Signs of Things to Come

FOR THOSE PAYING attention, this has been a fairly terrifying winter and spring. And I don’t just mean the presidential election. I mean that the signals we’re getting from the natural world indicate we’re crossing thresholds much more quickly than expected.

February, for instance, was the most anomalously hot month ever recorded on the planet, crushing all records. The world had pledged in Paris in December to try to hold global temperature increases to 1.5 degrees Celsius—well, February was just about at that level already.

The elevated temperatures were especially noticeable in the Arctic—for long stretches of the winter the region as a whole was as much as 18 degrees Fahrenheit above average. (Christmas Eve was almost 50 degrees warmer than normal at the North Pole). Not surprisingly, this meant the lowest levels of Arctic sea ice ever recorded by late March.

Meanwhile in the Antarctic, new data showed that sea level may be set to rise far faster than expected, as the great ice sheets start to slide into the ocean—the water could go up by meters in the course of this century, which would make the defense of most of the world’s great cities a nightmare.

And the damage wasn’t confined to the poles. In the tropics, extreme hot sea temperatures meant that we had the most widespread coral bleaching ever observed. One scientist, coming back from an aerial survey that found half the coral bleached in northern sectors of the Great Barrier Reef, called it “the saddest research trip” he’d ever taken.

One could offer 100 examples of the damage these changes are causing to human communities—the record wind speeds in the cyclone that crashed into Fiji, the absurd floods in Pakistan. Or—and this is really a nightmare vision of the future—the protesters killed by police in the drought-stricken Philippines in early April. The farmers were marching to protest the lack of aid to help them cope with slashing drought that had wrecked their crops; they were asking for, if nothing else, some rice.

They were met with gunfire. As I’m writing this, the death toll stands at three, and there are still dozens of protesters holed up in a Methodist Church surrounded by police. They’re calling it the “bullets for rice” protest, and I fear that what it shows is what will happen over and over again on this stressed planet as the years wear on: Stretched to the breaking point by climatic upheaval, people will demand change that political systems are unwilling to yield. The results will be tragic.

As I’ve said, the Paris agreements on climate already seem somewhat out of date—we need far faster progress if we have even the slightest hope of getting ahead of the physics of global warming. We can do it—with each passing month the engineers drop the price of a solar panel a few more notches. But we’ve got to go at it with far more vigor.

Some people will be motivated by hope. And some people—just as correctly—will be motivated by fear.

If you’re not afraid of what we’ve unleashed, it’s because you’re not paying sufficient attention.