“We don’t really know what’s going on,” Gavin Schmidt, the director of nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told me. “And we haven’t really known what’s going on since about March of last year.” He called the situation “disquieting.”

A beautiful and sharp analysis of our climate future and preparedness through the eyes of a sci-fi writer come city planner.

What doesn’t sell at the market is destined for the desert, where it sits, imperishable, as much of it is made from synthetic materials that do not biodegrade. Scavengers salvage what goods they can.

As the climate crisis deepens, experts recognize that, globally, ponds store as much carbon as the world’s oceans, and sequester atmospheric carbon at a rate 20 to 50 times faster than trees. For millennia, ponds in the Bengal delta have been scrubbing carbon from the atmosphere and sinking it in the soil. As they continue to disappear, so do hopes of holding back a worsening climate crisis.

We currently live in an epoch that geologists call the Holocene, which began soon after the last major ice age ended around 11,700 years ago. But for over two decades, some scientists have argued that the label is far too antiquated. In 2000, the term “Anthropocene” — ‘anthropo’ for human and ‘cene’ for new — gained prominence. It highlights how human activities dominate the Earth’s land, atmosphere, and oceans, significantly impacting its climate and natural ecosystems.

strong and sustained reductions in emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases would limit climate change

Climate change – better described as the Climate Catastrophe, which as surely as any war deserves a proper noun – is already here and already reaching into people’s lives – the lives of middle-class college-educated Western people like most of my readers – and smashing them like eggs. The Climate Catastrophe is already tearing apart people’s “normal”, in the sense of destroying people’s ways of life and standards of living.