An odd silence - at the end of humanity's hottest year...yet

The Crucial Years

The world—its politics, its economy, and its journalism—has trouble coping with the scale of the climate crisis. We can’t quite wrap our collective head around it, which has never been clearer to me than in these waning days of 2023.

Because the most important thing that happened this year was the heat. (...)

And yet you really wouldn’t know it from reading the wrap-ups of the year’s news now appearing on one website after another. (...)

Those stories in the Times and Post were a way to search for a new angle to a story that doesn’t change quite fast enough to count as news. (In geological terms, we’re warming at hellish pace; but that’s not how the 24/7 news cycle works.) (...) We’re programmed—by evolution, doubtless, and in the case of journalism by counting clicks—to look for novelty and for conflict. Climate change seems inexorable, which is the opposite of how we think about news.

The war in Gaza, by contrast, fits our defintions perfectly. (...) But in a sense, it is the very familiarity of the war that makes it easy for us to focus on it; “mideast conflict,” like “inflation” or “presidential elections,” is an easily-accessed template in our minds. (...) Next year seems likely to be another orgy of familiarity: Joe Biden and Donald Trump, yet again. (...)

[W]e’re literally in uncharted territory, dealing with temperatures no human society has ever dealt with before. And to head off the worst, we are going to require an industrial transition on a scale we’ve never seen before: there were signs this year that that transition has begun (by midsummer we were installing a gigawatt worth of solar panels a day) but it will have to go much much faster.

These changes—the physical ones, and the political and economic ones—are almost inconceivable to us. That’s my point; they don’t fit our easy templates. (...)

"The only really important question is, 'How many more years like this we have to have before the reality of how bad climate change is breaks into the public's consciousness?'" (...)

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Tags: #climate #climate_change #climate_crisis #heatwaves #extreme_weather #flooding #fossil_fuel #co2 #media #news #news_cycle #journalist #journalism