Why I am not a climate doomist
People power is changing the story
Some of my best friends are climate doomists, and I know why. A set of negative and potent trends feed doomism. Temperatures keep hitting new records, as do carbon concentrations in the atmosphere. We’re back to carbon levels not seen for three to five million years. Fossil fuel use keeps increasing. And feedback loops are already churning. From the Amazon, where rainforests have turned from one of the planet’s great carbon storage reservoirs to a net emitter, to the poles, where ice is disappearing at rapid rates. There are lots of reasons to believe we’ve already crossed the line, and coming generations will be wracked by uncontained climate chaos.
Despite all that, I am not a doomist, and believe we still have possibilities to leave our children and their generations with a world with which they can cope. After many years working on climate, that is how I express my climate mission. There is no doubt that humanity will be adapting to the consequences of our fossil-fueled bacchanal for generations, if not millennia. We will be learning to live with far less water in certain regions, and too much in others. We will be dealing with dustbowls where there were breadbaskets, and retreating from coastal cities. Storms will be ravaging, and wildfires widespread. But we will be coping, and will have eliminated the root causes of climate chaos, fossil fuel pollution and deforestation.
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