Climate action is a steepening curve.
So, too, is literally every other aspect of the planetary crisis.

Speed is everything.
Also, it's not just that actions become, of necessity, faster and more disruptive.

It's also that increasingly massive resources must be devoted to ruggedizing in the face of impacts, and ever-greater discontinuities shake society as people and institutions scramble to keep up.
(These facts, given the delay we've already experienced, are why we are surrounded carbon bubbles, brittleness bubbles and expertise bubbles.)

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More from @AlexSteffen

1 Nov
60% of IPCC authors think we're headed for 3ºC warming.

My sense:

1.5º is barely even within possibility, and certainly extremely likely.

2º is possible, requires massive shifts in climate politics, business and finance... and luck.

2.5º is doable with rapid, spiky action. Image
Informed intuition at work.

Nobody can predict the real outcome, given the sheer complexity of the human systems being modeled and the magnitude of discontinuity involved.

Which is why we need to fight as if the best outcome were still possible.

It might be.
Also, we should see how much progress has been made.

Even if we still face catastrophic perils, I believe we no longer face an extinction-level event, or even an apocalyptic civilization collapse.

Our future is now *transapocalyptic*, which, while grim, is actually a huge win.
Read 4 tweets
30 Oct
Thinking tonight of the many 1000s of awesome, dedicated, tough (and often funny!) advocates for the human future on planet Earth I have met over 30 years of this work.

Bunch of fricking misfit geeks, wonks and rads —who may have actually staved off human extinction.

Respect. Image
Humanity owes a vast, unpayable debt to the good, kind people who transformed themselves thru love & commitment from unremarkable citizens, scientists, back-to-the-landers, artists, engineers, parents & professors into the thin edge of the wedge that may turned us from disaster.
Even today, we fail to understand what these folks did for us all, and our kids, and their kids, and generations stretching out into the vastness of time.

Heroes with day jobs and kids to care for.
Read 7 tweets
29 Oct
Noting that the structure of a human system inclines it with great probability to a certain set of outcomes is not prediction, but observation. Image
The systems we've created for climate politics, policy and diplomacy incline towards seriously insufficient near-term outcomes, and thus — because of the inevitability of action in response to ecological imperatives — to radically disruptive medium-term results.
Massive actions in response to the planetary crisis are not a matter of whether, but when.

When, however, changes dramatically what the nature of the actions taken ends up being.
Read 4 tweets
26 Oct
On a planet where people are just growing used to wild change — endless droughts, massive storms, smoke-orange skies, random flash floods, heat domes and so on — the biggest shifting baseline seems to be our expectations of climate diplomacy.
The future planet we appear to be ready to agree to live on — if we get what is being framed as a *successful* COP — was understood to be an appallingly bad outcome just 30 years ago... a tragedy for future generations, to be avoided at all costs.
I am all about getting the wins we can, and revving up for the Snap Forward. Winning is a spectrum, here, and there are multiple paths to victory.

Our climate debate, however, wanders amidst the absurd and slightly surreal these days.
Read 6 tweets
15 Sep
Rioting to demand bold, headlong—indeed positively fucking reckless—climate action might be about to have its moment.
Read 4 tweets
24 Aug
How it started. How it's going.

Mount Shasta without snow for the first time in history.

This is what climate/ecological discontinuity looks like on the ground.
(Images: NPS, @BillMartinKTVU)
The planetary crisis is not an issue, it's an era, and we're already living in it.

alexsteffen.substack.com/p/were-not-yet…
Read 5 tweets

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