Quite a lot of climate coverage over the last few weeks has taken this tone—“it’s here, it’s now.” But what is “it”? The climate crisis is not an event but an era, in which cascading impacts are almost certain to continue to worsen and intensify, punishing more each year.
https://twitter.com/brentnyt/status/1416381185811525639
“It” will look very different in 2041 than 2021 and very different in 2061.
In this way it is less like the arrival of summer, or the appearance of a new normal, than like the arrival of agriculture or industrialization, and the end of normal. In its place, a whole new horizon—much less stable and much more treacherous.
The horizon will be shaking, and retreating, for decades at least, and the disasters we are now seeing will almost certainly be regarded, in retrospect, as comparatively calm, benign, even idyllic.
It’s as though, at the beginning of the pandemic, alarmed by deaths in the hundreds and cases in the thousands, we knew there was no way to get past it and back to normal, only to stall the rate of growth—and doing so would require a total global mobilization.
This is just the beginning, and it is altogether an alarming sign that already many scientists are startled by how quickly unexpected extremes have begun.
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