Epic floods and fires are on the way. Meanwhile, the US Forest Service and FEMA have been dismantled. Disaster response will be at the level of a third-world country.
Yes, that’s why I am so grateful for Bill‘s newsletter. It allows us to get prepared to survive whatever is coming, to the best of our abilities. Then we may be prepared to help others in our communities and explain to them why this is happening. The silver lining, as Bill points out, is that the urgency becomes a teachable moment in a way nothing else can be, and can catapult the transition to renewables in the nick of time (🤞).
Yes! Well expressed, timgonch. Wrote morning Joe this morning that it’s time to have REAL weather news every day. Just following the VA navy yard for the last 10 years tells a lot.
Tim, please consider using some term other than "third-world country," a Cold-War holdover (anyone remember what the second world was, the "Communist Bloc"?), a term that denigrates countries that are in less privileged positions than we are. Also, "third-world country" is a term that has been co-opted by the climate-change denying and warmongering communities in our politics.
An online search produced five alternatives listed by The Borgen Project blog (https://borgenproject.org/alternative-to-third-world/) , a nonprofit fighting extreme poverty around the world. They suggested the following:
1. Developing Nations
2. LICs and MICs (low-income countries and middle-income countries)
Thanks for the question, Jennifer; it's a hard one.
Global South is the term favored by anti-capitalists and academics, but most English speakers don't know what it means, and think it refers to Australia, Argentina, and Chile, which it doesn't. Developing nations or developing countries is fairly standard among liberals and bureaucrats in the UN, IMF, etc., but it implies that these countries are on the way to becoming like the "developed countries," if just given enough time/aid/freedom, etc. I tend to shun euphemism, and just use "poor country," because that's what it is. But again, there is a liberal problem--some rich country liberal is going to think it's condescending.
In general, we face the euphemism cycle. In the US census in the 1800s, there was a category for "idiots." Well this was insulting, so say "feeble minded." This soon became insulting, so we went to "mentally retarded" or "retarded," until, as I can remember, kids on the playground started calling each other "retard." So we got "intellectually challenged" or sumpm. The problem is not in the specific words, but in the fact that some countries are richer than others. So I go with "poor country." Not perfect, but at least honest.
I appreciate the nuances of this issue. While not perfect, I think "Global South" comes close, and is easily understandable by most readers. Thank you for the helpful discussion.
Like you, I was one of the early ones trying to raise awareness about climate change. I was even one of the few dozen people trained by Al Gore to deliver the Inconvenient Truth presentation. We tried to get folks to take it seriously, but humanity was already too addicted to fossil fuel and our elected leaders were too beholden to Big Oil's money. Now the future is here. Honestly it makes me so sad and angry. Here in Central Oregon we're calling this the Winter that Wasn't and just crossing our fingers for the upcoming fire season.
Yes, the upcoming fire season could be terrifying. With this mild winter and wet spring, here in SW Idaho, the landscape is producing prodigious amounts of fuel. I can envision fires that are unstoppable, across all sorts of vegetation formations, from the coniferous montane forests across the sagebrush plains and agricultural lands to the Snake River and beyond.
I don't ignore science and yes, I also believe in hope. And I don't want my children/ grandchildren/ friends/ colleagues to remain in areas that: have been repeated flooded, are seeing drought, and/or losing planting seasons and soil faster than than we can keep up with it. If the giant ice prisons could be refitted with grow lights (of roofs that opened and closed) so as to provide indoor/protected growing areas -- I'd support that.. Others?
Or perhaps even, lets leave envisioning to the new age converts and get some solar panels on any rooftop we have access to........we need action now.......implementation now.
A pretty good time, considering how expensive jet setting away from everything is going to be...with the money we save by staying home, surely we could reduce our carbon footprint to something near 0??
We got solar panels last autumn...super excited to see what our capture will be at the height of summer. Very fun looking at the daily graph of production! We're not rich...if we can afford it, an awful lot of folks can...just sayin :)
Same here....our first array is going to be 20 years old in 2029....our second we put up during a left wing government that had rebates. Then the EV, last summer the heat pump......we're retired, but all we had to do was forego the jet set vacations and camp in our own amazing back country to afford it all.
Hopefully, more and more of us will see the real economic advantages of getting off oil and Trump's war will have led to some good.
Yes, more farmers in Congress...and just more normal people who actually have some contact with the reality the 99% of us face...would be very welcome. Can't give up. We need to die fighting.
Another end game. Fossil Fools are working overtime to make sure we have to burn hydrocarbons to the end of life as we know it. Stupid.......but AI will save us??
Hard to imagine the proponents are that stupid.......so what is it they are actually up to I wonder?
Upper midwesterner here on Canadian border. This spring and last spring have been much more turbulent than ever before. I’m in my 70s and have lived here all my life. The pattern seems to be hot days in March (very unusual) followed by low late winter temp days and then back to hot air.. The result is very unstable air and almost every night there are crazy, wild, extreme thunderstorms. We now have mass flooding in the northern part of our state with emergency evacuations along rivers and dams. The wild thunderstorms with fast heavy rain squalls followed by hail and long periods of flashing lightning make sleep difficult. Thank you for your newsletter! Extreme weather events are here!
I'm in central PA and we are seeing very similar patterns (although no emergency evacuations or a major waterway nearby). Today my kitchen thermometer read 87F!!!!!!!
Thanks Bill for a comprehensive and detailed account of where things currently stand--pretty alarming re the potential speed of the AMOC breakdown.
In what stands to become a very chilly UK, at least our dedicated, non-party-political Climate Change Committee might have helped to postpone the AMOC breakdown, even marginally, by announcing its calculation that the cost of reaching Net Zero is actually LESS than the extra cost of coping with a single energy price shock of the magnitude of Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
(Whereas now in 2026, due to Trump's insane backing of Israel in its war on Iran, the energy price shock due to closure of the Strait of Hormuz is estimated by Goldman Sachs to be 18 times the magnitude of the invasion of Ukraine.)
"The Climate Change Committee (CCC) has released a new report to complement its 2025 advice on the UK’s Seventh Carbon Budget.
"The independent, statutory body tested its cost and energy security conclusions against different scenarios. It found that the total additional cost of a single fossil fuel price spike of 2022 magnitude is likely to be as large as the total net additional cost of meeting the pathway to Net Zero across every year to 2050.
"In all scenarios, achieving Net Zero was found to be a more cost-effective path for the UK economy than continued reliance on fossil fuels, bringing a net benefit to society."
If anyone is willing to believe the CCC calculation? Not the climate deniers for sure, or anyone whose biggest (but sometimes only) argument against even attempting to reach Net Zero is its "crazy cost".
But it's still good to challenge them--to disprove any one of their irresponsible arguments.
And I do think we should all be contacting Donald Trump to thank him sincerely for his truly overwhelming service to humanity, by hastening the world's transition to Net Zero: due to his war on Iran, with an energy price shock that underlines our energy insecurity in dependence on fossil fuels.
We might even forgive him his joining Netanyahu's war on Iran (though all the death and destruction makes that hard or impossible).
I'd better not tell Trump, though, that I'm a shareholder in Kirk Hill Wind Farm Cooperative, whose eight wind turbines spoil his view from his Turnberry golf course in Scotland--he lost a planning appeal against the wind farm development. And no doubt why he rants & raves about the lunacy of "windmills".
I get a lot of guilty schadenfreude out of my green electricity spoiling Trump's golfing view.
Dear Bill, I really appreciate you and I fail to comprehend your point of view on this epoch of anthro-ecocide. How soon will it be that we can no longer grow grain at scale, that humans cannot survive in wet bulb temperatures, that dying coral reefs precede ocean die-offs, that humans will not be able to survive?
Tipping points…things are happening faster and on a non-linear scale.
Watching American TV, it is astounding how quickly they forget America's attack on Iran is an unprovoked, illegal war......or that the yap about enriched uranium is the same dishonest excuse as were the weapons of mass destruction used to attack Iraq the second time.
It's America that has enriched uranium and weapons of mass destruction....and America that the world is waking up to realize is the rogue warmongering nation.
Fossil Fuel worshippers to boot.......even the Pope isn't free from their criticism.
We don't hear as much about conditions on the actual bleeding ground.......as we should. I've come recently to the conclusion that much of what we get on MSM in the west is pornographic propaganda..........dirty lies on dirty lies.
Agreed. Even MSNOW has its time filled with important news and is not trying to give climate change its due. Since it’s my TV of choice, have written to Morning Joe asking for more complete weather (or should I have asked for “climate”) reports. We learned a lot from what various readers have observed. Here in Chicago, ICE 24/7, we just need melt. But then there’s a threat to build a stadium where we have had, and should have again, a nature preserve.
THe only form of 'wealth creation' these snools seem to know depends on ripping up the earth, destroying arable soil, and building machines the spew pollution while claiming to curb it......the profit motive has blinded them to what actual prosperity looks like.
We are in the age of fossil fuel's last big kick of the can........a clean up operation if you will.
But if we let them set the agenda, we may be signing a death spiral for our planet....and its not just that fossil fuels produce greenhouse gases.........they also fuel wars of mass destruction.
Everything bombed now is a resilience ended; a shelter destroyed.
Capitalist fossil fools think money can be made eventually by rebuilding.....but since that rebuilding also produces greenhouse gas emissions.......everything we do with fossil fuels going forward is an extinction accelerator.
The good news about clean green technologies is that they are far more adapted to a peaceful local economy than they are to killing other people's children on the other side of a rapidly warming planet.
Let's all get working on that new world that just might still be possible.
I can imagine (charitably) that news organizations under-report news like today's from the Crucial Years for length and time constraints. Too bad, but I'm forwarding this worrysome blog to my regional newspaper, in hopes they can digest it for open-minded rural folks, who may have been suckered by propaganda into further addiction to fossil fuels and fear of green energy. I still do what I can with petitions and letters to the editor.
In the US 48 states the coldest year on record was 1917. Quite remarkably just four years later 1921 was the warmest. Not possible for atmospheric CO2 to have been the cause.
Epic floods and fires are on the way. Meanwhile, the US Forest Service and FEMA have been dismantled. Disaster response will be at the level of a third-world country.
Yes, that’s why I am so grateful for Bill‘s newsletter. It allows us to get prepared to survive whatever is coming, to the best of our abilities. Then we may be prepared to help others in our communities and explain to them why this is happening. The silver lining, as Bill points out, is that the urgency becomes a teachable moment in a way nothing else can be, and can catapult the transition to renewables in the nick of time (🤞).
What we actually need is an implementation moment.....with everyone of us who can invest somehow in renewables to do so.
Excellent idea!!!
Yes! Well expressed, timgonch. Wrote morning Joe this morning that it’s time to have REAL weather news every day. Just following the VA navy yard for the last 10 years tells a lot.
Tim, please consider using some term other than "third-world country," a Cold-War holdover (anyone remember what the second world was, the "Communist Bloc"?), a term that denigrates countries that are in less privileged positions than we are. Also, "third-world country" is a term that has been co-opted by the climate-change denying and warmongering communities in our politics.
What is a better term or phrase?
An online search produced five alternatives listed by The Borgen Project blog (https://borgenproject.org/alternative-to-third-world/) , a nonprofit fighting extreme poverty around the world. They suggested the following:
1. Developing Nations
2. LICs and MICs (low-income countries and middle-income countries)
3. Majority World
4. Fat and Lean
5. Global South/North
What do you think?
Thanks for the question, Jennifer; it's a hard one.
Global South is the term favored by anti-capitalists and academics, but most English speakers don't know what it means, and think it refers to Australia, Argentina, and Chile, which it doesn't. Developing nations or developing countries is fairly standard among liberals and bureaucrats in the UN, IMF, etc., but it implies that these countries are on the way to becoming like the "developed countries," if just given enough time/aid/freedom, etc. I tend to shun euphemism, and just use "poor country," because that's what it is. But again, there is a liberal problem--some rich country liberal is going to think it's condescending.
In general, we face the euphemism cycle. In the US census in the 1800s, there was a category for "idiots." Well this was insulting, so say "feeble minded." This soon became insulting, so we went to "mentally retarded" or "retarded," until, as I can remember, kids on the playground started calling each other "retard." So we got "intellectually challenged" or sumpm. The problem is not in the specific words, but in the fact that some countries are richer than others. So I go with "poor country." Not perfect, but at least honest.
I appreciate the nuances of this issue. While not perfect, I think "Global South" comes close, and is easily understandable by most readers. Thank you for the helpful discussion.
Point taken. Thank you.
Thank you, Stevan, for this thoughtful answer.
Like you, I was one of the early ones trying to raise awareness about climate change. I was even one of the few dozen people trained by Al Gore to deliver the Inconvenient Truth presentation. We tried to get folks to take it seriously, but humanity was already too addicted to fossil fuel and our elected leaders were too beholden to Big Oil's money. Now the future is here. Honestly it makes me so sad and angry. Here in Central Oregon we're calling this the Winter that Wasn't and just crossing our fingers for the upcoming fire season.
Yes, the upcoming fire season could be terrifying. With this mild winter and wet spring, here in SW Idaho, the landscape is producing prodigious amounts of fuel. I can envision fires that are unstoppable, across all sorts of vegetation formations, from the coniferous montane forests across the sagebrush plains and agricultural lands to the Snake River and beyond.
Let's also envision a wet spring and a surprisingly gentle fire season! It COULD happen.
I don't ignore science and yes, I also believe in hope. And I don't want my children/ grandchildren/ friends/ colleagues to remain in areas that: have been repeated flooded, are seeing drought, and/or losing planting seasons and soil faster than than we can keep up with it. If the giant ice prisons could be refitted with grow lights (of roofs that opened and closed) so as to provide indoor/protected growing areas -- I'd support that.. Others?
Or perhaps even, lets leave envisioning to the new age converts and get some solar panels on any rooftop we have access to........we need action now.......implementation now.
A pretty good time, considering how expensive jet setting away from everything is going to be...with the money we save by staying home, surely we could reduce our carbon footprint to something near 0??
We got solar panels last autumn...super excited to see what our capture will be at the height of summer. Very fun looking at the daily graph of production! We're not rich...if we can afford it, an awful lot of folks can...just sayin :)
Same here....our first array is going to be 20 years old in 2029....our second we put up during a left wing government that had rebates. Then the EV, last summer the heat pump......we're retired, but all we had to do was forego the jet set vacations and camp in our own amazing back country to afford it all.
Hopefully, more and more of us will see the real economic advantages of getting off oil and Trump's war will have led to some good.
We will miss Jon Tester in the Senate. More farmers in both houses of Congress is a goal for this GOTV postcard writer.
Yes, more farmers in Congress...and just more normal people who actually have some contact with the reality the 99% of us face...would be very welcome. Can't give up. We need to die fighting.
Data center competition for water and electricity is also layered on this go round.
Another end game. Fossil Fools are working overtime to make sure we have to burn hydrocarbons to the end of life as we know it. Stupid.......but AI will save us??
Hard to imagine the proponents are that stupid.......so what is it they are actually up to I wonder?
Upper midwesterner here on Canadian border. This spring and last spring have been much more turbulent than ever before. I’m in my 70s and have lived here all my life. The pattern seems to be hot days in March (very unusual) followed by low late winter temp days and then back to hot air.. The result is very unstable air and almost every night there are crazy, wild, extreme thunderstorms. We now have mass flooding in the northern part of our state with emergency evacuations along rivers and dams. The wild thunderstorms with fast heavy rain squalls followed by hail and long periods of flashing lightning make sleep difficult. Thank you for your newsletter! Extreme weather events are here!
I'm in central PA and we are seeing very similar patterns (although no emergency evacuations or a major waterway nearby). Today my kitchen thermometer read 87F!!!!!!!
Wow. That is really hot for this time of year.
Thanks Bill for a comprehensive and detailed account of where things currently stand--pretty alarming re the potential speed of the AMOC breakdown.
In what stands to become a very chilly UK, at least our dedicated, non-party-political Climate Change Committee might have helped to postpone the AMOC breakdown, even marginally, by announcing its calculation that the cost of reaching Net Zero is actually LESS than the extra cost of coping with a single energy price shock of the magnitude of Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
(Whereas now in 2026, due to Trump's insane backing of Israel in its war on Iran, the energy price shock due to closure of the Strait of Hormuz is estimated by Goldman Sachs to be 18 times the magnitude of the invasion of Ukraine.)
"The Climate Change Committee (CCC) has released a new report to complement its 2025 advice on the UK’s Seventh Carbon Budget.
"The independent, statutory body tested its cost and energy security conclusions against different scenarios. It found that the total additional cost of a single fossil fuel price spike of 2022 magnitude is likely to be as large as the total net additional cost of meeting the pathway to Net Zero across every year to 2050.
"In all scenarios, achieving Net Zero was found to be a more cost-effective path for the UK economy than continued reliance on fossil fuels, bringing a net benefit to society."
https://www.theccc.org.uk/2026/03/11/cost-of-net-zero-by-2050-less-than-a-single-fossil-fuel-price-shock-ccc/
If anyone is willing to believe the CCC calculation? Not the climate deniers for sure, or anyone whose biggest (but sometimes only) argument against even attempting to reach Net Zero is its "crazy cost".
But it's still good to challenge them--to disprove any one of their irresponsible arguments.
And I do think we should all be contacting Donald Trump to thank him sincerely for his truly overwhelming service to humanity, by hastening the world's transition to Net Zero: due to his war on Iran, with an energy price shock that underlines our energy insecurity in dependence on fossil fuels.
We might even forgive him his joining Netanyahu's war on Iran (though all the death and destruction makes that hard or impossible).
I'd better not tell Trump, though, that I'm a shareholder in Kirk Hill Wind Farm Cooperative, whose eight wind turbines spoil his view from his Turnberry golf course in Scotland--he lost a planning appeal against the wind farm development. And no doubt why he rants & raves about the lunacy of "windmills".
I get a lot of guilty schadenfreude out of my green electricity spoiling Trump's golfing view.
🤭😁
Dear Bill, I really appreciate you and I fail to comprehend your point of view on this epoch of anthro-ecocide. How soon will it be that we can no longer grow grain at scale, that humans cannot survive in wet bulb temperatures, that dying coral reefs precede ocean die-offs, that humans will not be able to survive?
Tipping points…things are happening faster and on a non-linear scale.
What's coming may well make Trump's blockade of a blockade look like the futile action of a blockhead.
The USA however, elected that blockhead twice, so things must be pretty dreadful down there already.
Yes. Dreadful. I fled the USA. Seeking asylum in another country. I cannot support or live in a country that elects an idiot twice!
Watching American TV, it is astounding how quickly they forget America's attack on Iran is an unprovoked, illegal war......or that the yap about enriched uranium is the same dishonest excuse as were the weapons of mass destruction used to attack Iraq the second time.
It's America that has enriched uranium and weapons of mass destruction....and America that the world is waking up to realize is the rogue warmongering nation.
Fossil Fuel worshippers to boot.......even the Pope isn't free from their criticism.
At least we have marchers, Indivisible, and Minnesotans!
They are really bad here and will be much, much worse, Ingamarie.
We don't hear as much about conditions on the actual bleeding ground.......as we should. I've come recently to the conclusion that much of what we get on MSM in the west is pornographic propaganda..........dirty lies on dirty lies.
Agreed. Even MSNOW has its time filled with important news and is not trying to give climate change its due. Since it’s my TV of choice, have written to Morning Joe asking for more complete weather (or should I have asked for “climate”) reports. We learned a lot from what various readers have observed. Here in Chicago, ICE 24/7, we just need melt. But then there’s a threat to build a stadium where we have had, and should have again, a nature preserve.
THe only form of 'wealth creation' these snools seem to know depends on ripping up the earth, destroying arable soil, and building machines the spew pollution while claiming to curb it......the profit motive has blinded them to what actual prosperity looks like.
Jesus wept. When Bill is afraid, be very very afraid. That said, I continue to be grateful for his comprehensive reporting.
We are in the age of fossil fuel's last big kick of the can........a clean up operation if you will.
But if we let them set the agenda, we may be signing a death spiral for our planet....and its not just that fossil fuels produce greenhouse gases.........they also fuel wars of mass destruction.
Everything bombed now is a resilience ended; a shelter destroyed.
Capitalist fossil fools think money can be made eventually by rebuilding.....but since that rebuilding also produces greenhouse gas emissions.......everything we do with fossil fuels going forward is an extinction accelerator.
The good news about clean green technologies is that they are far more adapted to a peaceful local economy than they are to killing other people's children on the other side of a rapidly warming planet.
Let's all get working on that new world that just might still be possible.
Excellent. I read every word and understood almost all of them. Glad to be a subscriber.
I can imagine (charitably) that news organizations under-report news like today's from the Crucial Years for length and time constraints. Too bad, but I'm forwarding this worrysome blog to my regional newspaper, in hopes they can digest it for open-minded rural folks, who may have been suckered by propaganda into further addiction to fossil fuels and fear of green energy. I still do what I can with petitions and letters to the editor.
What a mess! Thanks for all of this info!!
Lots of important data. Thanks.
In Southern California, we had about two weeks of winter this time. And after that, some days were in the nineties. It's been brutal.
Thanks so much Bill.
I believe Fairbanks Alaska did have the coldest winter in record this year.
In the US 48 states the coldest year on record was 1917. Quite remarkably just four years later 1921 was the warmest. Not possible for atmospheric CO2 to have been the cause.
😂El Niño
is actually Spanish for:
The Boy
Yikes!