Before I get into this, I want to thank DailyKos contributors for an incredibly warm welcome. I wrote my first post spurned by an incredibly misanthropic contribution made by one of the site’s contributors. I have always found that type of content to be more of a problem than anything else, and I wanted to try my hand at expressing my frustrations in a less belligerent fashion. I can’t really describe the support I almost immediately received from several contributors almost immediately, nor can I thank you enough for offering a bit of your “spoons” (to take from the language of one of the major contributions today) in extending a hand my way.
I thought I would return the favor by offering some food for thought from my own circles.
Despite the tone my initial posting here struck, I generally consider myself an optimist. My grandfather was a Methodist pastor who was always quick to prioritize social change, my parents are both educators (were it not for the economic barriers I’d follow them right there), and my high school’s textbooks included People’s History of the United States. Perhaps the thing, then, that caused me to relapse into my biggest period of despair was being confronted with the idea that the optimism among those campaigning for the biggest change was shaken so thoroughly as to be dissolved entirely.
The worst part was that I understood where it was coming from.
When you take it all together, it’s scary. And several of the records we’ve set over the last year have been horrifying. It’s important not to discount the very real emotions that emerge from a year like 2023, it may even be instrumental to catalyzing a greater awareness among more people (and in many ways seems to have accomplished this — do not take the willful ignorance of some as evidence of some kind of mass indifference towards the question, the average person is not your enemy).
However, I want to offer another perspective and a reason to keep a close eye on the developments over the next 18 months (and campaign for literally any positive change possible).
To speak of the sort of smug or angsty misanthropy that used to dominate my understanding of the climate crisis, which I have had to summarily deprogram myself from over the last couple of years, I remember a piece written by Adam McKay before I summarily unsubscribed from the outlet, where he mocked the continued use of language in regards to 2023 as “a glimpse into our climate future”. “Isn’t it already here?” he said. As time continued, (I believe his statement was made around August), others seemed to share his sentiment; that 2023 and later 2024’s experiences were a sure indicator of the new normal. Let’s, however, take a look at a few graphs:
To the right you’ll see Michael Mann’s “hockey stick” graph. What can be most evident with this entire chart is that the mean predictions are very rarely where the year ends up, and that the year to year variance, while following a trendline, is hardly uniform. 2016 (a previous El Niño) similarly represented a MASSIVE jump over the warming of years previous. What does this say? That the experience of this last horrifying year was not unaccounted for in the existing climate models, and said models are in fact incredibly versatile (almost like those scientist dudes know what they’re talking about, huh?)
Now, part of the anxiety over this last year was over the idea that the positive accomplishments were drops in the ocean of new, unprecedented changes that seemed to indicate a radical acceleration of every problem was underway. The prolonged record temperatures well through winter into spring were just more reason to think this was a sure thing, and that has clearly been a bit of a war of attrition for most who are passionate about the climate.
Why do I say that 2025 will be a major year then?
If we do enter La Niña (as a large majority of models expect us to), then we may be looking at a much different picture of what challenges lie ahead for us. A time less for despair and more for mobility on a scale we’ve never seen before.
2023 was the hottest year in human history, and most predictions place 2024 as being right on par with it. If 2025 is cooler, as some suggest it could be significantly? Then we can start to think about what that means for our borrowed time.
One thing that I have hung on to for a while now is the suggestion that the “worst case scenario” has continued to improve over the last few years. Not enough to avoid considerable losses and strain, but enough that our concern is on how to mitigate losses and protect what we can; not if we have the option. (It was sobering to remember that the IPCC once stated that all estimates placed us between 3.3°C and an excess of 5°C by 2100). We have yet to see how 2024 stacks up against the figure to left, but the increased capacity and storage in places like California, Germany and the United Kingdom suggests that the renewable revolution may finally be underway in a major way.
The Guardian’s piece surveying scientists recently put the 3°C barrier at the forefront of environmentally conscious people’s minds. This is a scary proposition in a number of ways, especially due to how difficult it would be for any meaningful recovery to happen after that point. I want to make no mistake here; the last twelve months have been disquieting to a supreme level, and the prospect of more years like it (or worse than it) is a horrific one. But if the models are true, and 2025 (and the next few years following it) is cooler, there is a chance, a real chance, to prevent more years like 2023. The next El Niño year would be sure to be an untold terror, but we’d have a chance to actually prepare for it by any means necessary. Perhaps if you’re sick of hearing the 1.5°C number volleyed about like the axiom of global salvation, think of it this way; 3°C isn’t our new prediction, it’s the number to avoid. Consider for a second if the worst case scenarios from years and years before had come to pass, and 2023 pushed us into a premature 2°C or worse?
Consider for a second what we’ve managed to do already, even with every roadblock and infuriating political (and industrial) arsonist standing in our way. 2024 with all of its devastation has already revealed a real desire within much of the population to finally leave behind fossil fuels, and finally finally the role of food production in our current predicament (to make the understatement of the century) is being talked about as a key part of the equation. With the fact of the average US citizen’s per capita emissions recently being below what they were in 1913, before things like air conditioning and cars were widespread adoption, the trends are starting to at the very least point in the right direction. With all that laid out, it sounds a bit less impossible, no?
I’m going to end this by repeating what has been going around the site in a major way:
GET OUT THE VOTE!!!
While I, like many of my generation, felt a disillusionment early on to Biden’s climate policies, the last year and a half has also proven that despite his missteps, there is a genuine desire in his cabinet to enact change in the right direction, and an ability in the rest of the party to catalyze those trends further. I don’t need to tell you that the prospect of this great work not only being stopped but rolled back would be a new kind of peril for humanity as a whole.
Source: www.theclimatebrink.com/…
Author’s Note: If you perceive this as an overly naïve or irresponsible thing to post, please let me know in the comments and I will remove it. My goal was only to provide my personal perspective and introduce some data points that I had not yet seen on DailyKos.