As severe weather events pile up all around us, The Doe authors take a look at our changing climate.

Climate Change

Hope is sweet earth shaped like a popcorn-bedazzled wand. Mullein boasts a bouquet of fuzzy floret leaves that dance at its roots and invite the hand to touch her. Seasons before the global pandemic, mullein called to make me her ally. She’d dazzle and entreat me from her summer station on the lawn of my neighbor, a devoted, down-to-earth Nana with a grandchild who also danced like sunshine. Nana gave me permission to harvest whatever I saw coming up. I promised to share the medicine. Mullein follows one of my favorite patterns of the sweet earth: “Everything you need is nearby.” And so she grew on the lawn of this beloved, longtime smoker to teach me about the woman who needed her. The kinds of people who would need her soon. And how to prepare me for the grief that would surely sit atop my lungs like pneumonia. The sweet earth teaches us to read her patterns. 

The sweet earth has a pattern of death. When Brazilian carpenter ants outgrow the forests’ capacity to sustain them, parasitic cordyceps fungi cull the population to maintain the dynamic equilibrium of the forest. That balance is necessary so that one species can’t become too large, as to destroy the ability of the entire system to regulate life. Indigenous people hold sacred the life-death-life cycle. This worldview understands that the death of an excess of carpenter ants will create space for new and diverse life to flourish. This worldview understands the one group of beings does not hold the right to disrupt the homeostasis of the entire ecosystem. The power of disruption is checked by death itself. 

As an ecological activist and rootworker, I dissolve the false separation between the patterns of nature and social behavior. Human beings are shaped and governed by the ecosystems they inhabit even if those ecosystems contain iPhones, concrete and subways. 

All-natural even if our diets are genetically modified. 

Even if we feel separate and enact the violence that flows from our falsehood. 

Our actions set off chains of reactions within the homeostatic ecosystem that is the earth itself. The disease that she experiences is reflected in the fractal of our bodies. Viruses and other bundles of genetic information called exosomes are exuded from bacteria, fungi and multicellular organisms, like pigs, in response to stress. Stress is a call for help, and this genetic information contains a diversity of adaptive genetic resources for the organisms to make use of. 

The coronavirus received these genetic stress signals emerging from the animals, in particular, the massive pig confinement operations and herbicide-soaked fields of Central China and adapted as all beings adapt. As all beings must. And she came to us, with her sacred communication. 

From the Chinese case studies, I learned that older folks had the highest mortality rates and I saw corona as just, especially when it displayed the same patterns in Europe. Old people destroyed the world. Ate excessively and had me inherit this shitshow. I saw the earth grieving. Eastern philosophers remember that grief lives in the lungs. The lungs are the interface between the human body and the world. And so the coronavirus became our disjointed relationship and made her home there. 

The abundance of plants in my world gives me direction as to how much medicine will be called for later. In the early days, I distributed my abundance of mullein medicine to all the elders in my life and friends who knew my game. And I waited until the virus arrived on my side of the world. 

But my side of the world is wounded and scarred. It has a body politic that is shaped by its past conditioning. In yogic philosophy,  past conditioning leaves an imprint or grooves on the subtle body which shape the response of the entire organism. These samskaras, or impressions, are in the words of yogi Dr. Kamini Desai, “Like channels that despite all the potential outcomes we have the ability to create, keep us reincarnating the same results into the reality in repetitive and predictive ways.”

The groves set forth by our racist history came alive during the pandemic and resulted in actual death. The groves of our racist history have impacted the physical redistribution of brown bodies in places where the air is sickened by the shitshow of industrial life. These folks are asked to be the buffer zone between white excess and its ecological repercussion. This grove, this samskara, is known as a zone of sacrifice. 

Seventy-one percent of Black Americans live in counties that violate EPA air quality standards. A Black family making up to $60,000 a year is more likely than a white family making $15,000 per year to live next to a toxic facility. Over 78 percent of Black people live within a 30-mile radius of a coal-fired power plant expelling toxic waste into the air. Black people are three times more likely to die from asthma than any other group. Black people are twice as likely to die from COVID-19 than a white person, and the same goes for indigenous people. COVID mortality is directly linked to the air pollution that folks of color are positionally exposed to. According to a study by biostatisticians at Harvard University, even a small increase in long-term exposure to fine particle pollution leads to a large increase in the COVID-19 death rate. Black and indigenous disposability is a part of the cultural and ecological samskaras of this country. 

But hope is sweet earth shaped like a popcorn-bedazzled wand. The institutions created in the samskaras of America’s racist history are ill-equipped to dismantle the structural racism that results in Black and indigenous disease. As our precious communities undergo the pressure of dying under the weight of this empire, our bodies exude adaptive genetic resources in the shape of exomes and viruses, genetic resources that shape-change in the soil and waters surrounding us, that shape-change in the trees and the birds and the insects. Who carry the seeds of our green allies like mullein, so that we can also adapt to live another day here, to become the virus in the chest of this empire and sit our whole weight upon it so that it can die, suffocating under the burden of our grief. 

Environment

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A family video of me taken when I was six years old shows me dutifully feeding my youngest brother via the bottle. My dad asks me how many kids I want to have when I’m older and, without skipping a beat, I say “Five.” He asks me how old I think I’ll be when I start having these five kids; I pause for a minute to consider before answering, “23.”

Five kids—it is ludicrous to even think of at present. By my own timeline (and with reference to my mother’s reproductive schedule), I should have at least three kids in tow by now. But I don’t.

I don’t know how to reconcile the climate change work that I do with what I consider my most innate and defining call: to be a mother.

Wanting to be a mother constitutes some of my earliest memories, such as holding my favorite dolls, putting balloons up my shirt and pretending I was pregnant, feeding my siblings and fighting with my sister for the right to push our baby brother in the stroller, taking my brother to my kindergarten class to proudly present him for show-and-tell.

As I grew up and tried to tease apart how much of my desire to be a mother was just indoctrination and how much was actually instinctive, I had to admit to myself that I was secretly relieved when studies about apes and chimps showed that males and females showed the same evolutionary proclivities: many girls are drawn to dolls, many boys prefer wheeled toys.

The bulk of my adult life has been working with a large intergovernmental environmental organization dedicated to finding solutions to seemingly intractable environmental problems. I work within the climate change team; as my knowledge of the climate and ecological crisis evolves, it doesn’t square easily with bringing more life into the world.

Right now, I’m shocked over how the COVID-19 world lays bare every crack, every fissure, every social injustice and climate inequity. The world’s response to this pandemic illustrates, in some respects, that those who possess the fewest resources to deal with the virus will bear the worst consequences of the virus. For example, the poor, the uninsured, the migrant, the minimum wage worker—these are the people who are forced disproportionately to bear the negative consequences of the spread of COVID-19.

And our climate future looms as even more dismal.

Is a birth strike a sign of moral protest? Or a tacit acknowledgment of defeat? Is having a baby a defiant act of optimism? Or a hopelessly selfish and shortsighted choice?

What is the balance between hope and realism? I draw inspiration from Angela Davis’ dictum: “You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.” Yet what act more radically transforms the world: a birth strike, or raising the next generation of climate warriors?

As I grapple with this question, I consider how this question of whether or not to have kids was addressed in Meehan Crist’s recent article. She writes, “[Y]ou will feel—with rage, or sorrow, or relief—that it has been made for you. But the fantasy of choice quickly begins to dissipate when we acknowledge that the conditions for human flourishing are distributed so unevenly, and that, in an age of ecological catastrophe, we face a range of possible futures in which these conditions no longer reliably exist.”

And this cognitive dissonance or disconnect takes on a new degree of dread as this pandemic seems to portend what the future might hold.

In Crist’s article, she also narrates the moment when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez voiced the question that still seems very impolite and not politically correct “while speaking to her millions of Instagram followers via live stream: ‘Our planet is going to hit disaster if we don’t turn this ship around,’ she said, looking up from a chopping-board littered with squash peel. ‘There’s a scientific consensus that the lives of children are going to be very difficult.’ Her hands fluttered to the hem of her sweater, then to the waistband of her trousers, which she absentmindedly adjusted. ‘And it does lead, I think, young people to have a legitimate question, you know, should…,’ she took a moment to get the wording right: ‘Is it OK to still have children?’”

I think a lot about climate grief and how to deal with what this planet might look like in 30 years or 50 years, but I still can’t wrap my head around what that means for my reproductive future. And now I’m adding the overlay of pandemic grief as I grapple with this question. I recognize that a post-COVID-19 world—where we should make dramatic choices to right this ship and choose to redefine the new normal with nature at the core of our decision-making—may not be a livable one. As the current bailout is doubling down on oil and the future looks even more uncertain than before, maybe I need to put this question to bed: It feels like the future is already here.

Birth Strike: Coming to Terms With Climate Grief

The first thing I noticed outside the metro station, other than the bone-chilling cold, was the ridiculous giant bunny begging me not to eat him or his friends. He was so cute, and yet so pitiful and so preposterous all at the same time. How could anyone eat anything that cute, even if it was delicious and nutritious? And why in the world were all these smelly hippies shrieking at us about “revolution”? And what in the heck did any of this freak-show outside have to do with the supposed solving of alleged man-made “climate change” going on inside, anyway?

It felt like an insane acid trip. But it was very real. And you are paying for it all.

My colleagues and I were on our way into the 25th United Nations Conference on the Parties, better known as the U.N. COP25 in Madrid. Just like the last 24 times they gathered, its members were developing a plan that would supposedly save the world from this horrible toxic pollution known as carbon dioxide—a “pollution” that is literally exhaled in large quantities by every single person on the planet, every single day, and is necessary to all plant life on earth.

It was quite an “ambitious” agenda, to use the language of the U.N.'s confab. While it sounded so noble to the uninitiated, I couldn't stop thinking about Pinky and the Brain, the infamous genetically engineered cartoon lab mice who, each episode, “try to take over the world.”

Of course, the hippies and the vegan lady in the bunny suit were at our entryway. That entrance is for the humble proletariat—all the tax-funded rent-a-mobs, the cheerleading squad (they prefer to be called journalists), and the legions of lower-level bureaucrats and servants who make the summits happen.

The VVIPs you see on the news—also known as “Very, Very Important Persons”— have their special own entrance reserved just for them, no riffraff allowed. That way, when they get off their gas-guzzling private jets and step out of their fancy limos and helicopters, they don’t have to go past the cute bunnies or the hippies shrieking at the plebs.

This was only my most recent adventure at one of these U.N. climate summits, which I've been attending since 2009 in exotic locations all over the world as a U.N.-credentialed reporter.

If the average American could see what I have seen, or experience what I have experienced, the “climate crisis” would have been solved years ago. Indeed, the scam artists behind the whole thing would have been run out of town and probably tarred and feathered. To call the U.N. summits a clown show is a terrible insult to clowns everywhere.

The U.N. climate extravaganzas are always weird and uncomfortable, especially for an American. But the one in Madrid—it moved there from Santiago at the last second after the communist revolution in Chile got too hot too quick—was especially outrageous.

If an alien had shown up from outer space to find out what world leaders were doing at this COP25 conference, they would have likely concluded that they were having a billion-dollar, two-minutes-of-hate session to rage against U.S. President Donald Trump and the horrible, fat, evil, racist, fascist, polluting basket of deplorables who elected him. 

It seemed like every speaker spent most of their time whining about how evil Trump and America were. The sideshows put on by tax-funded “non-government organizations” were doing the same thing. And the propagandists posing as journalists were, too.

Even the Americans, like current climate czar John Kerry, a man who flew in a private jet to Iceland to receive a climate leadership award and defended the PR fail by claiming that private jets were “the only choice for someone like me,” could only speak of how horrible Trump and America were.

Much of the rest of the event was babbling about how there were just too many plebs for the planet to sustain. One burned-out hippie, the producer of what he claimed was the top documentary in human history, got to speak at least a few times on key stages about how there needed to be fewer people and especially fewer Swedes.

Being married to a Swede, naturally, this anti-Swedish racism piqued my curiosity. “Don't have children—and I'm looking at you white men,” said the old white guy. Billionaire CNN founder Ted Turner told me something similar in Rio De Janeiro in Brazil at the U.N. Sustainable Development conference in 2012. He has five kids. But then, he's not a pleb.

Speaking of hypocrisy, at the Madrid summit, my team and I ran into former New York City overlord Mike Bloomberg as well. Naturally, the man was surrounded by at least three heavily armed bodyguards. And obviously, he came in one of his private jets, too—quite a sacrifice to leave behind his CO2-spewing helicopters, yachts, mansions and more to save the planet for us plebs by forcing us to use windmills and bicycles—if we're lucky! Bloomberg even agreed to take his picture with me, until his handlers growled, demanded to know who I was. They whisked him away.

Another semi-VVIP I ran into at a U.N. climate summit (this one in 2009) was Maldives President Mohamed Nasheed. He had been blabbering about how his nation was going to sink under the waves unless the world did what the U.N. was demanding right now. Apparently, “science” had spoken, and it was not for us to question, only submit.

Interestingly, one of the key sea-level scientists for the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a Swedish geophysicist named Nils-Axel Mörner, had been measuring sea-levels in Nasheed's part of the world for five decades. His findings suggested that sea levels were not only not rising, but they may also even be declining. 

Obviously, I asked Nasheed about this. Boy, was he angry. With the blood vessels almost popping out of his eyes, he claimed Mörner—again, a scientist who worked on the U.N. IPCC, supposedly the top authority on The Science™—was not “worthy” of a response. Then he proceeded to claim to me, falsely, that the pope had killed Galileo.

U.S. diplomatic cables exposed by Wikileaks later proved that the U.S. government was offering big money to the regime in the Maldives to build a deeper harbor—something that made no sense if the nation was truly about to be swallowed up by the sea—if they would play along with the climate hysteria and support the U.N. deal. Nasheed was later convicted under anti-terrorism charges in his home country, though the top court finally overturned the conviction in 2018.

The silly rhetoric is typical, though. At that same U.N. climate summit in Copenhagen, I got to hear Saint Al Gore, who had just arrived on a CO2-belching private jet, lecture us about how “the entire polar ice cap…could be completely ice-free within the next five to seven years.” He cited models that claimed there was a 75 percent chance of this occurring.

It sounded scary and made for terrifying click-bait headlines. But of course, five years came and went. Then seven. Then ten. And yet, the polar ice cap never became ice-free—not even close. Meanwhile, according to NASA, there is massive ice growth in the Antarctic that is causing a net decrease in global sea levels. But don't tell Nasheed.

It would be easy to fill a book with all the crazy stories I’ve heard from these clown shows. In Cancun, the clowns opened the COP with a prayer to the Mayan goddess of creativity without mentioning her association with cannibalism and human sacrifice. Yes, seriously.

After that, pranksters from an American grassroots organization managed to dupe almost every U.N. delegate that was asked into signing a petition to ban a dangerous substance known as Dihydrogen Monoxide. The chemical kills thousands each year and is a major component of acid rain, they were informed. They literally supported a petition to ban water. But you can trust them—they're the experts following The Science™.

The adventures of Lord Christopher Monckton, who I've gotten to know pretty well, have been priceless, too. In 2012, the British aristocrat impersonated a delegate from Burma and spoke to the whole U.N. plenary session about how the so-called science behind the man-made warming hypothesis needed to be investigated. The year before, he jumped out of a plane in Durban to prove the sky was not falling.

At an earlier U.N. summit, filmmaker Phelim McAleer dressed up in a polar bear suit and went hunting for the disgraced “scientist” at the center of “ClimateGate,” the scandal involving hacked emails that broke out shortly before the summit. The tax-funded legions at the summit seeking more climate loot were not amused.

And who could forget the Gore Effect—a mysterious phenomenon I have personally witnessed numerous times in my career—involving snowfall at U.N. climate summits starting as soon as Gore's private jet lands in town.

Full disclosure, in case you have not realized by now: I think the U.N.-backed hypothesis that man's emissions of CO2 are driving global warming—I mean, “climate change,” or is it “climate crisis” now?— is just as silly as the crazy man-made “global cooling” hypotheses peddled in the 1970s. Ironically, it was often the very same fanatics and propaganda organs disguised as news outlets now trumpeting the alleged man-made warming. And no matter how hard they try to deny reality on Wikipedia, the evidence is there for all to see.

Going to these U.N. climate summits for over a decade makes it clear that even our would-be overlords peddling the man-made warming hypothesis do not believe it. If they did, why would they show up in fleets of private jets? And why would they try to drastically cut American CO2 emissions while shifting all of the economic activity to China, where the regime is building coal-fired power plants faster than we can count them, and where CO2 levels per unit of output will be drastically higher than in the United States?

Something doesn't smell right. I wish you could smell it yourself.

Don't get me wrong—I love the environment, and you should, too. But nations squandering billions on this non-issue so U.N. fat cats can travel the world and party at our expense is grotesque, especially while real pollution, needing real solutions, goes unaddressed in China and other nations conducting the crazy climate clown circus.

Insiders

Inside the U.N.'s Climate Show Circus

I am intimately familiar with the international response to climate change: I’ve spent two decades negotiating treaties like the Paris Agreement.

And so I can say this, with some degree of certitude: It’s total bullshit.

How many major industrialized countries are on track to meet their targets under the Paris Agreement? Zero. Rich countries know that we're not going to get ahead of climate change; they've already begun the process of transforming themselves into gated communities.

Perhaps the most distressing aspect of the Paris Agreement isn’t the fact that every major developed country on earth hasn’t yet enacted policies that would meet their pledges. Neither does it lie in the disparity between nationally determined emissions targets and pledged policies, as infuriating as this hypocrisy is. In fact, even if every major developed country met all of its pledges, we’d still be on track for roughly three degrees Celsius of warming by 2100—or double the Paris Agreement’s nominal goal, which is in turn based on IPCC’s recommendations.

Our current policy trajectory puts us directly on track for widespread devastation and misery, all of which is likely familiar to anyone who has read a newspaper or watched the news at any point in the past few decades.

What’s most distressing about this dynamic is that even though every major developed country pays lip service to “climate hope” or similar greenwashing mantras, in the background these same countries are quietly jockeying for primacy on soon-to-be-viable polar shipping routes, forestalling immigration by climate refugees, or taking steps to secure freshwater and other resources in anticipation of a hotter, drier future.

For every paean to climate optimism by leaders, there are multiple subtle signals that countries actually expect to fail at preventing climate chaos. Canada, which terms itself “a world leader in the fight against climate change” has begun deploying military rangers to lay the groundwork for shipping lanes in the Arctic. Norway, with something of an environmental halo for its “green” policies and well-regarded role in international environmental diplomacy, is currently accelerating its pace of oil well exploration and is on track to drill more oil wells than ever before. Germany, a leader among major industrialized nations for its share of renewable energy is tightening immigration policy to decrease the numbers of asylum seekers allowed in the country (both climate-driven and otherwise). New Zealand, a darling of the international set for its “clean, green” image and 84 percent renewable electricity has been fighting to prevent an expected upwelling of Pacific Island climate refugees from seeking asylum, arguing there are “no legally binding regional conventions or treaties that prescribe obligations for developed countries towards Pacific Island neighbours in the climate change context.”

The discrepancy between countries’ words and actions takes on special significance when these actions serve to force others to pay the cost of climate inaction. This discrepancy between word and deed is a bad faith version of the free-rider problem. Virtually every country wants to avoid the consequences of climate change, but developed countries are apparently trying to virtue signal their way into everyone else carrying the water (often literally—China is hard at work re-engineering transboundary water flows in its favor).

No amount of recycling or carpooling is going to surmount our multiple decades of inaction on climate change. No amount of lofty rhetoric or calls for comity is meaningful when we still don’t have binding international agreements, let alone carbon fee and dividend plans with border tax adjustments. Since the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was adopted in 1992, per capita CO2 emissions have increased by 17 percent.

We’re not just failing to heal the world, we’re not even flattening the curve on climate change.

Against this backdrop, references to sustainable futures by wealthy countries begin to seem like misdirection, intended to lull us into a false sense of security while the greatest tragedy of the commons in human history is allowed to reach its logical endpoint. Major industrialized nations sign (non-binding) declarations sanctifying territorial integrity, sovereignty, agreed upon international norms, development goals, decarbonization, sustainability—and then muster a dismal zero percent compliance rate with the Paris Agreement.

Our generation has been tasked with finding solutions to environmental catastrophes set in motion long ago. Everything in my experience suggests to me that the UN will likely not be up to the task of addressing climate change. No one is riding to our rescue. There are no adults in the room. We have no recourse. We will need to take direct action if we want to save the planet. Failing that, the cynic in me thinks the safest individual course is to take the lead of wealthy industrialized countries, and hope that conspicuously miming climate action will trick other people into making the sacrifices we’re not willing to make ourselves, while secretly planning for a hopeless future.

Ivan Goncharov, in his novel, Oblomov, noted that “it's the trick of dishonest people to offer sacrifices that are not needed or cannot be made so as to avoid making those that are required.” International diplomacy around climate change mitigation and adaptation is suffused with precisely this variety of trickery. I have never in my life flown more than when I worked for a UN specialized agency on climate change programming, and multiple branches of the UN (including the one requiring me to fly around the world for meetings that could have easily been transacted online) don’t even bother offsetting their carbon emissions.

This disregard is mirrored in the behavior of the diplomats and trade representatives who attend international climate change negotiations. I have personally seen delegates asleep in their seats at climate change meetings, and resource-constrained country delegates agitate for more widespread travel because it renders one eligible for a (relatively) generous daily service allowance. I don’t at all intend this as a lamentation about the edifice of international environmental diplomacy. Rather, I’m arguing in favor of actual diplomacy with teeth, that will result in common but differentiated responsibilities, tangible provisions to offset the loss and damage that vulnerable countries have suffered, and binding, enforceable climate mitigation agreements. Anything less amounts to avoiding the sacrifices that we actually require.

Why the Paris Climate Agreement Is Bullshit

Drugs & Alcohol

Up, up and away! Time to get out of the house with The Doe.

Travel

Stories that can only be told from the land of the free, home of the brave.

American Stories

LGBTQ Voices

Motherhood

Earth Day or any day, let's celebrate our planet. 

Tearjerkers

The Doe celebrates its authors this Black History Month.

Black Voices

Extra, extra, read all about it! The news-media industry has shifted dramatically over the last decade—heck, within the last two years. Between print journalism, podcasting, social media and infotainment, The Doe turns over every rock in this evolving ecosystem.

Media

Stories of starting over and finding the fresh.

New Beginnings

The ol' nine to five has changed quite a bit in the past couple of years, from working remotely to, well, not working at all. This month we take a look at how cash still does rule in our capitalist society and what the future of business and money might just look like.

Money

The Doe's editorial team takes a look back at the year and shares its favorite narratives.

It was approximately 9:30 p.m. on September 1, 2021. I had just finished having dinner with my partner, Alex, and we sat in our bedroom playing chess online. It was raining quite heavily and had been doing so for about two or three hours. I had been going out to the front of our New York City building every 45 minutes or so to get some fresh air, fascinated by how hard it was raining.

Eventually, my basement neighbor knocked on my door. I thought this was strange, as I rarely received a knock. He warned me that a bit of water was beginning to come in underneath the building's front door and into the hallway. He was very calm, and the water by the door didn’t seem like much at this point, almost as if someone had spilled a bucket of water. I realized my neighbor’s concern; he's in a basement and some of his property could be damaged, so I offered to help him move some of his belongings to higher ground. As I left my bedroom and headed into my apartment hallway, two or three centimeters of water had trickled inside.

"OK, we'll put some towels down at the front door and that should help out,” Alex and I thought. Soon, a significant amount of water had accumulated in the building’s hallway and began rushing into my unit. The water was now at my ankles—much worse than I thought. But at this point, I didn’t think the water would go any higher. I called my mom just to check up on her and let her know the situation. 

By then, our third-floor neighbor had invited us to store some belongings in her apartment and to possibly spend the night. We gratefully accepted. Alex had grabbed a few things, and I brought my laptop. On our way upstairs, one of the neighbors suggested we go back down to move our stuff to higher ground. Alex insisted this was something we should do. Again, I didn't think the water would get any higher than my ankles, so I thought it was unnecessary, but I agreed, mostly because I didn't want Alex to be down there alone. We spent a couple of minutes on the third floor before returning to the first floor, where the water had risen to my knees.

At this point, I began to understand this was a potentially life-threatening situation—I began to understand the stakes. The water was rising so quickly that I knew any previous estimation I made was going to be useless. We swiftly ran into the apartment with the idea of grabbing our documents (passports, wallets, IDs, etc.) and any other valuable belongings we wished to save. Alex managed to secure them while I grabbed an empty backpack. Suddenly, the water began pouring through the windows, forming a cascade. "My car is outside and probably submerged in water,” I thought. It was all quite difficult to process—especially with a waterfall in my living room.

Nothing made any sense except knowing that the only thing worth saving in the apartment was our lives. I ran into the bedroom where Alex was packing a bag with clothes. I grabbed her by the wrist and forcefully pulled her toward me and headed out to the front door, which was now closed shut. I attempted to turn and pull the doorknob to no effect. The pressure applied on the door was too great. I was locked in, and the water was just below my waist. 

This being a first-floor apartment, all the windows had metal rails to deter any would-be thief. There was no way in or out besides the steel-reinforced front door, which was now shut and too heavy for any human to open. I had only one thought: "I have to get through this door, but I have to destroy it to get through.” Alex tried calling 911 but calls weren’t answered. I began to have that sensation of water creeping up higher and higher on my body, not unlike slowly walking into a shallow pool or wading into the ocean.

To bust down the door, I would need my toolbox underneath the kitchen sink. The problem was that the cabinet underneath was hidden under murky water, and visibility was practically zero. But as any desperate man in such a desperate situation would do, I reached down into the cabinet, and by the grace of God, or whatever manifestation of a higher power or supreme being that you may believe in, the toolbox—that small, orange, $10 toolbox from IKEA—was the first item that grazed my hand. I pulled out the hammer and knew I needed to get through the locking mechanism on the door. That meant open season on the door handle.

After a few good smashes, I wrecked the knob, but the door still wouldn’t open. My next thought was to strike the doorframe right by the lock and attempt to bend the doorframe, releasing the tension on the lock and causing it to swing open. I made some progress but still couldn’t get all the way through. At this point, the water was at my belly button.

My neighbor then rushed downstairs with a hammer of their own and began striking the frame from the opposite side of the door. One, two, three good, coordinated strikes and the door swung open with massive force. Needless to say, Alex and I ran all the way up to the third-floor apartment to spend the night, safe from the flooded floors below.

My hands were completely beat up. In striking the door, every hammer miss meant that my hand made contact with the door, taking chunks out of my flesh. Importantly, I survived, and I’m grateful for that. I wasn’t able to save anything of significance from my apartment, but I’m alive, which is more than enough to be thankful for. In hindsight, adrenaline saved me and my lack of exit strategy. Many others were not as fortunate.

If my firsthand experience with a flash flood is worth anything, remember the following: In a flash flood, the paramount thing to do is get to higher ground. Your personal items and belongings can be replaced or recovered over time. Your life cannot.

Collection

Hurricane Ida: The Night I Barely Survived a Flash Flood

When Social Security was enacted in 1935, poverty was far more prevalent among the elderly than any other age group. That year, nearly 80 percent of Americans aged 65 or older lived in poverty. At present, fewer than 10 percent of Americans over 65 are under the poverty line. This resounding success is one of the most laudable transformations of American society since emancipation and women’s suffrage.

But our successes in alleviating the wretchedness and precarity of poverty for our elders wasn’t achieved in a vacuum. Today, people under 18 are more than three times as likely as the elderly to live in poverty, with all of its attendant illnesses, wasted potential and deaths of despair.

In a very real sense over the past century, a generational wealth transfer has been delivered to the elderly and away from the young.

I hasten to add: none of this is a call to immiserate the elderly. I have a lifelong, warm, loving relationship with my elders and consider my grandfather the lodestar for masculinity and parenthood. My grandmother was a Second Lieutenant in the Army Nurse Corps and an all-around badass. Much of the benefit that accrued to these elders (through Social Security and otherwise) are outweighed by the service they gave to our country and planet, and by the love and care, they’ve demonstrated to us and our families.

But, surely, we as a society didn’t mean for elderly poverty alleviation to come at the cost of life prospects for today’s youth.

Surely, we aren’t so enamored of a comfortable old age for our elders that we’d abandon our children to a future in a disease-ridden, environmentally despoiled hellscape.

Surely, we’re not intending to create a zero-sum game between protecting the elderly and preserving a future for the young.

I have spent over two decades working in global public health aimed at decreasing child mortality, and I despair of the world that we are leaving to our children.

By some estimates, the median age of COVID-19 mortalities in the US is higher than the current life expectancy at birth for someone born in 2020. More than just signaling that we are willing to hamstring our young by not investing in their futures, it means that we are, in Modest Proposal fashion, cannibalizing one impoverished group (the young) to feed the wealthiest (the elderly) by taking years of life away from the worst off and transferring these years upwards to well-off elders who already have had more years of life (and at a higher standard) than those born today can possibly expect.

A disproportionate share of the costs for our COVID response—from short-term privation and isolation to long-term decreases in job prospects, credit ratings and earning potential—are borne by people with extremely low risk of mortality or complications from SARS-CoV-2. In essence, young people are asked to sacrifice for the good of people who’ve already gotten more out of the world than we’re ever likely to get.

We live in the first generation in human history expected to live shorter, less healthful lives than our parents, and this deprivation is accelerating. Today’s 35-year-olds now have been subjected to two “once-in-a-lifetime” recessions, while today’s 80-year-olds suffered exactly zero GDP declines greater than 5 percent in their entire working life. And these same 80-year-olds, in the wealthiest tranche of society, will likely live out their retirement with the full complement of Social Security and Medicare benefits (based on their life expectancy).

In contrast, today’s 35-year-olds will get to watch the Social Security trust fund reserves become fully exhausted in 2037, and the Medicare Hospital Insurance trust fund become insolvent in 2026. (N.B. in both cases, these social safety net programs will be able to limp along at lower levels of benefits for years afterward. However, that we’re willing to give wealthy, aged people more safety net protections and resources than impoverished young people is both unjust and terrifying.)

And this debt to children born today—this intergenerational inequity—is, if anything, worse on the climate change front. In both the climate change and the coronavirus cases, a gerontocratic ruling class allocates itself the benefits from the status quo, and puts the costs on the youth’s tab. Today’s 80-year-olds have the highest carbon footprint of any generation, and have injected volumes of CO2 into the atmosphere, all of which will be around for decades for the rest of us to face. Gallingly, this age group is also the most likely to “disbelieve” the scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change.

Gerontocratic systems, from the Soviet Union to modern theocratic nightmares like Iran and Saudi Arabia, to the Roman Republic, do not end well. If we are consigned to a zero-sum struggle between the old and the young, perhaps it is time for the young to stop cooperating with evil. To paraphrase and repurpose Marx: children of the world, unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains.

Coronavirus

The Generational Divide Increases With COVID-19 and Climate Change

The climate crisis is the greatest challenge facing humanity, with potentially disastrous ecological, economic and social consequences. And like the COVID-19 epidemic, the impacts of climate change will fall disproportionately on less affluent members of society who cannot easily adapt to a warmer world by running their air conditioners more often or moving to escape rising sea levels. In this way, climate change is a crisis of social justice, exacerbated by depleting land values, increasingly scarce resources (and conflicts over them) and forced global migrations. Together, these present a dual challenge to architects and designers like myself: how to mitigate, address and adapt to changing environmental conditions while creating conscientious, sustainable lifestyles that are accessible to every segment of society. 

Twenty-first-century architects and designers can view climate change as an opportunity for new modes of design thinking. In the past, the influence of climate on architecture has mostly consisted of new constraints on design, like certification and building standards that have modified or replaced vernacular and traditional building materials and techniques. In the future, we need to expand the lexicon of climate architecture by investigating how architecture and design can be used to visualize changing climates; address the social, economic and health impacts of climate change; and transform public space around shared resources and knowledge. 

One way we can achieve this is by recognizing ​that the notion of public spaces must be extended to include shared resources, such as the water we drink and the air we breathe. A city’s infrastructure is just as important for its public life as its squares, concert halls and coffee shops. Conversely, parks have historically been viewed as urban amenities, but their cool grasses and shady trees may be necessities in cities that will be increasingly devastated by summer heatwaves. All of these factors will come to define new domains of work, leisure, transport and infrastructure space. 

Architects and designers can also conceptualize materials and design elements via the natural media that make up Earth’s climate. By incorporating natural climate elements—dust, wind, clouds, water, ice and sun—into design thinking and construction, architects can give materiality to Earth’s changing climate, and make legible the problem of climate change. 

Take dust, for instance. Dust provides a visceral representation of atmospheric motions, and drying lakes will only increase the amount of dust in the atmosphere. ​Climate change will also lead to major changes in wind patterns, affecting prevailing wind directions and the frequency and severity of storms and other extreme events. Similarly, recent climate studies suggest a reduction of cloud cover in warmer climates, which could worsen heatwaves and social inequalities associated with shade. Then we have acid rain, melting ice-caps and rising sea levels, which have become some of the most iconic—and devastating—images of environmental change. 

Natural media—such as dust, winds, clouds, water, ice and sun—are foundational to how humans engage with the climate system. It’s important to acknowledge that climate change is not only a condition for us humans to adapt to or resources for us to manage. Instead, our environment is a place for shared cultural values.

In my design practice, I am currently exploring the possibility of visualizing climate change through architecture as part of a collaboration for a combined research facility and community center in the Salton Sea. This facility will aid ongoing scientific efforts to measure, model and observe the changing dust conditions in the Salton Sea region, while also providing an amenity for the public to experience and learn about the region’s climatic changes. In the future, it will be important to see new interdisciplinary collaborations form between scientists, public policymakers, landholders and designers.

The building itself serves as a didactic tool for rendering the rapidly changing climate visible, both through its scientific and educational programs and, more importantly, via a permeable membrane that envelopes the building and filters dust from surrounding debris to form a stratigraphy recording the layers of accumulation. As the sea shrinks and more of the lake bed is uncovered, the dust’s physical and chemical properties change so that, just as layers of rock record sequences of environmental change, the stratigraphy that accumulates along the building’s glass facade detail acts as an embodiment of the invisible impacts of climate change across timescales. 

Over the next century, we will see a shift in cities. Rising temperatures, resource scarcity and more frequent natural disasters will all reveal inequities in the way we share space. Land value will continue to reflect these pressures, and populations will redistribute as we have seen already in global conflicts stressed through desertification. In relation to building technology, climate media provides a basis for exploring specific material properties, assemblies and details for specific sites. For example, wire-mesh structures could be used to study how ice melts, breaks up and responds to shifting grounds during the collapse of ice shelves, the melting of glaciers or the gradual disappearance of winter snows. 

Lastly, our built environment will reveal the multiple timescales of climate change. In the case of the Salton Sea, where dust gradually builds from the drying of the lake bed, architecture links together the human timescale, the building’s timescale of inhabitation and, ultimately, the geologic timescale on which periods of environmental change are recorded. With this in mind, design provides a basis for how multiple user groups can come together to interact, exchange and adapt in new environmentally-focused commons.

Architectural Solutions to Climate Change and Humanity's Future

In below-zero temperatures, the lake holds onto its heat more than the shoreline surrounding it, causing a thick morning fog to float over the surface, the gravitational pull of a diaphanous moon to the water. Lake Superior is so large that it has tides like an ocean. It is December 2019, and I am sitting near the Aerial Lift Bridge in Duluth, Minnesota, almost 1,200 miles away from my apartment in Brooklyn, watching ice chunks float in the harbor. For a short period of time during my childhood, my father was the city engineer and in charge of this bridge, most known for letting iron ore ships in and out of the city. 

Earlier in the year, Duluth—situated in the most southern corner of Lake Superior—was named “the most climate-proof city" in the U.S. by Harvard researcher Jesse Keenan. When I first read about it in The New York Times, I laughed. Our Great Lake may provide an abundant supply of fresh water and a consistently cool year-round temperature compared to the rest of the continental U.S., but my experience growing up in Minnesota was of a state home to an almost cliquey kind of eccentricity I couldn't quite pinpoint to friends on the East Coast—and also a state government still actively reckoning with its positionality in the current climate crisis. 

I considered the term "Minnesota nice" an ironic joke, lying physically beneath "friendly Manitoba." Our state is more accurately home to road rage on I-94 and meat raffles held at local Lutheran churches. I recently returned to a photograph I have of two of my family's Siberian huskies from a camping trip when I was a kid—one red, one black, their bodies and bright blue eyes pitched halfway between the fire and the tent, the lake just visible behind them. It seemed more like a nostalgic Polaroid from a photo book than a real shoreline currently in the throes of relentless development.

In many respects, Duluth could, in fact, be considered a ripe candidate to balance on both a metaphorical and literal precipice of change. The city stretches 30 or so miles along the steep shore of one of the largest freshwater lakes in the world by volume, and is the most inland ocean port in the world. Its immigration history is as rich as its rock cliffs: Iron ore production began in the mid-19th century and was the main source of its initial population growth.

In 1870, Duluth was the fastest growing city in the U.S., drawing thousands of families from all over Scandinavia and Eastern Europe. Beginning in the latter half of the 20th century, Duluth, like many American towns that traditionally relied on mining exports for income, shifted to tourism and tech—so much so that finding a public campsite on the lake has now become almost impossible, due to the abundance of privately-owned land. 

It costs a hefty sum to see the sunrise these days: The lodge my family frequented growing up is now run by a resort chain that charges at least $130 a night depending on the season. There is a direct correlation between development and levels of runoff and septic waste into the lake, contributing to algal blooms that are increasing due to global warming. According to the University of Minnesota-Duluth, Lake Superior is one of the fastest-warming lakes in the world. My father says the increase in unpredictable weather contributes to the shoreline’s maintenance as well: “Because of the frequency of storm surges and rising lake levels, the shoreline sees continuous erosion issues that must be dealt with—many of those areas in tourist areas and having impacts to the local economy.”

Can a city really be “climate-proof” if it hasn’t dealt with the environmental impacts already leveled upon its neighboring indigenous communities? 

I started to ask myself, "What is a climate-proof city, anyway?" Certainly not one that is immune to its past, both its nostalgia and its history of colonization, beginning with immigration but one that continues on in the form of fossil fuel transport through indigenous lands. I thought of notes from Lorine Niedecker's poem “Lake Superior”: "So—here we go. Maybe as rocks and I pass each other I could say how-do-you-do to an agate. What I didn't foresee was that the highway doesn't always run right next to the lake." There is always a highway with gasoline-fueled traffic nearby, and now, the encroaching expansion of Enbridge’s Line 3 pipeline carrying tar sands for over three hundred miles between Alberta, Canada and Superior, Wisconsin, right next door to Duluth. 

Proponents of the pipeline and Enbridge executives justify that it “already existed,” and yet, the “repair” expands and reroutes the tar path through indigenous lands with multiple treaty violations. The pipe will carry twice the amount of oil it previously did, slated to be the largest tar sands pipeline in the world. It will now cross more than 200 bodies of water and 800 wetlands that it can potentially leak into. If the local Minnesota government is serious about global warming, it should stop approving modifications of old infrastructures that pose harm to communities, specifically ones that have lived here for generations. 

There are eleven reservations in the state of Minnesota (under the names of Ojibwe, Chippewa, Dakota and Sioux), one of which has access to Lake Superior and houses a national monument run by the National Park Service that draws just under 70,000 visitors a year. Karen Diver, the chairman of the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa from 2007-2015, has further stated in direct response to Keenan’s report: "Our way of life is so tied to a healthy natural environment. More people, more strain, more pollution. From my perspective, we haven't even figured out how to act in a positive way with our indigenous people here." The pipeline seems to be a further example of her point.

While I don't have one singular response to Keenan's report, reading it has brought forth vital questions for me to consider in our inevitable future of climate migration: How do regions accept new groups of people, when they have yet to converse with their own sense of memory and loss, and especially when some have not even started to dismantle their violent relations with the local indigenous people? What kind of space does shoreline that was never "mine," but holds a deep well in my body and mind's memory, occupy? What I do know is that I am committed to preserving Duluth and its surrounding landscape as a place of community, beauty and healing, and not one of further exploitation.

“In an age of global warming, there is no background, and thus there is no foreground,” writes philosopher Timothy Morton in Hyperobjects. “It is the end of the world, since worlds depend on backgrounds and foregrounds. World is a fragile aesthetic effect around whose corners we are beginning to see.”

Reading this, I’m reminded that there is a world along the shore that has already disappeared, and there will inevitably be another world that climate migrants move into. These so-called separate “worlds” are just prominent changes in one ever-unfolding experience. There is a world dying and a world being born every second. The constantly icy waters my sister and I dared each other to dip our hands into each summer is a world that is now gone—the warming shallows touching the pipeline is another world yet to come.

Climate-Proof Cities Don't Exist

I went to Aspen for the first and only time in the summer of 2019. During my first night, I slept in my car on the street, masturbated to porn on my phone and woke up early the next morning to a Latino construction worker leaning on my passenger side window.

“No, no, no! The steps going in over there!”

It was a nice sunny day in Aspen and the first day of the Aspen Ideas Festival. I’d been invited through the Ideas Scholars program, which provides free festival tickets to “a diverse group of global leaders who are selected for their work, accomplishments, and ability to transform ideas into action.” At the time, I was a master’s student and on the Environmental Film Festival team at Yale. My guess is that my invite had something to do with those four letters: Y-A-L-E.

That next night, I found myself alone in the luxury suite of a hotel. The space was far too big for me, and I thought for a second maybe that’s why rich men are always filling their homes with women and parties and shit because, otherwise, the cavernous-ness of wealth would constantly be whispering. I sat on the king-sized bed and looked at the fake fireplace that burned the decomposing fossils slowly ruining the planet and wished they’d have just paid me the cash for however much this room cost and I could go sleep in my car again. It’d help a lot with rent. I snapped back when my phone buzzed. There was an email from some folks at The Atlantic.

"The Atlantic requests the pleasure of your company for a private breakfast and discussion. “What policies will drive meaningful action on climate change?” Underwritten by ExxonMobile".

A few days later, I found myself struggling out of bed, hungover, but with just enough time to get to the hotel to talk to whomever about environmental meaningfulness. 

Walking into Hotel Jerome in Aspen is like being transported into a 1912 campaign rally for the Bull Moose Party, which gave us both meaningful conservation policies and meaningful eugenics policies—and thus, our National Parks and the Holocaust. Inside, it is artificially dark, suggesting some time before the lightbulb, and the walls are strewn with the heads of dead animals and the portraits of dead white men dressed in military regalia and American flags. The furniture is all built from some combination of the flesh of dead trees and the fur of dead animals. 

In every act of its public persona, Hotel Jerome hints nostalgically toward a time when the relationship between man and nature was intimate and ruggedly reciprocal. And yet, in reality, it’s a celebration of a time when the rich, white men in portraits traveled West to places like Aspen to nostalgically “LARP” a frontier-era that never existed. The real frontier was horrific, no place for blue-blooded, sport-hunting Ivy Leaguers. Which makes Jerome a confused place today.

And so, there I was, in the lobby of Hotel Jerome at 7 a.m., when the next generation of white male Ivy Leaguers with invites from some of the world’s most powerful would gather to discuss the unchanging, abusive relationship between man and nature. I was standing there in the unrealistic darkness, in my Western-patterned button-down shirt, when a white woman in a white dress walked up to me.

As she led me through a labyrinth of hallways deeper into Jerome, we chatted. She was nice, about my age and had the graceful professionalism of someone working 60-hour weeks in Manhattan and seeing a therapist. 

The Wheeler Room in Hotel Jerome is as ridiculous as the rest of it. Everything’s white. Lacy drapes adorning 20-foot tall windows drift in the breeze and morning light. And in the middle is one gigantic table built for 30. If the rest of Jerome is a shrine to some imagined masculine earthliness and death, the Wheeler Room is a temple for the heavenly feminine, a place for more atmospheric or aspirational conversations.

As I got there, people in suits were already sitting down at their assigned seats, backslapping and laughing in a way that suggested, “This is just like the old college days, eh?” I quickly found my name card and sat down. To my right was a reporter for Axios, who was frantically and only half-secretly scrolling to her voice memos app beneath the table. Record.

The editor of The Atlantic seemed to be in charge. He was bald, kind and introduced the gathering with something like, “Here we are in the beautiful Wheeler Room in Hotel Jerome in Aspen, Colorado. Look at this group! Exxon Executives, McKinsey Partners, and even academics from Brookings to Harvard to Yale! In today’s session, we will be trying to answer the question: What policies will drive meaningful action on climate change?” 

After some more hopeful remarks and a casual bite of food that went down in a way that you know he didn’t taste because he was too nervous, he began. Here’s a brief, remembered transcript of the meeting: 

Atlantic Editor, to an Exxon Executive: You’re in charge of environmental policy at ExxonMobile. How have y’all been thinking about policies that will lead to meaningful action on climate change?

Exxon Executive: Well, I know this sounds crazy but we think that nuclear energy is the future.

Harvard Researcher: Well, here’s a small problem with nuclear but, yeah, I also agree.

National Geographic Editor: Why are people so afraid of nuclear?

Brookings Fellow: I know, I don’t get it! It’s so good.

Chevron Advisor: I mean, yeah, it won’t work forever, but as a transitional source?

Exxon Executive: Yeah, totally. It’s the only thing.

Former USDA Undersecretary: If only we didn’t live in a democracy we could just like, do nuclear everywhere without anyone stopping us.

Axios Reporter: I mean, do we live in a democracy?

Atlantic Editor, speaking to me: You’re the director of an environmental film festival, why don’t you tell all of these people what “meaningful” environmental storytelling is to you.

Me: [Having just shoveled too many eggs into my mouth] Well, I think that basically nobody cares about climate change.

[The room falls silent. One food server falls wide-eyed as he pours more coffee for the editor-in-chief of National Geographic. The woman in the white dress gasps audibly and covers her mouth with her right hand.]

Me: Or at least…well, let me start over.

[I think for a moment and look across the table at The Atlantic editor, who knows what I’m thinking and agrees. There is a serene moment when the editor and I stare at each other. The editor sees I’m finally realizing that the people in power are not up to the task of addressing our deteriorating environment. For generations, this has been true and nobody talks about it. The editor watches as I struggle to say something that would change the conventional minds of the table. For a moment, the editor regrets asking the question and putting me on the spot. For years, I will wonder why I was invited to this event in the first place, and the answer might be that sometimes the editors at places such as The Atlantic like to bring in young “global leaders” into white rooms in the back of hotels in Aspen over breakfast to show them what we’re really dealing with.]

Me: [Having fully cleared his mouth of eggs] I mean, in practice, we’re all climate deniers. The question of what is “meaningful” has nothing to do with solving the material problem of carbon in the atmosphere. It has to do with whether our collective efforts and public policies align with huge mythical narratives of what we imagine as the good life. I mean, for me, any policies that incentivize the reassessing of cultural values in order to better respect nonhuman life on this planet—and push the public to feel more accountability and kinship with future generations of humans—would qualify as meaningful action. 

Exxon Executive: I mean, yeah, it might be important to think about why people don’t like nuclear.

Brookings Fellow: Yeah because, I mean, nuclear is awesome. It’s our only chance.

When I escaped Hotel Jerome and made it back out into the morning light, Aspen was just waking up and I felt like I wanted to punch someone. I turned to my right and there on the sidewalk was the only female chief art critic in the history of The New York Times. I didn’t punch her but wanted to.

“So what’s the deal with climate change art? Who’s making the best work?”

“Uh, I don’t know. I haven’t really thought about that. People mostly just make art about identity these days, you know? But yeah, I’m not sure. I’d have to think about it…sorry, it’s early. I haven’t had coffee yet.”

I’m not sure if it was the hangover or eggs or the portraits of old men or animal heads on the walls in Jerome. Or maybe it was just the simple experiential fact that we are sailing the Titanic of a globalized interconnected economy toward an iceberg with no one behind the wheel. But I kindly excused myself from Helen’s presence, quietly threw up in a nearby garden, started crying and called my mom.

What It’s Like to Speak Up for the Environment in Front of Oil Executives

It’s not easy being a climate scientist these days. 

On the one hand, there are the climate deniers and “lukewarmers” who deny the fundamental reality of climate change, or insist that climate change’s impacts somehow won’t be so bad. About once a month I get an email out of the blue from a retired engineer or physics teacher explaining why we climate scientists have it all wrong, and why we don’t understand some basic physical principle. Often, these emails come with helpful links to self-published textbooks or online manifestos offering more details.

On the other hand, there are the many people, especially younger ones, who are genuinely worried that climate change is very soon going to bring about the end of human existence as we know it. And about once a month, I get an email from a high school or college student asking what they should do to help prevent the collapse of society.

While I commend and respect this level of concern about the climate crisis, I don’t personally view climate change as an existential threat to society. The countries and communities who can afford to adapt to a changing climate will do so—and they already are. But those who can’t will experience all of climate change’s worst effects. For me, the climate crisis is a question of social justice and equality, of ensuring that everyone can be prepared for its consequences, rather than something which will bring about the end of society as we know it.

As a climate scientist, I often ask myself how we got into this situation. The conventional explanation is that this mess is the fault of the business conglomerates and special interests who have funded, directly and indirectly, so much climate misinformation. But do we scientists deserve some of the blame? Could we have been clearer in explaining our findings? Have we fallen into a trap set by the fossil fuel industry and its entourage?

One of our biggest problems is communicating uncertainty. Scientists are obsessed with uncertainty—defining it, measuring it and reducing it. You’d never publish data without putting some uncertainties in it. But most people don’t spend so much time thinking about uncertainty. Politicians especially like to have clear, simple stories to tell. So people on either side of the climate debate can latch on to climate scientists’ discussions of uncertainty. It’s a clash of nuance versus messaging, and scientists are much better at nuance than messaging.

I still don’t know what the right line to take on this is. There’s no uncertainty about the basic science and data of climate change: It’s real, we understand it and we know humans are responsible for it. But we’re still trying to work out how bad it’s going to be. Really bad? Or really, really bad, but not apocalyptic? We get excited when a new piece of evidence helps us parse these shades of gray, but non-scientists typically aren’t as interested in confidence intervals or new advances in data-infilling.

Another issue is that we depend on models to make predictions. In fact, this is how all of science works: We make models of reality, which we test by making predictions. The climate models used to forecast the future are some of the most complex computer programs ever written—millions of lines of codes, written by hundreds of researchers, which run on some of the largest supercomputers on Earth. But even these models are imperfect representations of the climate system, with countless biases and approximations. It doesn’t take much work to pick apart a climate model and decide you don’t trust its predictions. Clouds are the largest source of uncertainty (how do you even define a “cloud"?), but they’re far from the only source of error in climate models.

The key, though, is to realize that these models are all we have. And they’ve actually done a pretty good job at predicting the climate’s trajectory since the first climate model predictions were made in the '80s and early '90s. Everyone who works on these models is an expert in their field, and does their best to create the most accurate simulation of the climate system that they can. In a way, it goes back to the issue of uncertainty again—there’s much we still don’t know about the climate system, but we’re confident in the big picture.

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