Bill, the 5.5°C vs. 2°C distinction is the number I'll be thinking about longest from this piece — it's not really about how much warming, it's about whether anything alive gets time to adjust.
I wrote a death in my novel Athena around exactly that gap between gradual and sudden. My teenage protagonist's grandfather had lived his whole life in a California desert town, farmed through decades of brutal summer heat without incident — he knew how to survive the climate he'd always known. A storm unlike anything the region had ever seen took the roof off his house and killed him anyway. He wasn't unprepared in any way that mattered. The system he'd adapted to simply stopped existing faster than a person could adapt to what replaced it.
That's what "the ocean simply can't keep up" means at human scale too. Adaptation was never really the missing ingredient. Time was.
That distinction really stayed with me too. I think we often talk about adaptation as if it’s a skill people can simply acquire, when adaptation also depends on having enough time, resources, and functioning systems around you. You can be remarkably well adapted to one world and still be completely unprepared for how quickly that world changes.
In his book, 'The Heat Will Kill You First', Jeff Goodell cites the cultural opposition to certain types of adaptation of buildings, specifically Paris's famous zinc roofs. People living in garret apartments under these roofs literally roasted to death and yet Parisians strongly oppose their removal.
Not all Parisians, trust me! Only the France Building Architects corpse, who has an extraordinary power on everything built close from heritage sites - 90% of Paris.
That’s a great addition and it points to a third factor beyond time and resources, willingness. The zinc roofs aren’t a system nobody thought to change, they’re a system people are actively choosing not to change, aesthetics winning out over survival. Which might be the harder problem. You can build more time and resources into a system. It’s much tougher to build in the willingness to give up something beautiful because the climate that made it safe no longer exists.
Climate numbers are rarely the whole story. The important part is what they reveal about the system underneath, who is exposed, what is changing, and how quickly we can actually respond. Numbers become much more powerful when we stop treating them as endpoints and start asking what they mean.
The Australian Federal government are requiring datacentres to be powered by renewables and to recycle water. Check out Expectations 2 & 3 on the webpage link I've given.
It would be nice if this could be used to persuade other governments to follow suit.
We have s a condo in Miami and the diesel generators need work--we're planning on renting a generator for $15,000, but a solar array and batteries make more sense to me. How would you approach this situation? Gerators are noisy, stinky and require fuel during a hurricane when it's often not available easiely.
Our rooftop is limited, 2-4,000 sq ft. There is storage space. How would we find a consultant?
“…aggressive plowing and the replacement of native grasses…” - I appreciate climatologist Andrew Dessler’s quote, but let’s please live-in -truth and more accurately describe the Great Plains plowing for what it was: ecocide.
We must act fast is certainly on target. But so far after several decades of knowing this there is still a lack of a sense of urgency. Given how slow governments tend to act, even with good intentions, what would probably be needed is a declaration of a climate emergency to give leaders more power to act, something like the emergencies that were declared when the covid pandemic occurred. But clearly that is not going to happen for climate change which unfolds at a much slower pace. And there are even more political and financial obstacles than there were for covid. Probably this century a number of critical tipping points will be passed, and a few may already have been, which will produce irreversible changes. A sober view indicates that the situation is hopeless but nevertheless we shouldn't give up. Something might turn the situation around. You never know.
I can't recall a climate emergency being declared at Kyoto but clearly the Kyoto Protocol that resulted failed to reflect an emergency. It was full of offsets to meet the goals and the U.S. Congress did not ratify it because it did not include China. Also, other developing countries were not included. It was finally a start but what followed has been largely disappointing. There has been some measurable progress, instead of projections reaching 4C by the end of century they now show the temperature may not quite reach 3C. We did get off the business as usual path but not nearly enough.
<<On a “slow ramp,” [AMOC] currents stay stable until temperatures are raised 5.5 degrees Celsius—which is a lot of breathing room.>>
Global mean surface temperature (GMST) is on a trajectory to fly past critical, deadly 2.7°C around 2050-2060 heading toward 5.5°C in early 2100s, continuing on a less fast rise asymptotically approaching 10°C, if we don’t take intelligent effective steps to bend the Keeling Curve downward toward 350ppm and below.
Given the 25-30 year lead to 2.7°C, where on Earth can anybody, any critter, anything survive at GMST 5.5°C above pre-industrial in say, 2100-2110?
You say, “the most important point I keep trying to make in this newsletter: we must act fast!”
Is it too late? Or is later too late? Or is it never too late?
My 11-year old Honda with a 4-banger and 6-speed manual transmission gets 44+ miles per gallon. I drive only when needed and I need to fill the gas tank about every 2 weeks. So my cost is about $.26 per day. Switching to an electric or hybrid would cost a LOT more and I'm on a fixed income so I really can't make decisions based on emissions produced.
The idea that every car owner in the world can replace their diesel vehicle with an EV is insane. The focus should be on subsidised, electrified public transportation, especially in urban areas.
More than 95% of Americans have some form of air-conditioning, but what happens when those slack power lines fail or if prices rise?
My favorite story about solar fields working in tandem with agriculture is when they plant wildflowers between the panels and put beehives among the panels. The bees help pollinate farmland within miles. The notion solar destroys prime farmland is nonsense if done thoughtfully.
You are connected to more than the power lines. You are paying for whatever your utility does to produce power, all the cost of maintaining and expanding the grid ( check the cost of copper wire nowadays, just for instance), and you are paying to fry the planet. Admittedly, it's a tough choice if you don't do the math.
As a supply authority chair in the 1970s I bought copper cable by the ton and undergrounded all above ground electricity and telephone wires and poles. Your comment about paying to fry the planet is not understood. Fact remains living in southern climes as I do kiwi don't need skillfully marketed solar and nor do Tasmania (similar latitudes) which exports its hydro electricity to Melbourne by cable
Well, you seem to be well aware of your options, especially since you are in a place that may be safe for your time. But most other folks have very different situations. if you're satisfied with your personal choices i wonder why you feel compelled to comment about situations you will never half to consider.
90% of NZ homes...... And of those many would not have the discretionary funds to indulge in buying their own power system let alone the batteries even if subsidised
It sounds like most of the world still needs batteries to maintain a steady supply of power, but I agree that subsidizing individuals is not the best option—we need local systems with batteries. And yet, even without batteries, our supply may be as stable on solar/wind than on fossil fuel-derived systems.
Somewhere, somehow we will need to find the funds to switch to a different energy system. The upfront costs are real even if downstream there are savings. It's the upfront costs that prevent the average person from switching to renewables, EVs etc. This is the problem in a nutshell. Overall the Chinese appear to be moving ahead on this front. The rest of the world, not so much. Is there another example of this besides China?
"remember that ninety percent more is stored away in the oceans, waiting to be released". Bill, if this is based on the common statement that 90% of the addiitional heat due to the global warming goes into the oceans, then your expression is wrong, you should say instead "remember that nine times more is stored away in the oceans, waiting to be released".
Bill, the 5.5°C vs. 2°C distinction is the number I'll be thinking about longest from this piece — it's not really about how much warming, it's about whether anything alive gets time to adjust.
I wrote a death in my novel Athena around exactly that gap between gradual and sudden. My teenage protagonist's grandfather had lived his whole life in a California desert town, farmed through decades of brutal summer heat without incident — he knew how to survive the climate he'd always known. A storm unlike anything the region had ever seen took the roof off his house and killed him anyway. He wasn't unprepared in any way that mattered. The system he'd adapted to simply stopped existing faster than a person could adapt to what replaced it.
That's what "the ocean simply can't keep up" means at human scale too. Adaptation was never really the missing ingredient. Time was.
That distinction really stayed with me too. I think we often talk about adaptation as if it’s a skill people can simply acquire, when adaptation also depends on having enough time, resources, and functioning systems around you. You can be remarkably well adapted to one world and still be completely unprepared for how quickly that world changes.
In his book, 'The Heat Will Kill You First', Jeff Goodell cites the cultural opposition to certain types of adaptation of buildings, specifically Paris's famous zinc roofs. People living in garret apartments under these roofs literally roasted to death and yet Parisians strongly oppose their removal.
Not all Parisians, trust me! Only the France Building Architects corpse, who has an extraordinary power on everything built close from heritage sites - 90% of Paris.
That’s a great addition and it points to a third factor beyond time and resources, willingness. The zinc roofs aren’t a system nobody thought to change, they’re a system people are actively choosing not to change, aesthetics winning out over survival. Which might be the harder problem. You can build more time and resources into a system. It’s much tougher to build in the willingness to give up something beautiful because the climate that made it safe no longer exists.
That Hartley guy, with the 401k lawsuit, is a United Methodist, & a McKibben fan.
-AMH
Climate numbers are rarely the whole story. The important part is what they reveal about the system underneath, who is exposed, what is changing, and how quickly we can actually respond. Numbers become much more powerful when we stop treating them as endpoints and start asking what they mean.
Two thoughts:
1. We should stop subsidizing the oil companies first. Then we don't have to claw back as much and they can't fight us getting it.
2. Data centers should be required to have solar panels on the roof or next to them and battery storage in addition to being near a water source
The Australian Federal government are requiring datacentres to be powered by renewables and to recycle water. Check out Expectations 2 & 3 on the webpage link I've given.
It would be nice if this could be used to persuade other governments to follow suit.
https://www.industry.gov.au/publications/expectations-data-centres-and-ai-infrastructure-developers
Yes and the water should be recycled. This should be the minimum!
You need to seriously re-think the whole data center enterprise.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/08/datacenter-ai-drought-water
Betting the farm on AI may not be the most sensible response to the climate crisis.
We have s a condo in Miami and the diesel generators need work--we're planning on renting a generator for $15,000, but a solar array and batteries make more sense to me. How would you approach this situation? Gerators are noisy, stinky and require fuel during a hurricane when it's often not available easiely.
Our rooftop is limited, 2-4,000 sq ft. There is storage space. How would we find a consultant?
https://solarunitedneighbors.org/individuals/
“…aggressive plowing and the replacement of native grasses…” - I appreciate climatologist Andrew Dessler’s quote, but let’s please live-in -truth and more accurately describe the Great Plains plowing for what it was: ecocide.
We must act fast is certainly on target. But so far after several decades of knowing this there is still a lack of a sense of urgency. Given how slow governments tend to act, even with good intentions, what would probably be needed is a declaration of a climate emergency to give leaders more power to act, something like the emergencies that were declared when the covid pandemic occurred. But clearly that is not going to happen for climate change which unfolds at a much slower pace. And there are even more political and financial obstacles than there were for covid. Probably this century a number of critical tipping points will be passed, and a few may already have been, which will produce irreversible changes. A sober view indicates that the situation is hopeless but nevertheless we shouldn't give up. Something might turn the situation around. You never know.
We declared a climate emergency at Kyoto, FFS. That's not what has halted progress.
I can't recall a climate emergency being declared at Kyoto but clearly the Kyoto Protocol that resulted failed to reflect an emergency. It was full of offsets to meet the goals and the U.S. Congress did not ratify it because it did not include China. Also, other developing countries were not included. It was finally a start but what followed has been largely disappointing. There has been some measurable progress, instead of projections reaching 4C by the end of century they now show the temperature may not quite reach 3C. We did get off the business as usual path but not nearly enough.
Thanks Bill,
excellent summaries and food for thought and action. A pleasure to read, if pleasure can apply to this grim topic. But worthy of all our attention.
Agrivoltaics is still a trickle, but what we do see is working well. https://solargrazing.org/
#5.5 degrees Celsius vs 2 degrees Celsius:
<<On a “slow ramp,” [AMOC] currents stay stable until temperatures are raised 5.5 degrees Celsius—which is a lot of breathing room.>>
Global mean surface temperature (GMST) is on a trajectory to fly past critical, deadly 2.7°C around 2050-2060 heading toward 5.5°C in early 2100s, continuing on a less fast rise asymptotically approaching 10°C, if we don’t take intelligent effective steps to bend the Keeling Curve downward toward 350ppm and below.
Given the 25-30 year lead to 2.7°C, where on Earth can anybody, any critter, anything survive at GMST 5.5°C above pre-industrial in say, 2100-2110?
You say, “the most important point I keep trying to make in this newsletter: we must act fast!”
Is it too late? Or is later too late? Or is it never too late?
Doom, urgency, delusion?
Where there's life there's hope
Fatalism simply plays into the hands of the fossil fuel lobby who looking to max out the fossil fuel credit card while they can.
My 11-year old Honda with a 4-banger and 6-speed manual transmission gets 44+ miles per gallon. I drive only when needed and I need to fill the gas tank about every 2 weeks. So my cost is about $.26 per day. Switching to an electric or hybrid would cost a LOT more and I'm on a fixed income so I really can't make decisions based on emissions produced.
You shouldn't have to pay for it all yourself. Vote for restoring + expanding the EV tax credit into a full subsidy that works for people.
The idea that every car owner in the world can replace their diesel vehicle with an EV is insane. The focus should be on subsidised, electrified public transportation, especially in urban areas.
More than 95% of Americans have some form of air-conditioning, but what happens when those slack power lines fail or if prices rise?
https://neada.org/summer-cooling-costs-projected-to-hit-record-highs-as-household-electric-bills-rise-10-5-june-price-update/
We have to find better ways to cool down our communities.
https://theconversation.com/how-to-keep-buildings-cool-without-air-conditioning-according-to-an-expert-in-sustainable-design-121004
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/aug/29/the-air-conditioning-trap-how-cold-air-is-heating-the-world?utm_term=6a3f91266663403260f892e7329d06c6&utm_campaign=TheLongRead&utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&CMP=longread_email
Here comes the sun 😎🌞 ‼️ It's all right 👍
My favorite story about solar fields working in tandem with agriculture is when they plant wildflowers between the panels and put beehives among the panels. The bees help pollinate farmland within miles. The notion solar destroys prime farmland is nonsense if done thoughtfully.
Solar power is not a savior when the sun is occluded
Batteries
Which is why you have battery backup when using solar
Batteries and other expensive imported equipment though are not required when 90% of us, or more, are connected to the power lines
You are connected to more than the power lines. You are paying for whatever your utility does to produce power, all the cost of maintaining and expanding the grid ( check the cost of copper wire nowadays, just for instance), and you are paying to fry the planet. Admittedly, it's a tough choice if you don't do the math.
As a supply authority chair in the 1970s I bought copper cable by the ton and undergrounded all above ground electricity and telephone wires and poles. Your comment about paying to fry the planet is not understood. Fact remains living in southern climes as I do kiwi don't need skillfully marketed solar and nor do Tasmania (similar latitudes) which exports its hydro electricity to Melbourne by cable
Well, you seem to be well aware of your options, especially since you are in a place that may be safe for your time. But most other folks have very different situations. if you're satisfied with your personal choices i wonder why you feel compelled to comment about situations you will never half to consider.
Brian, Tell us about situations I will never have to consider
I’d like to see more on this. 90% of the entire world? Of the country? A community on a local grid?
90% of NZ homes...... And of those many would not have the discretionary funds to indulge in buying their own power system let alone the batteries even if subsidised
It sounds like most of the world still needs batteries to maintain a steady supply of power, but I agree that subsidizing individuals is not the best option—we need local systems with batteries. And yet, even without batteries, our supply may be as stable on solar/wind than on fossil fuel-derived systems.
As others have said, batteries, and Passivhaus design.
Somewhere, somehow we will need to find the funds to switch to a different energy system. The upfront costs are real even if downstream there are savings. It's the upfront costs that prevent the average person from switching to renewables, EVs etc. This is the problem in a nutshell. Overall the Chinese appear to be moving ahead on this front. The rest of the world, not so much. Is there another example of this besides China?
"remember that ninety percent more is stored away in the oceans, waiting to be released". Bill, if this is based on the common statement that 90% of the addiitional heat due to the global warming goes into the oceans, then your expression is wrong, you should say instead "remember that nine times more is stored away in the oceans, waiting to be released".