, head of the Chukchi indigenous community in the village of Kolymskoye, on the northern reaches of the Kolyma River. “Now nature is in control.”

Formed during the late Pleistocene, the Earth’s last glacial period, which ended about 11,700 years ago, Yedoma consists of thick layers of soil packed around gigantic lodes of embedded ice. Because Yedoma contains so much ice, it can melt quickly — reshaping the landscape as sudden lakes form and hillsides collapse.

In the summer, huge blazes tore through Siberian boreal forests, unleashing yet more carbon into the atmosphere. Some scientists fear worsening northern fires are amplifying the permafrost damage.

on the Yamal Peninsula, monstrous craters have opened up in the tundra. Scientists suspect they represent sudden explosions of methane gas freed by thawing permafrost.

Due to thawing permafrost — along with the demise of Soviet-era state farms — the area of cultivated land in Yakutia has plummeted by more than half since 1990. The region’s cattle herds have shrunk by about 20 percent, to 188,100 head in 2017 from 233,300 in 2011. Reindeer herds have also declined sharply

he degradation of crop and pastureland caused by the thawing permafrost helped bring about the collapse of the region’s agriculture.

Yegor Prokopyev, the retired head of Nelemnoye, says climate change is the latest shock to befall the Kolyma River region. There was communism and forced collective farming. Then capitalism and government cutbacks.

. The radical transformation underway here, she said, should serve as a warning to people in every corner of the globe. “Changing our ways is imminent,” Crate said.

The town of Zyryanka has warmed by just over 2 degrees Celsius from 1966 to 2016, according to their analysis.

The Post’s analysis, which uses a data set from Berkeley Earth, looks further back. It shows that Zyryanka and the roughly 2,000-square-mile area surrounding it has warmed by more than 3 degrees Celsius when the past five years are compared with the mid- to late 1800s.

From 2005 to 2014, his team found, the number of days with below-freezing temperatures three feet below the surface fell from around 230 days a year to 190.

enormous wedges of ice lie under Yakutia.

“The permafrost is thawing so fast,” said Anna Liljedahl, an associate professor at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. “We scientists can’t keep up anymore.”

In the 1970s, Desyatkin said, the ground in the Middle Kolyma District, just north of Zyryanka, thawed to a depth of about two feet every summer. Now it thaws to more than three feet. That extra foot of thawing means that, on average, every square mile of territory has been releasing an additional 700,000 gallons of water into the environment every year

Meanwhile, ancient plant and animal remains trapped inside the Yedoma are exposed to nonfreezing temperatures — or even the open air. That, in turn, activates microbes, which break down the remains and unleash carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, especially from the thawing plant material.

Scientists estimate that the Earth’s Yedoma regions contain between 327 billion and 466 billion tons of carbon. Were it all released into the atmosphere, that would amount to more than half of all human-caused emissions from greenhouse gases and deforestation between 1750 and 2011

As the permafrost thaws and riverbanks erode, more tusks will emerge. Though mammoths disappeared from the Siberian mainland some 10,000 years ago, the government estimates that 500,000 tons of their tusks are still buried in the frozen ground.

Supply and demand are so great that some people are collecting mammoth tusks at near-industrial scale. They use high-pressure hoses to blast away riverbanks and hire teams of young men to comb the wilderness for months at a time.

. In the glutted market, Sivtsev said, the price for top-quality tusks has fallen from about $500 a pound five years ago to around $180.

climate change is leaving people with few choices. “They have to somehow support and feed their families.”

The ducks and geese are just about gone, he said, possibly moving to new habitats in Siberia as the climate shifts. The sable pelts aren’t as thick as they used to be. The shorter winters mean that once reliably frozen-over lakes and rivers are now less predictable, making hunting grounds harder to reach and restricting his ability to get goods to market.

In Nelemnoye, the population has declined to 180 from 210 in the past decade, according to village head Andrei Solntsev. Just 82 of the residents have work. Many factors are pushing people to move to the city — lack of Internet access, poor flight connections, limited job opportunities — but the uncertainty born of a changing climate looms over everything

As the permafrost thaws and recedes, a handful of apartment buildings there are showing signs of structural problems. Sections of many older, wooden buildings already sag toward the ground — rendered uninhabitable by the unevenly thawing earth. New apartment blocks are being built on massive pylons extending ever deeper — more than 40 feet — below ground

a study published this year that the value of buildings and infrastructure on Russian permafrost amounts to $300 billion — about 7.5 percent of the nation’s total annual economic output. They estimate the cost of mitigating the damage wrought by thawing permafrost will probably total more than $100 billion by 2050.

In the electricity sector, emissions plunged by 10.3 percent in 2020, driven by a sharp decline in coal burning. As electricity demand sagged nationwide, utilities ran their coal plants far less often because coal has become the most expensive fuel in many parts of the country. Instead, they used more natural gas — which produces less carbon dioxide than coal, but still generates significant heat-trapping methane — and drew more heavily on emissions-free wind and solar power.

Emissions from heavy industry, such as steel and cement, dropped 7 percent in 2020 as automakers and other manufacturers churned out fewer goods amid the economic slump. America’s buildings, which produce carbon dioxide when they burn oil or natural gas for heat, saw emissions fall 6.2 percent, driven by both lockdowns and warmer-than-average weather.

Transportation, the nation’s largest source of greenhouse gases, saw a 14.7 percent decline in emissions in 2020 as millions of people stopped driving to work and airlines canceled flights. While travel started picking up again in the latter half of the year as states relaxed their lockdowns, Americans drove 15 percent fewer miles over all last year than they did in 2019 and the demand for jet fuel fell by more than one-third.

Renewable energy surged in 2020, as energy companies overcame disruptions from the pandemic to build a record number of new wind turbines and solar panels ahead of a key deadline to claim a federal tax credit. The United States produced roughly as much electricity from renewable sources last year as it did from coal, a milestone that has never been reached before.

The other caveat is that America’s emissions could tick back up again once vaccines are widely distributed and the economy recovers. The Rhodium Group report noted that a similar rebound occurred after the financial crisis of 2008-9 caused emissions to fall sharply. And it noted that many sectors, like air travel and steel making, have already been rebounding in recent months.

“The vast majority of 2020’s emission reductions were due to decreased economic activity and not from any structural changes that would deliver lasting reductions in the carbon intensity of our economy.”

Scientists warn that even a big one-year drop in emissions is not enough to stop global warming. Until humanity’s emissions are essentially zeroed out and nations are no longer adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, the planet will continue to heat up. As if to underscore that warning, European researchers announced last week that 2020 was quite likely tied with 2016 as the hottest year on record.

Americans choosing Trump would send the signal that they don’t care about the climate, Light said.

“In the case of a second Trump term, we’ve got to totally double down on the efforts to communicate how serious the non-federal actors are in the United States,” Light said. “And what you really want to try to make sure is that those people in other countries who are not in favor of strengthening their countries’ own climate target are not able to point to the United States and say nothing’s going on there.”

The concentration of climate-heating greenhouse gases is at a record high, according to a report from the UN’s World Meteorological Organization. The planet is already 1C hotter than it was before industrialization.

As the technology for retrieving oil and gas has advanced, with hydraulic fracturing, the cost of production has plummeted. The US is now a net exporter of oil products.

Much of the expansion expected would be for feedstocks to make chemicals and plastics, explained Courtney Bernhardt, the group’s research director.

“The US is already struggling to meet climate commitments and transition to a low-carbon future,” Bernhardt said. “This analysis shows that we’re heading in the wrong direction and really need to slow emissions growth from the oil, gas and petrochemical industries.”

In the race against Trump, all the major Democratic candidates have similarly pledged to seek at least net-zero emissions by 2050.

The League of Conservation Voters’ called the House committee effort encouraging and said the announcement “is further proof that elections have consequences”. But other groups were critical, saying the plan would not transition away from fossil fuels fast enough.

major upgrade of its previous commitment to reducing greenhouse gases, and necessary if the world hopes to keep a global temperature rise well below 2 degrees

Japan is the world’s fifth-largest emitter of greenhouse gases. It had previously said it would go carbon neutral “at the earliest possible date,” vowing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent by 205

Joseph R. Biden Jr., his challenger in the presidential election, has vowed to restore the United States’ participation in the accord.

reinforced just how much of an outlier the United States, the world’s second-largest carbon emitter

decision was most likely driven by a combination of domestic and external political pressures

As a developed nation, Mr. Kuramochi said, it would be “somewhat embarrassing for Japan to have a net zero emissions timeline later than China.”

he would harness the power of “innovation” and “regulatory reform” to transform the country’s energy production and usage

The country has made steady progress in reducing its emissions, but still generated 1.06 billion tons of the gas in the one-year period that ended in March 2019, placing it among the top 10 per capita emitters

By the early 2000s, Japan had made substantial progress in curbing carbon dioxide emissions through the use of nuclear power. But the meltdown of a nuclear power plant in Fukushima after a devastating earthquake and tsunami in 2011 led to a widespread shutdown of the country’s energy-producing reactors, which had generated roughly a third of Japan’s total power supply. Only a handful of the plants have since restarted.

Short on energy sources, Japan decided to reinvest in coal.

Japan currently plans to reduce — but not eliminate — its dependence on coa

The country has also vowed to end contentious government subsidies for the export of coal-fired power technology to developing nations, where the use of coal for electricity continues to rise

Further efforts to decrease Japan’s domestic commitment to coal will likely meet powerful resistance from Japanese industry, which is still heavily dependent on the fuel

Japan is already considering a substantial increase in its supply of wind and solar power, and it is also looking at newer, less-established technologies, such as plants that burn ammonia or hydrogen.

Mr. Suga said that Japan would continue to develop nuclear power with “maximum priority on safety,”

Movement toward the new goal had already started on the local level, where 150 municipal governments have pledged to be carbon neutral by midcentury.

But even if Japan achieves its goal, it will not by itself be enough to halt or even slow the current trend of global warming, a goal that requires a global effort

Preventing a climate catastrophe will require “a transformation of the energy system that has underwritten modern society,”

Japan will be carbon neutral by 2050, its prime minister said on Monday

The announcement came just weeks after China, Japan’s regional rival, said it would reduce its net carbon emissions to zero by 2060.

This isn’t an American crisis alone. All around the world, developed nations have locked themselves into unsustainable, energy-intensive lifestyles.

Among those with the largest footprints are wealthy oil-producing microstates with small populations, like Qatar or Trinidad and Tobago, where the per-capita footprint pushes 60 tons

In the next tier, with the United States, are other sprawling, continent-size countries that use a lot of heating or cooling and where people tend to drive long distances, such as Canada and Australia (around 20 tons)

By dint of their density and reliance on mass transit, nations in Western Europe (as well as Japan and South Korea) make up most of the next tier, which cleaves roughly into two groups: places like Germany, Norway and the Netherlands that rely more on fossil fuels (around 15 tons),

places like the United Kingdom, Denmark and France that use a higher percentage of nuclear and renewable power. Though it’s half the size of an American’s, the footprint of someone in the typical French household still remains unsustainably high: around nine tons.

This is the paradox at the heart of climate change: We’ve burned far too many fossil fuels to go on living as we have, but we’ve also never learned to live well without them

the problem of the future is how to create a 19th-century carbon footprint without backsliding into a 19th-century standard of living. N

The greatest crisis in human history may require imagining ways of living — not just of energy production but of daily habit — that we have never seen before. How do we begin to imagine such a household?

With a carbon footprint hovering around the global median of 4.5 tons per capita, it falls within a narrow tier of nearly developed countries within sight of two tons per capita — the estimated amount needed to limit the world to 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming.

There are countries more prosperous, and countries with a smaller carbon footprint, but perhaps in none do the overlapping possibilities of living well and living without ruin show as much promise as in Uruguay.

Mujica harbored another deeper belief too. For years, he had been arguing that the “blind obsession to achieve growth with consumption” was the real cause of the linked energy and ecological crises.

In speeches, he pushed his people to reject materialism and embrace Uruguay’s traditions of simplicity and humility. “The culture of the West is a lie,” he told me. “The engine is accumulation. But we can’t pretend that the whole world can embrace it. We would need two or three more planets.”

He shared his own experience in solitary confinement, and how years without books or conversation drew him closer to the fundamentals of being: nature, love, family. “I learned to give value to little things in life. I kept some frogs as pets in prison and bathed them with my drinking water,”

“The true revolution is a different culture: learning to live with less waste and more time to enjoy freedom.”

By 2016, an array of biomass, solar and some 50 wind parks had replaced the grid’s use of oil, helping slash more than half a billion dollars from the country’s annual budget. Today, Uruguay boasts one of the world’s greenest grids, powered by 98 percent renewable energy.

prevailing economic conditions and something in Uruguay’s character had afforded the transition more receptivity than anyone predicted. This was one way in which a career in theoretical physics prepared Méndez for the world of policymaking, he said: “You have to be open to the solutions being very narrow and technical, or very wide and human.”

as the energy sector shifted, the mind-set in the country began to shift with it, Méndez said, sometimes in surprising ways. Some bought air-conditioning units, but many kept to their formerly low-consumption habits, continuing to hang their laundry and take the bus, dozens of which in Montevideo were now electric. Others bought plug-in timers to automate their laundries to run at night or installed solar water heaters on their roof

for Méndez, the biggest shift was among leaders. In cabinet and business meetings the problems of the future — like how to eliminate industrial waste and phase out gas entirely — began to feel like just that, he said: problems, not crises.

there appeared to be fundamental tension in how to bring Uruguayans along in the energy transition. On the one hand, the infrastructure shift needed to happen in the background, so the public never lost confidence in the grid — that part had been surprisingly smooth. But on the other hand, it was important to keep people engaged so they would support the necessary changes to come

Emaldi and her colleagues focused their efforts on electrifying transportation and growing the green-energy sector. The government eliminated duties and taxes on electric cars and rebranded a tax on gas as a CO2 tax, with a portion funding green initiatives.

“What comes in the near future will change more lives,” Minister Paganini told me. “You have to get into sectors or areas that are much more difficult than just changing the generation of electricity.” You need to change human behavior.

fossil fuels gave humanity the ability to choose our food, to transform a rainforest or windblown desert into something fertile and constant, a biotic vending machine from which eaters can select whatever they want whenever they want it. This choice now drives about a third of all global emissions. Most of them stem from the growing process itself — clearing land, fertilizing crops — with the bulk of the rest coming indirectly from the vast web of manufacturing and delivery systems that bring it to us: packaging crackers, refrigerating drumsticks, airlifting avocados.

One reason the global cattle industry had become so damaging, Baethgen said, was that too many grasslands had been razed or degraded. In the short term, feedlots produced more food, often with lower emissions, since cows got fatter faster and burped less frequently, but over the long term, without the grasslands to recycle carbon, net emissions built up. From Baethgen’s perspective, every damaged field thus represented a huge opportunity: By restoring grasslands, he could not only pull more greenhouse gases into the ground, but also grow more beef. And since the 1990s, Uruguay has managed a remarkable feat: increasing its annual production of beef without any increase in greenhouse gases — and doing all of this on natural pasturelands.

He believed too much climate science relied on big-picture modeling to drive engagement. “Those science-fiction scenarios were great to increase awareness,” he said. “But if you give a minister of agriculture information for the year 2080, that doesn’t do anything.” He waved a hand over the landscape. “You’re providing information, far in the future, with no resolution and no certainty. That’s the best combination to ensure paralysis. Nobody does anything.”

In his 2016 book, “The Great Derangement,” the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh says it’s unwise to reduce climate denial to “only a function of money and manipulation.” The sheer level of paralysis, he writes, “suggests that the climate crisis threatens to unravel something deeper, without which large numbers of the people would be at a loss to find meaning.” Ghosh wonders if the modern consumer mind-set can ever change, collectively or otherwise: “In a world where the rewards of a carbon-intensive economy are regarded as wealth, this must be reckoned as a very significant material sacrifice.”

Esponda described his family as middle to upper middle class. Both he and Laroca were economists for the city and together made about $30,000 a year. “Everybody in Uruguay is middle class,” he said. I thought I knew what he meant. Unlike in the United States, I found it difficult in Uruguay to discern class differences. Conspicuous displays of wealth seemed rare, as were the tiers of consumer goods that otherwise revealed someone’s spending. “There’s not the American consumerist mentality of ‘We need to get the next new thing,’”

On trips to New Orleans and Chicago, he had been transfixed by the selection of junk food in convenience stores, the undamaged furniture left on the street. “You guys throw away your whole home,” he told me. “Here, most of this stuff wouldn’t be trash.”

Esponda pointed to his couch, a sagging green camelback. It was given to them by his parents, he said, and barely fit his growing family anymore. But he couldn’t find a reason to replace it, even with a dual income that allowed them to save each month. “Why would I?” he said. It was a mentality apparent throughout the couple’s apartment. In stark contrast to most American homes with two kids, their apartment wasn’t overflowing with toys. Two bikes leaned against the wall by a plastic slide. “Our choices don’t really have anything to do with the environment,” he said. “It’s about saving money, yes, but also being careful with what we buy.”

Several people described frugality to me as a core tenet of the Uruguayan political project, though globalization had played a role, too.

something a man in the asentamientos said to me: “Nobody has confronted the real problem: How will the country grow?”

I thought of a single dad I met in Montevideo who said I shouldn’t think of his country as a model or example. It was too small, its progress too troubled. It was more like a laboratory for the rest of the world, he said.

We often picture the future as a kind of growth, a set of possibilities to expand and realize, but maybe it could also be the opposite, a present to reconcile and safeguard.

Part of the reason America has become so paralyzed by climate change is precisely that we’ve failed to acknowledge the limits it imposes — on where we can live, the things we can have, the household we can envision. This is a particularly difficult idea to sell to a country perched atop decades of accrued wealth, which was itself amassed by generations imagining further comfort and choice.

In the coming months, gas prices spiked, inflation climbed and the price of energy began to strangle Europe. No future seemed as certain as a less abundant one.

A former bank analyst at Bear Stearns, Estrada had decided to take a 75 percent pay cut to return home and eventually took a job with a local energy firm. “I read studies about how there’s a diminishing return on happiness above a certain income, and I experienced that,” he told me of living in New York. “I had more money than I had things I wanted to buy.” He said that contracting his life had allowed him to be more mindful of its details. It reminded him of the household his parents ran in the 1980s, when things were so precarious. No one left lights on or wasted water. They were mindful of the things they bought.

“We learn to live with less here,” he said. “And it’s made my life better.”

But these measures have costs. Schooling time is cut short, so students learn less. People do not travel to their jobs, so work is less productive. The heat kept some farmers inside and stunted harvests, so crop yields fell and global food prices increased. Social life is disrupted.

The geography of poor countries — many are close to the Equator — is not the only reason climate change is such a burden for them. Their poverty is another factor, leaving them with fewer resources to adapt.

“Climate change is one of the most profound inequities of the modern era,”

There is a paradox to the climate crisis. Because India never fully industrialized, it has not released as many greenhouse gases as the U.S., European nations and other rich countries. But because it has not industrialized, it also has fewer resources to adapt than the richer, polluting nations.

Fewer than 10 percent of Indians have air-conditioning at home.

The rush for clean energy technologies, like solar and wind power, is an effort to break that tension — to give countries a way to industrialize without the planet-warming pollution. With climate disasters already hitting much of the world, that effort is in a race against time to prevent more crises like India’s.