Reality intrudes

We can’t actually keep on like this

In our political life, reality hardly matters any more. Earlier today the president of the United States, in a fit of pique, proposed renaming Lake Ontario “Lake America.” He hides in a food cart and sends journalists out as decoys to be killed on his behalf. His winsome aide hands him an endless stream of flattering tweets. And yet the world stumbles on. People die, obviously, as a result of this folly—in the Middle East, and in middle America, where suddenly measles is a serious threat again. (Hell, the deaths attributable to Elon Musk’s decision to destroy USAid put him in the Stalin and Mao category for negligent manslaughter.) But human societies are for a while resilient; we assume that there’s always a chance for a reset. After the next election normal service will resume. If you start with a rich country like the U.S., it can absorb a lot of decline.

But that’s not how physical systems work. You push them and then past a certain point things change. If the temperature drops below 32 degrees water freezes, and if it rises above 212 then it boils, more or less. This newsletter spends a lot of time in the world of politics, because that’s where we need to make changes. But sometimes we need to remind ourselves that ultimately that political world is a subset of the physical one, simply because that’s how things work.

And we’re now reaching, I think, the point where that physical system is running out of margin.

Take a look at this graph. It shows the temperature of the global sea surface, averaged on a daily basis. Since our planet is 70 percent ocean, it’s a pretty good gauge of how hot the planet is getting. And what it shows is that in all the decades we’ve been measuring, it’s never been hotter. Given what we know about climate history, it’s almost certainly never been hotter in the history of our species. (Handily, by the way, that 21.1 Celsius line is just about exactly seventy degrees Fahrenheit.) As a Canadian professor wrote, “August 21st likely marked the warmest Sea Surface Temperatures have been for the entire Holocene period, and possibly even as far back as the last Interglacial 125,000 years ago.”

As Damian Carrington chronicled yesterday

The new ocean heat record being set in August is especially remarkable as global sea temperatures are typically highest in March and April, after the austral summer. The southern hemisphere has significantly more ocean area than the northern.

“The record is another clear signal of an ocean under growing stress,” said Dr Samantha Burgess, at the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), which produced the new data. “El Niño is adding heat to the system, but it is doing so on top of decades of human-driven warming. The consequences are already visible: the number of marine heatwave days globally has more than tripled since the early 1990s.”

That means many things. Among them, as Ben Noll laid out yesterday,

The unusual ocean warmth has fueled powerful storms in the Pacific, such as Hurricane Lala near Hawaii, helped create a reservoir of extra moisture that has contributed to recent rainfall extremes across the United States and boosted summer heat across Europe.

This is a system that’s being pushed much too hard and much too fast, and it’s breaking.

Forty two percent of the world’s ocean area is now experiencing a “marine heatwave.” This means that wide swaths of coral are already “bleaching,” turning a deadly shade of pale; we don’t have the numbers yet, but it’s entirely predictable. We learned earlier this summer that the last huge coral bleaching event, the fourth this century, ran from 2023 to 2025 and

impacted 84% of the world’s coral reef area in all three coral reef-containing ocean basins (Pacific, Atlantic and Indian Oceans). Mass bleaching was documented in at least 83 countries and territories.

It’s not just that coral reefs are one of the wildest corners of God’s brain; it’s that they provide food for 500 million human beings and keep waves from destroying shorelines. But still—they’re underwater. We don’t actually seem them on a daily basis. It’s hard for us to imagine the damage.

Trees are easier for us to see; think of them as coral reefs but on land. And here’s a completely remarkable account from Eric Niiler on how the hot new wildfires bred by our hot new atmosphere are degrading them in the most obvious possible ways

On a gentle slope on the western side of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, where a towering green canopy of ponderosa pines had stood for centuries, wildfires have transformed roughly 1,700 acres into brown, bare shrubland.

That forest is gone for good, scientists say. Spiky shrubs and poison oak have replaced the majestic trees. All that is left of the pines are burned logs and dead branches.

It’s part of a wider transformation that’s taking place across the Western United States, from Oregon to New Mexico, as bigger and hotter wildfires sweep through forests that have not evolved to survive such high-intensity blazes and a warmer climate. Recent studies estimate that as much as 40 percent of Western conifer forests will turn into shrubland by 2100 as a result.

These trees help define the American west. (Google the Oregon license plate). But they also function as part of an ecosystem. To wit:

Researchers say that as trees disappear, winter and spring snow will melt faster, affecting wildlife as well as communities that are already struggling with water shortages. Some Western states get as much as 75 percent of their water from snowmelt.

“When you remove the forest, that snow is more susceptible to melting earlier,” said Benjamin Hatchett, an interdisciplinary scientist at Colorado State University. And he noted that a warmer, more arid climate dries out soil and pulls moisture from plants, making them more susceptible to wildfire. “That thirstier atmosphere is a big concern,” he said.

Oh, and:

Forests also absorb planet-warming carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Bigger, older trees store more carbon than younger trees and shrubs. The loss of conifer forests today means a hotter tomorrow.

But again, much of that is invisible—co2, sadly, can’t be seen. (If it turned the sky smog-brown like carbon monoxide we’d have done something decades ago). And even forests are far away from where most people live as to seem almost unreal. (Once, a visitor looking at the Vermont foliage near my home asked me if we collected the colored leaves when they fell and put them back up next year, as if they were a kind of Christmas decoration).

So let’s think about that water for a moment, the snowmelt that’s disappearing ever faster. Here’s another remarkable account of the American West, this time from Reis Thebault. It begins in the control room of the Central Arizona Project, the vast canal project that supplies water from the Colorado River to Phoenix and its surrounds, which are some of the fastest growing communities in America. The Colorado, though, is drying up, and so big cutbacks are coming.

Short-term reductions, announced by the federal government on Friday, will cost Arizona roughly one-third of its share of river water over the next two years. But beyond that, a range of cutbacks remain possible.

Under the most severe outcome, the system would be cut off entirely during the driest years, setting off a social and economic meltdown Arizonans shudder to even imagine.

“They are threatening to shut down the Southwest,” said Brenda Burman, the project’s general manager. “It’s not possible to picture it.”

There’s a certain poetic justice here, perhaps—communities that have built their identity on the myth of the ruggedly independent western man overcoming the hostile elements, only to find themselves entirely dependent on the socialized distribution of limited water.

Cave Creek, a picturesque burg steeped in cowboy kitsch in the foothills north of Phoenix, gets 95 percent of its water from the aqueduct system

“Without Colorado River water, we would be a dusty little town with dirt roads,” Mayor Robert Morris said.

The town’s leaders have been scrambling to find backup plans. Cave Creek has hired a water consultant and struck deals with neighboring municipalities, cobbling together enough supply for the next five years, Mr. Morris said.

He has sought to prepare residents for higher bills and stricter conservation, working to undo a foundational part of the state’s philosophy in the process.

“The biggest thing for people to overcome is the idea of unlimited, cheap water,” Mr. Morris said.

But even that blow to identity is small compared to the blow that comes when you run out. And not just of affordable water, but of affordable food. And we seem to be nearing that point. We’ve long known, for instance, that yields of staple crops are rising more slowly than they would otherwise, because of higher temperatures. But a new study this week put some fairly remarkable numbers on the future: “severe water scarcity” events due to global warming could easily triple the price of wheat.

Looking ahead, climate model projections suggest that water scarcity will expand under continued warming. Our results indicate that a temperature increase of about 3°C could triple average global wheat prices relative to 2010.

But we don’t have to wait. As Somini Sengupta pointed out this weekend, in four paragraphs that may set some kind of record for condensed reality, that future is more or less now.

Wheat is at the heart of the modern diet, and this year, it is facing an accumulation of modern dangers. The breadbaskets of the world are getting pummeled by drone strikes and devilish weather, nudging prices higher amid already soaring food costs in the wake of the Iran war.

Heat and drought have diminished harvests in some of the biggest wheat-producing countries, including the United States, which is expected to have its worst wheat harvest in a half-century, spiking prices. Poor countries that agreed to buy American wheat under the threat of Trump tariffs could be stuck paying abnormally high prices.

The Black Sea, a crucial passage for the global wheat trade, is an active theater of the Russia-Ukraine war, while the Houthi militia’s attacks on shipping in the Red Sea have already forced grain shipments to take a longer, more expensive route around South Africa.

Beyond that, a supercharged El Niño further threatens water levels in the Panama Canal, while drought has reduced water levels to perilously low levels in transit routes like the Rhine and Danube rivers in Europe, raising transportation costs. All this at a time when the global atmosphere is hotter than normal because of a century of fossil fuel burning, threatening the livelihoods of small farmers in poor countries.

All of this is down to fossil fuels—the oil we’re fighting over in the Strait of Hormuz, the gas and coal whose methane and carbon emissions have sent temperatures soaring and river levels dropping. It’s reality.

Just to repeat the numbers, this time from Neal Burnette-Irwin and Marion Kilpatrick

Mark Jankowski with USDA’s Outlook Board is still crunching the numbers for the year, but says the crop is set to break all the wrong records.

“On our balance sheet, we didn’t make any changes to our export or other use forecasts, so all that essentially did was tighten up ending stocks by six million bushels from where we were last month. Now we’re looking at U.S. ending stocks of 717 million bushels, down 203 million bushels from last year, reflecting the fact that this wheat crop is a small crop. It’s historically small.”

U.S. wheat growers can point to a number of challenges this year, but Jankowski says the issues aren’t limited to domestic wheat production. The crop is also suffering globally.

“A fairly sharp reduction in the European Union production estimate. We lowered it by 1.8 million tons this month, reflecting very hot, dry weather that spread across the entire EU region over the summer. Much of that extreme heat hit during the grain-filling stage for wheat, so it is showing up as reduced yield potential. With a 1.8-million-ton reduction in the forecast this month, that would bring the EU’s wheat production forecast down to 134.2 million tons, down just about 11 million tons from last year.”

It’s not just wheat. In Europe, knocked to its knees by an endless stream of heat waves this summer, we have reports of vegetable harvests collapsing by double digits—sixty percent of France’s broccoli crop, for instance, is gone. Britain could face food shortages within months, one excited newspaper report warns; in Ireland, they’re calling for an emergency food stockpile as harvests run low. The UK government has refused to release an unredacted copy of a report from the country’s intelligence agencies about ecosystem collapse amidst rising temperatures, but we do know that it predicts the very real possibility of widespread food shortages by 2030, resulting in “price rises, migration, political destabilisation and possible war… fueled by the human-induced climate crisis.”

What I’m trying to say is, we are running up against limits. We have made it hot enough on this planet that things are going very wrong. This is not like politics, where you get to say something dumb and change the subject. As I’m writing this, for instance, word has emerged of a court filing where the Trump-appointed board of the Kennedy Center has threatened to tear the building down unless Trump’s name is carved on the wall. That’s not real; it’s a game, one designed to distract. But wheat is real.

Because we’ve pushed so hard into this new hot world, our margin has been substantially reduced, in some cases to nothing. As one scientist quoted in that excellent article on western trees and fire said,

“Forests do have innate resilience and under normal circumstances, they can take a hit or two and bounce back,” Dr. Coop said. “But circumstances just aren’t normal anymore.”

Still, there are things we could do. When it comes to forests we could at least not knock more roads into the middle of them, as the Trump administration decided to do last week. (If you want to read a bang-up piece of writing about the Peavine Fire currently devastating Reno, I recommend this from my beloved Third Act colleague B Fulkerson).

When it comes to the Colorado River, we could—as conservationists have suggested for decades—demolish Glen Canyon Dam and let Lake Powell drain downstream to Lake Mead. It wouldn’t solve the problem, but it would give us a little more margin.

And we could deploy lots and lots of solar panels to desalinate enough water to supply some of the needs of places like Phoenix (solar panels that, by the way, shade the desert and conserve some moisture). And we could, you know, stop building water-intensive data centers. (Big victory in New Mexico yesterday, where activists included my Third Act colleagues managed to win a temporary halt to the giant Jupiter project, “in part due to recent revelations about the use of millions of gallons of fresh water for the data center’s construction in recent months.”)

When it comes to food, we may have more margin yet. America’s fertile cropland is filled to an astonishing extent growing corn syrup, feed for cattle, and gasoline—an area the size of Indiana is devoted solely to producing ethanol, an absurd boondoggle. So we’re not without options. Using it to produce solar power and, you know, food people eat would take off some of the pressure.

Above all, of course, we can rapidly deploy renewable energy. At this point it won’t lower the temperature rapidly, but it could keep it from climbing rapidly. And it’s within our technical capacity—the planet possesses the factories capable of turning out solar panels three times as fast as we’re currently going.

I will return next time to politics, because politics is unavoidable. It’s how we will or won’t rise to these challenges. But for now I just want to drive home the reality, the sheer inescapable reality of life on our rapidly overheating planet.

Because we’re pushing the margins, and we’re doing it right now. One of the more remarkable essays I’ve read in recent months comes from Aruna Chandrasekhar, describing modern-day Mumbai as a “city of sweat.” This relates directly to the elevated sea temperatures with which I began this account—Mumbai, as anyone who has had the privilege of visiting the Gateway of India will recall, sits on the edge of the Arabian Sea. The city’s seawalls are already overtopped in storms, but the constant danger is the humidity. Here’s Chandrasekhar (and the whole article is very much worth reading)

In summer, Mumbai’s air holds up to 90% of all the water it can possibly contain, leaving almost no room for sweat to evaporate – which in turn leads to rapid dehydration, exhaustion and fatal heatstrokes. On a 38C day in April 2023, 14 people died in an outdoor rally attended by India’s home minister. What has come to be expected of millions upon millions of Mumbaikars, no matter how bad it gets, is resilience. But that resilience is coming up against hard limits of survivability.

Jari Mari is a crazy mosaic of the city’s extremes. Migrant, working-class Muslim and Dalit families live in tin sheds and one-bedroom concrete blocks stacked behind the high-security walls that seal off runway 27. The housing is so dense that the narrow lanes see no sun and feel no wind. But the heat still gets through, and the kids are always sick, many of the mothers in these houses told us: everyone has to sleep with their doors open, mosquitoes be damned. No one we spoke to could afford air conditioning.

In Sabiya and Sameer Khan’s one-room house, temperatures touch 49C. When we tell Sameer we’re not here to shoot planes, but to take thermal pictures of his asbestos roof, he looks at us like we’re mad. We show Sabiya how the fan above her stove is pushing hot air back down on her. A couple of blocks away, kids play cricket on concrete that shows a reading of 58.7C.

58.7 Celsius is 137.66 degrees Fahrenheit. No more need be said.

In other energy and climate news:

+A highly important new report on “climate double agents”—DC lobbyists who work for communities trying to hold the fossil fuel industry responsible, and also for…the fossil fuel industry. As Sara Sneath explains,

Dozens of lobbying firms were identified by researchers as working on both sides of climate action. James Browning, the founder and executive director of F Minus, said local governments who hire these firms to lobby for climate mitigation, disaster relief, and wildlife conservation likely don’t know that the same firms are working for clients like ExxonMobil and the American Petroleum Institute (API), which critics say are pushing to further dependence on fossil fuels. “They are locked into these relationships with big firms and may also not know they are the ones blocking climate efforts,” Browning said.

For example, the analysis shows US multinational law firm Greenberg Traurig has lobbied for three fossil fuel entities (API, ConocoPhillips and the Western States Petroleum Association in California) that have opposed state-level legislation aimed at holding fossil fuel companies financially accountable for their historic climate-warming emissions and using that revenue, in the form of climate superfunds, to support climate mitigation costs. Miami-Dade county, in Florida, hired the firm to lobby for shoreline protection and Everglades restoration. “That’s a glaring conflict,” Browning said.

+Okay, we’re creating lots of icebergs. But we’re also creating drones that can latch onto them. Tim Hornyak describes the uses of the “Ice Dart.”

Landing on icebergs specifically allows drones to monitor them for days or months, producing more detailed observation than a quick aerial surveillance mission. This could simplify iceberg tracking compared to methods such as helicopter deployment, dropped instruments, or dart-like tracking devices, and provide another data layer to satellite and ship-based iceberg detection, according to the researchers. It could also provide a means of monitoring icebergs that are otherwise untrackable.

+Veteran analyst Dana Nuccitelli reports that the war in Iran really did turbocharge EV sales around the globe—except of course in the U.S.

The price of oil and refined fuels spiked, and interest in EVs followed. Since March, electric car sales have surged in Europe, Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Asia Pacific. In Europe, the world’s third-largest auto market, EVs now represent nearly 30% of new car sales…

There remain a few glimmers of hope in the American EV market. California, which accounts for one-quarter to one-third of annual electrified vehicle sales in the country, just launched its own rebate program for first-time EV buyers. And American legacy automakers like Ford and newcomers like Slate are taking innovative approaches in an effort to introduce more affordable electric vehicles.

But unless those efforts achieve success soon, the formerly dominant American auto industry will be relegated to fighting over the scraps of an ever-shrinking internal combustion engine vehicle market as the world transitions to an electrified future, unintentionally supercharged by the consequences of Trump’s Iran war.

+I cannot tell you what this new scientific data really means—but you have to admit it’s interesting:

Rising carbon dioxide in the atmosphere may be leaving a measurable imprint inside the human body. Researchers analyzing more than two decades of U.S. health data found that blood bicarbonate levels have climbed about 7% since 1999, while calcium and phosphorus have declined—changes that closely track increasing atmospheric CO2.

At the very least, this should cause us to do a little…reflecting

Humans evolved when atmospheric CO₂ concentrations were approximately 280 to 300 ppm. During the past decade, atmospheric levels have risen by an average of about 2.6 ppm each year, while 2024 alone saw an increase of 3.5 ppm.

Fellow Author Dr Phil Bierwirth, a retired environmental geoscientist affiliated with the ANU Emeritus Faculty, emphasized that the study does not establish a direct cause-and-effect relationship. However, he said the consistency of the changes across a large population warrants attention.

“I actually think that what we are seeing is because our bodies are not adapting,” Dr Bierwirth said.

“It appears we are adapted to a range of CO₂ in the air that may now have been surpassed.

“The normal range maintains a delicate balance between how much CO₂ is in the air, our blood pH, our breathing rate and bicarbonate levels in the blood.

“As CO₂ in the air is now higher than humans have ever experienced, it appears to be building up in our bodies. Maybe we can never adapt such that it is vitally important to limit atmospheric levels of CO₂.”

+Lucy Carrigan, with a fine report on one of the hottest and driest summers in Irish history

The wildfire that started on Monday, July 20, was still smoldering on Monday, August 1. It burned this way, it burned that way, the wind changed direction and the fire with it. It went down the east side coming menacingly close to the villages of Killurney and Kilcash, it whipped around and headed off in the opposite direction and came down towards the villages of Cloneen and Killusty. A friend living in the mountains posted photos of an apocalypse: oppressive dark clouds of smoke illuminated by the ominous, reddish orangish glow of fire ravaging the mountain. A long way from the boardrooms of power and influence, Tipperary Fire and Rescue were out in force, so too the Army Corps. And, the farmers who were quick to see the danger to their lands and their homes.

Despite all of their most valiant of efforts, Sliabh na mBan burned and burned. The fire got deep into the peat and was next to impossible - without a soaking rain which did not come - to put out.

Sliabh na mBan is now charred black.

+Ben Santer is a climate science OG and longtime leader in the field. He’s recently had a cancer diagnosis, and explained how it changed his thinking in certain ways

They're looking at red blood cell counts, they're looking at hemoglobin. And it's that long-term monitoring that enables them to understand, , okay, my condition isn't just something that was an error, an erroneous measurement. It's there. It's present over time, and it's getting worse or it's getting better. So I mention that because there are real parallels here. There's a lot of benefit in monitoring, and that's what's imperiled. Certainly in climate world, the current administration seeks to go after the monitoring and impede our ability to make and continue to make long-term measurements of basic markers of the health of planet Earth. And in the medical arena, there are threats to things like vaccine development and cancer research and some of the basic research underpinning confident medical diagnoses. No. No, we can't let that happen. It will affect both our own ability to access the best personal healthcare, and it will also affect the health of the planet on which we live if we allow these injuries and insults and threats to basic science.

It's not a viable survival strategy to say see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.

+I know it’s hard to believe, but the Trump administration is trying to limit efforts in other nations to control plastic pollution. The Washington Post got its hands on a leaked document:

The overwhelming majority of plastic is made from chemicals derived from petroleum or other fossil fuels, and the Trump administration has pushed to expand oil and gas drilling and domestic production. Negotiators under Trump have become far more vocal in opposing binding limits on plastic production, compared with a more conciliatory tone under President Joe Biden.

The negotiating position also reflects a broader administration strategy of citing national security concerns to promote fossil fuels, such as when it declared a national energy emergency last year, blocked the development of wind farms and exempted oil and gas firms from Endangered Species Act requirements in the Gulf of Mexico.

+Small electric tricycles with solar panels on the roof—built in China—are replacing gas-powered vehicles in a desperate Cuba, trying to survive as America chokes off its energy supplies.

This is how people get around now,” said 40-year-old Liecer de la Cruz, who owns one of these vehicles.

The tricycles, with a cost between $2,000 and $4,000, are used to transport goods and serve fixed routes once covered by buses.

While their price is out of reach for most Cubans, many have sold their older gasoline-powered cars to buy the tricycles. Others got them from relatives abroad, where they are generally cheaper, and some small-business owners even used their profits to invest in them, expecting to recoup the cost.