It’s a complicated proposition, giving thanks; it has always looked very different depending on who and where you are in this country. Because what have we been given and by whom? What have we taken and from whom? What is being taken today and who are the takers?

And it grows more complicated each year, giving thanks, as so many of us whose lives are materially abundant increasingly see that abundance less as a blessing and more as our birthright and a legacy to maintain. When in reality, modern materialist lifestyles were always the brittle pretense of an era of extraction that is hollowing out the Earth and our space to be safe upon it—and is starting to crack.

And this year, with cracks appearing everywhere—in our climate, our politics, our communities, our bodies and minds, our very sense of reality—it is profoundly complicated, giving thanks. This era of capitalist extraction and detached materialism has belched up such historic, geopolitical hairballs as Donald Trump presiding over the world’s richest nation for a second time and promptly pulling us out of the Paris climate agreement; such inexcusable own-goals as global carbon emissions hitting a new record high in 2025; and such multi-generational tragedies as the vital, life-supporting 1.5ºC climate target being all but certified dead. (We can overshoot and return to 1.5ºC but we’re making this task harder.)

This follows a decade of urgent talk about the all-important “2030 deadline” for deeply reducing emissions to achieve this target—“we have just 10 years to avoid catastrophic climate change”, wait, “just 5 years”, wait… This was a message that children around the world picked up and shouted, demanding to be heard. But this year, the adults have gone quiet. The deadline will be missed.

So, it’s a complicated thanks. If I consider what really matters to me, each of those things is under some kind of assault. And my thanks is suffused with grief and anger.

But gratitude is powerful. It’s both something we offer up and, when we mean it, it’s a gift we give ourselves that can help us to hold grief, move anger, and bring us into right relation with what is.

So here are things I’m thankful for.

I’m thankful for the food that will be on the table. I’m thankful for the hands that harvested it. I’m thankful for everyday people in cities across the nation, defending our immigrant friends and neighbors from this administration’s inhumanity.

I’m thankful for the defenders of science, justice, and truth, the people who work tirelessly to ensure these pillars of a free and fair society outlast this authoritarian spasm.

I’m thankful for the creators—the ones making the music, writing the words, conjuring the new and unexpected artforms, and drawing forth visions of the possible that can see us through this dark time.

I’m thankful for the elders. Not the arrested-development adolescents wandering the halls of power in old people’s bodies. True elders, people with the wisdom the world so badly needs. May we listen; may we become one ourselves.

I’m thankful for the dreams of young people that spring eternal, with each new generation, and renew the world’s purpose: to let them thrive.

I’m thankful for the beauty of nature. I’ll grieve coral reefs the rest of my days, but I saw them; I witnessed that wonder of creation and I’m grateful. And though I long for a time when witnessing nature’s beauty was simply about awe, not grief, I wasn’t born then. Learning to hold grief and wonder together not only spares us from emotionally shutting down but can open a deep well of strength and equanimity.

I’m thankful for the resilient living Earth. I’m thankful for all that she has absorbed of our foolishness: the consumption, the fossil-fuel pollution, the bottomless corporate greed—she has spared us the true cost of it all. But now the atmosphere is trapping ever more heat; the oceans break out in fevers; the land endures the drought, floods and fires of its more violent climate. Ecosystems collapse, people suffer, animals are made extinct. This is the Earth seeking new equilibrium; this is the future; we will be less shielded from the consequences of our choices. And yet… the Earth adapts and, if given a chance, life will always seek to thrive.

I’m thankful for the people who, their lifeways tied to the Earth, continue to stand against the madness and for right relations with nature and each other. Around the world, Indigenous people who have suffered immeasurably in these centuries of colonial extraction, but endured, are raising voices and showing ways forward, including at COP30 in Brazil. They’ve been offering wisdom we should have heeded, just as the Mayflower colonists should have heeded, but it’s not too late.

I’m thankful for those cracks, the ones that seem to be appearing everywhere. Bayo Akomolafe says “the crack is the monster’s gift,” a weakness in the wall, an opening on which to pry. Vanessa Machado de Oliveira invites us to use these openings to “hospice modernity,” to gently deconstruct the sources of destruction, and to grow in their place the world the world needs. More than I can ever recall, so many people seem to sense that world, waiting to be grown; are planting seeds and tending; are questioning what we as humans really need to live rich lives and creating community that can meet those needs. So many of us are now searching for a bridge to the world we need. I’m thankful that we’re searching together and for the possibilities we may find. No one knows where this is going—why can’t it be somewhere beautiful?

And I’m thankful for our capable, willing hands, yours and mine. We’re going to need to pry at the cracks and plant for tomorrow, together. We’re going to need to raise defiant fists and hold out compassionate palms. And we’re all going to need to hold hands as we meet what comes. I wish I had simpler things to tell my children about this moment, I wish giving thanks was simpler. But they are teens and young adults now and their time here will not be simple, so I tell them the truth: Some things are lost. A lot can be saved. I won’t see the world we’re trying to reach. I hope you will. All we can do today is build a bridge to that world. All we can do is hold hands tightly and be the bridge.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Right now, the focus must be on safety and emergency preparedness. But let’s not forget that there are those to hold accountable for disasters like this: the policymakers and fossil fuel companies who have long obstructed climate action, lied about climate science, and left communities to face the destruction of extreme disasters.  

Here are some key things to know about Hurricane Melissa and climate change and what it means for people in harm’s way.    

An unusually dangerous storm made worse by climate change

It may seem like we’ve had a “quiet hurricane season.” That’s because there hasn’t been the number of catastrophic US landfalling hurricanes we saw last year (e.g. Beryl, Helene and Milton). But in fact, four out of the five hurricanes that formed this year (Humberto, Emily, Gabrielle, Melissa) became “major,” and all four of those underwent rapid intensification, an ominous sign of the heat building up in our oceans. 

The Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale categorizes storms by their maximum sustained winds. Category 5 storms have winds of 157 mph or greater and are historically rare. There have only been two years since 1960—the start of the satellite era— with three or more category 5 hurricanes: 2005 and 2025, with Erin, Humberto, and now Melissa. Melissa’s hurricane-force winds extend outward up to 30 miles from its center, and tropical storm force winds extend outward up to 195 miles from its center, hence the impacts extending beyond Jamaica and Cuba into Haiti and the Dominican Republic.  

Warm water is hurricane fuel and the Caribbean is warm—much warmer than usual. According to Climate Central, the elevated ocean surface temperatures below Melissa in recent days were made 700 times more likely by climate change.  They go further to say: “These [ocean temperatures] are projected to have strengthened Melissa’s top wind speed by about 10 mph, increasing its potential damages by up to 50%”. Tragically, the storm is making landfall as a powerful Category 5 in a populated area of Jamaica.   

Then there’s our warmer atmosphere. Warm air can hold more water than cool air, leading to more precipitation. As the atmosphere continues to warm, it acts like an expanding sponge, able to hold—and drop—more and more water. Any hurricane that forms today can tap into this to bring heavier rainfall wherever it moves.  

The rainfall forecasts for Southwest Haiti, parts of Jamaica, and now eastern Cuba have been absolutely staggering, with feet of rain in the process of falling, or anticipated in coming days.  

One of Hurricane Melissa’s most unusual features is its slow movement across the Caribbean. This slow pace may also be due to climate change: According to a recent modeling study, as climate change worsens, we can expect slower-moving hurricanes due to less circulation in the upper atmosphere, which normally acts to steer hurricanes along.  

High risk of catastrophic impacts and huge existing vulnerability 

The monstrous power of this storm is trained on people and terrain that are highly exposed and vulnerable to harms. The wide field of hurricane-force winds, long-duration heavy rainfall (up to 30 inches in some places) falling on already saturated ground, and significant storm surge (expected to be 9-13 feet in some areas), all pose catastrophic threats to Jamaica, Haiti, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Bahamas and other parts of the Caribbean. The mountainous topography of some of these countries and the limited tree cover and rural poverty, most notably in Haiti, make the risk of landslides acute, threatening infrastructure, homes, and lives. There could also be long-lasting power and communications outages, roads and bridges could wash away, and remote communities may be cut off for days.  

For people in harm’s way, it’s critical to follow their local emergency authorities’ advice to evacuate or shelter in place safely immediately. The reality is that with a storm this extreme, it will be hard to be completely shielded from harm, especially for those with fewer resources. The National Hurricane Center’s advisory messages are urgent and unequivocal in alerting people to the extreme dangers they face.  

In a supreme injustice, the people and places in the path of this storm are among those who have contributed the least to the climate crisis and yet are on the frontlines of its deadly and costly consequences. In places like Haiti, poverty, political unrest and an ongoing humanitarian crisis increase people’s vulnerability to disasters like this. 

Government authorities are doing what they can with constrained resources, including a massive evacuation effort underway in Cuba. Jamaica has been at the forefront of finding innovative ways to invest in disaster recovery and resilience, including a catastrophe bond (with a parametric trigger that will be met by Hurricane Melissa). This should hopefully provide quick access to funds for recovery and rebuilding after the storm. 

But it’s not difficult to imagine that much more will be needed in Caribbean nations in the time to come, including humanitarian assistance on a vast scale. The United States should play a constructive role in that effort, instead of going down a path of military aggression in the region. If you are able, please look for ways to support Hurricane Melissa recovery efforts in the days to come.  

Marc Alessi, Rachel Cleetus, Carlos Martinez, Astrid Caldas and Juan Declet-Barreto contributed to this blog post.

This week in Danger Season, people across large areas of the Midwest and Northeast are breathing dangerous air as climate-exacerbated wildfires in Canada and the western US send smoke eastward. Meanwhile, the Trump administration doubles down on convincing us there’s no danger in a changing climate, whatever our stinging eyes and lungs may say.

Beware the air

This week, some of the worst air quality (AQ) conditions on Earth enveloped US cities, particularly in the Midwest and Northeast. The air in Chicago and Detroit registered among the top 3 most polluted, globally. Unhealthy conditions were widespread, including in Syracuse, New York, where UCS Science Fellow Marc Alessi reported air quality index (AQI) values above 100 and air quality alerts issued by the National Weather Service in effect since Sunday. In coastal Massachusetts, where air quality only reached “moderate” danger, my asthma, normally inactive, has been flaring.

The Air Quality Index (AQI), EPA’s tool for reporting air quality, combines monitoring of five major air pollutants regulated by the Clean Air Act, including the particle pollution found in wildfire smoke. The current acute air quality situation is mainly the result of the large wildfires burning in North America, particularly in Canada, but also in parts of the western United States.

When a fire consumes a tree, the smoke it sends aloft includes particulate matter fine enough to be transported thousands of miles on prevailing winds. (The smoke that has blotted out blue skies in New England this week traveled onward over the Atlantic to reach western Europe as well.)

Those particulates are so fine that, when inhaled, they can travel deep into the lungs and even enter the bloodstream. The people at greatest risk from breathing wildfire smoke are people with cardiovascular or respiratory disease, people who are elderly, young, pregnant, outdoor workers, and of low income. Whether or not you are among the folks at greatest risk from the health impacts of breathing smoke, it’s worth digging out your COVID K/N95 masks to protect yourself when air quality conditions get dangerous. This is particularly important any time wildfire encroaches and burns in residential areas where household items, when incinerated, mobilize toxic heavy metals and other carcinogens.

Where there’s smoke there’s climate-driven fire

The 2025 wildfire situation in Canada, the main source of our current air quality trouble, is on track to be the country’s second worst year on record. Already, an area roughly the size of West Virginia has burned, more than double the 10-year average area burned by this date. Roughly 60 large fires are currently burning uncontrolled.

Looking ahead, the North American wildfire season tends to extend well into the fall and the forecast for the next two months is indeed for ongoing, widespread, and increasing fire risk.

These wildfires are being made worse by climate change, which can increase the conditions conducive to fires. In western North America, climate change nearly doubled the area burned by wildfires between 1984 and 2015. As my colleague, UCS Scientist Carly Phillips, recently blogged:

The wildfires burning now aren’t the same fires that burned 30 years ago. They are burning at higher elevations, over longer fire seasons, growing with greater speed, and under more extreme fire weather conditions. They are also burning later into the night and ramping up earlier in the morning, due in part to increases in vapor pressure deficit, an increase in which has been attributed to climate change.  Fires are also burning at higher severity, […].

“No danger to see here”?

The Trump administration would like us to believe their claim that there’s no need to regulate power plant and vehicle heat-trapping emissions because there’s no real danger in the climate change they cause.

The administration would also like us to believe that there are sufficient wildland firefighters to help keep communities safe. The truth is there remains a high vacancy rate. ProPublica and other outlets’ reporting demonstrate how the DOGE-related cuts and forced early resignations leave us woefully unprepared for this year’s fires with nearly a third of open firefighting jobs still vacant as of mid-July. In California, Governor Newsom is sending the President model Executive Order language to facilitate federal level staffing improvements.

As has been on terrible display in Danger Season 2025—between flooding, extreme heat, drought, wildfires, and this week’s unhealthy air, many harms of which are exacerbated by the administration’s actions—we are deeply endangered.

Not only is there danger, there’s accountability for it

In 2023, UCS released research showing that nearly 40% of the total area burned between 1986 and 2020 in the western United States and southwestern Canada can be attributed to the emissions traced to the world’s 88 largest fossil fuel producers and cement manufacturers.

That is of course the industry being served by the Trump administration’s ongoing work to roll back fossil fuel regulation and derail climate science. That is of course the industry that has deceived the public for decades on the climate dangers of using their product.

Push back against the danger

As we wrote last week, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released a proposed rule to undo the agency’s 2009 foundational scientific finding that global warming pollution endangers public health and the environment.

Please take time now to tell the EPA that its mission is to protect the public and the environment, not to make policy based on climate disinformation. Submit your comments to the EPA.

Plus, Congress is now fully in recess, and your elected officials read the local papers when they’re home. It’s a good time for a letter to the editor about what you’re experiencing during Danger Season, because it’s NOT a good time to roll back funding or staffing for FEMA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

And if smoke gets serious where you are, consider finding a local mutual aid group collecting and distributing masks for your unhoused neighbors. For example, when wildfire smoke is bad in Oakland, California, Director of Climate Science Amanda Fencl supports Mask Oakland.

We’ll be back next week. In the meantime, tell your friends: believe your lungs, not the lies.

Extreme heat is going to get a lot more extreme. The best time to act was decades ago when the science became clear about the threat we face. But the fossil fuel industry lied and denied to keep society hooked on its heat-trapping product, and here we are today, with 115 degree heat index forecasts in the Southeast this week. Nobody wants to live in the climate future we’re entering, so the second best time to act is now.

How hot is it?

2025 is shaping up to be among the warmest years on record, behind 2024 but rivaling 2023. Globally, northern hemisphere summer temperature records are being broken in some big and shocking ways, from the Arctic to Oceania, and in many places in between.

Here in the US, a summer that was forecast to see above normal heat is really delivering. Intense heat and humidity blanketed much of the population prior even to the official start of summer. Intense heat waves have made repeat appearances, including this week, when as of this writing, 136 million people in the Eastern half of the country were sweltering under “major heat risk,” with another 14 million under “extreme” risk. Some areas have seen heat index conditions of 110, 115 and 120 degrees. Heat-associated deaths, always badly undercounted, are mounting.

Looking ahead, the monthly outlook for August shows above-normal heat in the Western half of the country. No region is getting off un-baked.

“If you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen” loses its bite when the whole planet is the kitchen, and we’re just starting to cook. Here are 6 things to know about heat in 2025.

1: Of course it’s climate change

Our friends at Climate Central show with their Climate Shift Index that this week’s heat over the Eastern US was made 3 to 5 times more likely because of climate change. Around the world, climate change made large areas of the current sea surface heat more than 100 times more likely to occur.

But look… whether extreme heat—or flooding or drought or a storm—on a given day was caused or worsened by climate change is no longer a genuinely useful question. Our climate has already changed. Our climate is still changing and at an accelerating rate. We have created a world that is 1.1 degrees C warmer than the historical average. Everything that happens now, weather-wise, happens within a changed climate. Rather than more time and energy being spent proving something was “caused by climate change,” let’s let the denialists spend their time and energy trying to prove it wasn’t. And better questions for us to ask today are: why are we still using fossil fuels? And why is that industry and its political enablers not yet paying the price for what they’ve done to all of us? Why—I mean why—are we basically letting them run the world?

2: Hot as it is, this could be the coolest summer of the rest of our lives

As global average temperatures increase, summer heat increases, too. The 10 hottest years on record are all in the last decade, with 2024 surpassing 2023 as the hottest in nearly 200 years of record keeping. 2025 could be the second-hottest. So that’s where we are.  

Where we’re headed is still in large part determined by our actions to curb fossil fuel pollution, but it’s inevitably going to be hotter.

In September, parties to the Paris Climate Agreement (which no longer includes the US) will submit plans for curbing emissions consistent with the agreement’s goal of keeping global temperature increases well below 2.0 C, preferably to 1.5 C. But barring some bolt from the blue, that 1.5 C goal has all but slipped beyond reach. Current rates of emissions have us on track for an increase of between 2.2 and 3.4 degrees C by 2100.

What does this mean in terms of summer heat? According to my team’s 2019 analysis, Killer Heat, without strong action to curb emissions, cities across the country can expect historically rare heat index conditions of 105 F or greater to become commonplace by mid-century. Take Raleigh, NC, as an example, where that kind of heat would be experienced 26 days per year on average by mid-century. Later in the century, extreme heat would dominate the summer season, occurring ~56 days per year.

To see heat index forecasts for your own city, check out our interactive tool here.

We are unlikely to see years where global average temperatures dip significantly. Some years, we’ll experience the cooling effects of a La Nina and the annual increase in temperature could be smaller; other years, we’ll experience the added heat of an El Nino and the rise may be steeper. But overall, the rate of global warming is accelerating.

All this to say that our future is on an increasingly hot planet with increasingly hot summers.

3: The ocean is losing its cool

Given how busily industrialized nations have been burning fossil fuels and filling the atmosphere with heat-trapping emissions, we could have seen temperature increases over land far greater than we have. For sparing us this consequence of our actions, we have the ocean to thank. The ocean has absorbed some 90 percent of the excess heat trapped in the atmosphere by fossil fuel emissions, storing that heat in the surface and even deep waters. But given this heat storage, we are now seeing record high average ocean temperatures, including ocean heat waves, which are doing major ecological harm. (These temperatures are also driving the current and most extensive global coral bleaching crisis. Not all reefs will recover, and those that do face a still-warming ocean.)

From exacerbating land heat waves to increasing humidity, hot oceans may provide less heat relief and more heat trouble in our future.

4: Heat can kill us—and is killing us

Heat is the number one weather-related killer in the US and around the world. Officially, heat caused roughly 2400 deaths in both 2023 and 2024 in the US. But heat-related deaths are generally greatly undercounted, in part because heat stress can make preexisting health conditions worse without presenting as the primary problem. Certain bodies are most at risk in extreme heat, including people who are elderly, very young, pregnant, on certain medications, and/or living with underlying health conditions, like heart disease or obesity.

Then societal factors create major added risk, making heat dangerous for people who are outdoor workers, low-income, unhoused, incarcerated and/or living in urban heat islands. In an overheating world, access to cooling becomes a matter of life and death, and for those people, access is not guaranteed. Already this year, extreme heat is responsible for 150 confirmed deaths in the US.

The grind of surviving amidst extreme heat can be harder still in the Global South, where people in overcrowded and impoverished cities like Karachi, Pakistan, can find little relief.

I often wonder if our failure to take climate change more seriously is mostly a failure of imagination. But we should imagine heat waves of unprecedented duration, intensity and mortality, because they are coming. And we should act on climate with fervency.

5: We are making a U-turn away from solutions

This week, the Trump administration is announcing its most profound denial of our climate reality yet, with its repeal of the EPA’s 2009 Endangerment Finding and clean vehicles regulations.

This, combined with existing and proposed cuts to US climate science across federal agencies, paint the stark picture of an administration doing the express bidding of the fossil fuel industry—an industry willing to sacrifice our future for a few more years of profit. Including attempting to make climate change disappear.

We should be racing toward the clean energy solutions that can slow this runaway climate train, but the Trump administration and Congress are gutting US progress—throwing the engineer off the train and dismantling the brake system—setting us and the whole world back. The sheer economic stupidity and coming damage… the injustice to people today and to all generations to come… the immorality and craven greed of it all… they’re hard to overstate.

6: But heat can respond quickly to reduced heat-trapping emissions—if we act

If emissions are brought to net zero, warming can slow dramatically. The planet won’t cool; that will be a longer-term process. There are uncertainties, including how quickly the ocean will respond and how other, non-CO2 heat-trapping gases will factor in. And there are no guarantees when so many geophysical processes are being disrupted and thresholds are being neared. But stabilizing global average temperatures can stabilize the increase in extreme heat. There is an upshot, it’s still within reach, we just need to act.

If you can’t take the heat, organize the kitchen

What can we do? The list is long and—let’s be clear—needs to be part of a longer-term transformation of our society and economy. But there are things we can do today.

• Practice heat safety for yourself and those around you.
• Protect vulnerable people by pushing Congress to pass legislation to protect workers from dangerous heat.
• Defend and restore federal climate science by holding members of Congress accountable during August recess.
• Stop the climate gaslighting. We are already struggling to cope with climate change. When people with power deny and downplay the dangers of climate change—while we’re suffering from those very dangers—don’t let them get away with it. Don’t refute the bogus science that they point to, that only gives their bogus science attention. Just point out what they’re trying to do: distract, deny, delay, and keep on profiting.

We’ll obviously need to get ourselves some worthy, qualified leaders first chance we get, lean hard into mitigating and building resilience to climate change, and do more, better, faster.

In the meantime, try to stay cool.

This tumultuous week has had more than its share of terrible news, as well as a few reasons for guarded optimism. In our Danger Season Weekly Outlook we capture some of both and look at the week ahead.

The climate dangers of Danger Season

• All eyes on the Texas flooding: The headline is still the devastation and tragic loss of life in Texas. At this point, more than 120 lives have been lost and 160 people remain missing. Given the Trump Administration’s reckless cuts to NOAA in recent months, there was quick blame cast and lines drawn between those cuts and this tragedy. As our team carefully outlines in the blog we posted, the situation is complex and much is still being learned. But we do want to emphasize our one big takeaway—that we simply cannot allow the Trump administration to continue to attack, defund, and dismantle the very agencies that help keep us safe and recover from disasters, including NOAA and FEMA. Quite the opposite: we need to ramp up investments in cutting-edge science and climate resilience to keep people safer as climate extremes intensify.
• FEMA’s limited response in Texas, which comes as the agency has seen a roughly 1/3 reduction in its permanent workforce to date and faces the President and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem’s threat of total elimination, has been questioned and criticized. Today, as the President heads to Texas, his administration is signaling that they are backing away from the threat of eliminating the agency, but given their rhetoric and the harm done to FEMA to date, we need to stay on high alert in defense of its ability to deliver on its crucial mission—which is, lest anyone forget, to help people before, during, and after disasters. More on this below.
• Wildfire-fueled flooding: In New Mexico, burn scars from last year’s wildfires created a landscape more prone to flash flooding, as the community of Ruidoso just experienced with a historic and deadly flood. Wildfires can create hard, dry land surfaces denuded of vegetation, conditions that, much like drought, prevent rainfall from being absorbed into the ground. With both wildfires and heavy precipitation increasing in frequency and intensity, these dangerous conditions may become more commonplace.

• North America’s fire season heats up – Millions across North America are already feeling the impacts of wildfires, from evacuations to smoke exposure. The largest fires are currently in Alaska and Canada’s western and central provinces, while, as our Danger Season map shows, active fire alerts span large swaths of the western U.S. (shown here in red). And one for the “seriously?” file: A handful of Midwest lawmakers took the unusual step of complaining to Canada about the smoke from its wildfires affecting their states, as if Canada is having a big backyard cookout that it can simply douse and call it a night.

• Looking at the week ahead: NOAA’s Weather Prediction Center is forecasting hazardous heat across large areas of the West and Southeast, and potential heavy rains across the Great Plains, Northeast, and Florida in the coming days. July continues to be a hot month, consistent with NOAA’s forecast of above average temperatures across the entire country. And consistent with our changing climate.

The “Double Danger” of the unchecked Trump administration

It’s enough contending with the climate crisis, but this year of course we have the acute crisis of Trump administration cuts and congressional submission making most matters worse. This week we have been watching:

• The Supreme Court ruling and Trump administration cuts at NOAA and FEMA: SCOTUS allowed the Trump administration to proceed with mass layoffs and agency reorganizations in a ruling earlier this week, although it not did rule on the legality of the firings themselves. A number of groups have filed a legal challenge that will continue to move forward.  For now, the ruling unfortunately clears the way for the administration to continue to wreak havoc with further harmful staff cuts at NOAA and FEMA and the further reorganization of those agencies.
• The Neil Jacobs confirmation hearing: President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead NOAA, Dr. Neil Jacobs, appeared before the US Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee on 7/9 for his confirmation hearing. Despite acknowledging and expressing support for NOAA’s critical, life-saving work, Dr. Jacobs’ testimony was at odds with the FY2026 President’s Budget Request, which proposes a 27% cut to NOAA—cuts that Jacobs stated he supports. This comes with scrutiny from his previous run as acting NOAA Administrator where he was willing to undermine science and his employees for political purposes as he did during the infamous ‘Sharpiegate’ scandal. As we have been reporting, NOAA is facing insurmountable cuts to its budget and staffing with more expected. As NOAA administrator, Dr. Jacobs will bear responsibility for standing up to reckless administration staffing and budget cuts that threaten NOAA’s mission.
• More on the dynamic FEMA situation: On Wednesday, the FEMA Review Council, established by President Trump, met for the second time in Louisiana, where Department of Homeland Security Secretary, Kristy Noem, repeated her refrain that FEMA needs to be eliminated as it exists today, that the failures of FEMA are staggering and that states need to take on the role of response and recovery. FEMA has already seen massive cuts to its staffing, programs, and critical budget line items by the Trump administration and Congress and state emergency managers are reporting being “ghosted” by this depleted FEMA in recent months.
• Make no mistake who further FEMA cuts will hurt: vulnerable people and communities. On Wednesday, we hosted a webinar on these topics in which our guest speaker, Jeremy Edwards, former FEMA press secretary, pointed out that in the wake of the terrible flooding, even the relatively well-resourced state of Texas needs federal help (TX requested a disaster declaration which releases robust FEMA support and resources from the federal government); and if Texas needs a strong FEMA, you can bet other, less-resourced states like Mississippi do too.
• So while we welcome the Trump administration’s latest signals that it is backing away from eliminating FEMA, there is much to be done to shore up the agency. The FEMA Review Council may have the appearance of a democratic, public process, but we expect that the recommendations, due before the end of the year, will reflect not those of the council members but the Trump administration’s destructive agenda.

• Deepening federal science brain drain: News broke this week that at least 2,145 senior-ranking NASA employees are departing the agency in response to the administration’s push. These losses hurt the US scientific enterprise in ways that will reverberate for many decades. On our Wednesday webinar, former NOAA Assistant Administrator for Research, Craig McLean, pointed out that the Trump administration-driven loss of NOAA staff to date represents 27,000 years of agency experience. That is an investment our nation made in the vital mission of NOAA, to (1) understand and predict changes in climate, weather, ocean and coasts; (2) share that knowledge and information with others; and (3) conserve and manage coastal and marine ecosystems and resources. With climate change unleashing more deadly extreme events across the country, this mission has never been more critical.
• In better news: Reporting suggests that the Senate Committee on Appropriations is poised to reject the huge FY ’26 funding cuts proposed by the administration to the Departments of Commerce and Justice, as well as other federal science agencies (NOAA, NASA, NIST, NSF, OSTP). The final legislative text from the committee is not yet public, but media reports and statements from committee members are positive. The challenge will be to ensure that the final budget appropriations legislation firmly rejects the destructive Trump administration budget proposal and instead secures robust funding levels as close to the Senate committee numbers as possible. Please join us in demanding that Congress protect the funding and staffing of both NOAA and FEMA.
• Going into next week: we’ll be keeping an eye on the next stages in the appropriations process for NOAA, FEMA, and other scientific agencies, as well as a bill in the Senate to enable the Trump administration’s harmful agenda and claw back money via a so-called recissions package . The outcome of that “rescissions” bill could have broad implications for funding across federal agencies.

Stay the course, and we’ll see you next week.

This post is the second installment of our Danger Season Weekly Outlook and roundup—and a dangerous week it’s been.

While we saw the first named storm of the North Atlantic hurricane season, and while wildfires expanded in several states, extreme heat has dominated daily life for much of the nation, with a persistent heat dome encompassing most of the eastern half of the US since this past weekend and subjecting the majority of the population to dangerously hot conditions. 

What we’re tracking weather-wise: historic, harmful heat dome that hasn’t let up

• By the numbers: Records toppled for June, some annual high records set; stunning humidity and Heat Index values. The historic heat dome has broken 322 daily high temperature records across the Midwest, Northeast, and Mid-Atlantic since Sunday.  Boston, Newark, New York City JFK Airport, Providence, Rhode Island, Manchester, New Hampshire, and Portland, Maine either tied or broke their highest temperature recorded for the entire month of June.  The record heat continued overnight, as many communities experienced record-breaking warm lows. New York City’s Central Park and Minneapolis-St. Paul had their earliest-ever low of 80F since records began in 1869 and 1872, respectively. A record  warm low, or record high minimum temperature, is the highest minimum temperature recorded on a given date at a given weather station.  These records get broken when nights are very hot. 
• “Extreme” risk: Areas of “extreme” heat risk, according to the NWS heat risk product, which are typically rare, have been widespread over the Midwest, mid-Atlantic, and Northeast this week. Parts of Ohio will have seen nearly a week under “extreme” conditions. This heat wave has been especially dangerous because of:
  • the severity of the humidity, which makes it harder for our bodies to sweat efficiently and cool ourselves;
  • the number of successive days of extreme conditions, which makes it harder for our bodies to shed accumulating heat;
  • the elevated nighttime temperatures, meaning little overnight relief and recovery for overheated bodies;
  • its unusual early onset in the summer season, when people are less physically acclimated to heat;
  • and its coverage of more northern states where people, homes, workplaces and infrastructure are generally less prepared for such intense heat.

• Health impacts: Visible examples of heat illness made the news when a Major League Baseball pitcher, shortstop, and umpire each fell ill from heat in three separate Midwest baseball games. But less visible will be people’s pre-existing health conditions that are exacerbated by heat stress this week. So far, two deaths, one in Dallas, one in St. Louis, Missouri, are being attributed to this heat wave. We are learning that the deceased woman in St. Louis, who succumbed after several hot days in her un-airconditioned home, had her power shut off by the local electric utility on June 11.
• Grid strain and dirty-fuel use: Overheating of electric grid equipment caused isolated power outages around the US. Demand for electricity hit new highs in the Northeast. Supplies were tight, leading grid operators to use the dirtiest power plants to meet the elevated demand. Oil burning plants, both expensive and dirty, were used in regions that have hundreds of new solar and wind generators waiting for approvals to build. Coal was used in New England, a rarity, to meet 1% of the demand on Tuesday. These most-expensive plants pushed real-time prices for electricity incredibly high, which will ultimately impact the pocketbooks of consumers.

Climate signal: Extreme heat is one of the most direct ways we experience climate change: it is well documented that heatwaves are becoming more frequent and lasting longer in the US. During heat events, we turn to the Climate Shift Index, a tool developed by our friends at Climate Central, that quantifies the role of climate change in the near-term heat forecast. This week’s most intense heat, it shows, was made 3, 4 and 5 times more likely because of climate change.

Some of the implications we’re concerned about

• Heat can kill: Heat can sicken and kill vulnerable people, and at high enough combinations of temperature and humidity, heat can sicken and kill anyone. It is the leading cause of weather-related death in the US and globally, despite significant undercounting. Spikes in mortality during heatwaves have been well-documented in Europe and a study released last week projected 570 “excess deaths” in England and Wales from their June 19-22 heatwave. While air conditioning is far more prevalent in the US, not everyone has reliable access to it, and as noted above, outages this week left tens of thousands of households unable to run theirs.

• Heat protections are patchy across states, needed at the federal level: Workers face great risks during extreme heat, especially those who must labor outdoors. But only seven states have protections in place, like required water breaks and access to shade. As we noted in last week’s Outlook, the first-ever proposal for an OSHA federal standard  for worker heat protections is going through a virtual public hearing process, now through July 2, 2025 (here’s the full schedule). But whether the Trump administration will finalize a strong rule is a big question.
• Indoor spaces are safe if they are sufficiently cooled, but households with fewer resources may not have air conditioning or may not be able to afford to run it. For people unable to pay their electricity bills, the question of whether their electricity provider can shut off their power amid extreme heat can become a life and death one, as we see with the tragedy in St. Louis. Across states, there is a patchwork of regulations preventing utilities from doing so, but a federal moratorium is needed. Low-income households may also need assistance keeping up with electricity bills, assistance provided to states by the Low-Income Housing Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) for distribution. But not all states make LIHEAP funds available to households for summer cooling costs.
• The kind of help people in the US get during extreme heat depends on where you live. Whether outdoor workers have protections, whether lower income people can access funds to help pay for air conditioning: there’s a patchwork of state rules and standards. That’s not good enough in our climate-changed present and not nearly good enough for where we’re headed. What we need is a strong, proactive, integrated, national approach to making us safer during the heat waves that global warming has already exacerbated and will steeply worsen in the years ahead.
• Despite this need, Trump administration and Congress are cutting heat protection resources across the federal government: The federal government supports heat safety and resilience in a range of ways, many of which are facing staff and budget cuts. We’ll be tracking and digging into these in the weeks ahead. But as the Federation of American Scientists noted in its recent report, “In April, the entire staff of the Climate and Health program at CDC, the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), and all of the staff at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) working on extreme heat, received reduction in force notices. […] While it appears that staff are returning to the CDC’s National Center for Environmental Health, they have lost months of time that could have been spent on preparedness, tool development, and technical assistance to local and state public health departments.”  
• In addition, the Trump Administration’s proposed FY26 budget , if passed (which Congress should refuse), would eliminate the LIHEAP funding completely (see budget request p. 9), LIHEAP serves around 6 million low-income households. These already income-strained families could face extreme heat vulnerabilities with the removal of LIHEAP assistance, particularly for the elderly and those with limited mobility. Though 2025 LIHEAP funds have been distributed, the future of LIHEAP is in question.

What you can do now

What the Congressional majority and the Trump administration are pushing during federal budgeting processes will make the federal policy response much worse. It will slash protections for vulnerable people (with heat protections just the tip of the iceberg), slash the federal science infrastructure that helps keep us safe, and slash the deployment of clean energy and clean vehicles, key solutions to tackling climate change.

The heat is forecast to ease going into the weekend, so let’s all cool down and let off some steam by calling on our members of Congress to block the disastrous federal budget process underway right now.

Friday marks the official first day of summer, but Danger Season is already in full swing. Our team refers to the warm months, when climate-driven weather extremes tend to concentrate and do greatest harm, as “Danger Season.” Here in mid-June, these extremes have already hit much of the country—just since May 1, 78% of population has faced at least one of the Danger Season alerts we track—and the eastern half of the US is headed into a prolonged and potentially unprecedented stretch of extreme heat.  

This post is the first installment in our Danger Season Weekly Outlook. We aim to post these each week with a short summary of (1) the extreme events we’re tracking, (2) the implications for people and communities, including how current cuts to federal resources make it harder for people to cope and calls to action, and (3) what we see shaping up next week. 

What we’re tracking weather-wise: buckle up for dangerous, historic heat

There’s a lot going on out there—wildfires burning for weeks already in Canada, poor air quality from smoke in the Midwest and Northeast, pockets of catastrophic flooding—but extreme heat is about to dominate them all.  

• A heat dome is building in the central and eastern parts of the United States starting this weekend and lasting, according to our team’s analysis of the models, at least through the end of next week. A heat dome is an exceptionally warm air mass that forms when a strong high pressure system in the upper atmosphere “sits” in one spot for days or even weeks. High pressure systems usually limit mixing of hot air at the surface with cooler air aloft, allowing surface heat to build and a heatwave to unfold.

• The heat, yes, but the humidity… During this heat wave, temperatures are forecast to surpass 90°F across most of the central and eastern US. Many areas, including Boston, NYC, and Washington, DC, may surpass 100°F. But the game changer in this event is the humidity. While a heat dome prevents mixing between the surface and upper parts of the atmosphere, winds closer to the surface will continue to bring significant amounts of moisture from the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Ocean into the central and eastern parts of the country, leading to high humidity. High humidity and temperature combine to create an experience of heat—the “feels like” conditions captured by the heat index (below)—that can make a heat wave truly oppressive, dangerous, and even deadly.  

• The forecast includes locations in the Mid-Atlantic reaching a heat index of 115°F+ by Tuesday. According to the National Weather Service’s Heat Risk map, parts of the Midwest and Northeast will experience “extreme” heat risk next week, the highest risk according to the product. 

• The climate connection is clear. It is well documented that heatwaves are becoming more frequent and lasting longer in the US, and this potentially historic event is no exception to that trend. Our friends at Climate Central have developed a tool that quantifies the role of climate change in the near-term heat forecast—and generally finds it to be ubiquitous and overwhelming. But what about the ocean-fed humidity? Currently, the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic coast are warmer than usual for this time of year—the temperature anomalies across large areas of the Gulf this week are made 30x more likely by climate change—allowing for more evaporation of moisture into the atmosphere, which then leads to higher dew points and humidities over the eastern US. The fingerprints of climate change are all over this event. 

Some of the impacts we’re concerned about

Heat like this is dangerous for anyone, even deadly. But there’s a spectrum of risk. Some groups of people—young children, elderly people, and people with pre-existing conditions—have trouble tolerating heat at relatively low thresholds. On the other end of the spectrum, most healthy adults can tolerate higher temperatures, provided they have access to rest, water, shade, and cool spaces. But any healthy person, if exposed to temperature and humidity combinations that prevent their body from being able to cool itself, will succumb to heat illness.  

And then there are the situations we live in that make coping with heat harder, including working outdoors; being at school or at work without cooling; being detained or incarcerated in un-airconditioned spaces; living in an urban heat island; being unhoused; being pregnant; being on medication that reduces heat tolerance; the list is long. Read more about heat risk here and its inequities here. 

In a major heat wave, serious risks are everywhere, but some of the things we’re watching this week are:  

• Acclimatization. Each year, people tend to struggle with heat at the start of summer, then acclimate as the season goes on. (For this reason, the NWS tends to issue fewer heat alerts in August than in June for similar heat conditions.) With the widespread, sudden onset of extreme temperatures, millions of people may not yet be acclimated and at greater risk of succumbing to heat illness.  

• Outdoor workers. Amidst this coming heat, outdoor workers will be unprotected by heat safety standards in all but seven states (and each state varies on the industries covered and the requirements for employers). After years in the making, the first-ever proposal for an OSHA federal standard  for worker heat protections is going through a public hearing process (which is being held virtually from June 16 through July 2, 2025, you may wish to tune in, here’s the full schedule) — but whether the Trump administration will finalize a strong rule is a big question especially as it has fired the entire team of heat experts at National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), and gutted the heat centers at the multi-agency National Integrated Heat Health Information System (NIHHIS). Much of what our taxpayer dollars had built to keep people safe from heat is being dismantled as the summer heats up. We need to increase the pressure on and advocate for OSHA to finalize a strong heat protection rule.  

• Here are some calls to action: Join UCS and sign on to this coalition letter asking members of Congress to reintroduce the House and Senate versions of the Asunción Valdivia Heat Illness, Injury, and Fatality Prevention Act: the deadline to sign on is 6/20. For local actions and contacts see heatjusticenow.org and to advocate for state level heat actions, join UCS in signing on to the Alliance for Heat Resilience and Health (AHRH) letter to the National Governors Association. 

• Grid reliability. Keeping the AC on depends on the ability of our power supply to keep up with demand and there’s reason to think that, in this heat, it might be unable to in some places. For example, in their summer outlooks, the Independent System Operators (ISOs) that manage the electricity transmission grids for New England and New York identified extreme heat conditions that would require emergency measures to maintain reliability and avoid  blackouts, . With this heat wave, substantially hotter and longer heat conditions are in the forecast.  

• To go deeper, read our new report, Keeping Everyone’s Lights On.  

• Lack of access to cooling—Households with fewer resources, or those who live in substandard housing, may not have air conditioning or may not be able to pay for the costs of running air conditioning. This can be deadly, especially for those who are elderly or mobility impaired and may not be able to go to neighborhood cooling centers.  

• New escalation of ICE activities in major cities. Given that ~170 million people will be living in extremely dangerous heat in the coming two weeks, this is a time for prioritizing public health, safety, and general calm. Studies have shown that exposure to extreme heat increases people’s stress levels and even instances of violence. The Trump administration’s 6/16 announcement that ICE will escalate activities in major blue-state cities is mobilizing advocates. Given the determination people have shown to defend their neighbors from unlawful ICE actions, the risk of new tension, conflict and unrest during this deadly heat could be high.

• Being good neighbors. Related to the point above, during this heat, we can each make a point to check in on neighbors and people we know to be at higher risk.

What are you watching?

Let us know in the comments. It is forecast to be a challenging season, both weather-wise and socio-politically. Let’s stay alert, keep each other informed, and weather it as best we can.   

We are all under assault

This improbable blue planet is enough to make you gasp: suspended in the silent dark, yet bedazzled and humming with life. But here in the summer of 2025, its brilliant corals are fading to bone-white in the hot ocean, its glaciers are collapsing, rivers are shrinking, its forests are on fire, its vibrating soundscape is going quiet as the chorus of Earth’s creatures dies out. We are breaking Nature’s back and the price is going to be steep. There’s no sugarcoating that humanity’s ship is headed into a dark and challenging night.  

Our challenge is to pull together, navigate with care toward possibility—of which there is still so much—steer safely to the other side, and deliver our children and future generations a new day. We can!  

But with everything riding on us rising to that challenge, this ship we are on together is being steered by people choosing to govern through intimidation, not hope, by sowing chaos, not community. Our president, the captain of our ship, and his crew—an administration of anti-democratic, anti-science, and incompetent leaders working to advance the agenda of the very fossil fuel companies choking our planet—are trying to set the ship on an even crueler and more challenging course than the one we are on and tormenting anyone on board who reminds them of the future they fear. They are destroying the instruments (read: science) for navigating toward those better shores. They are burning the sails (read: clean energy) that would carry us there. They seem ready for people to die (read: too many cuts and policies to name) as they claw toward absolute power. 

People are rising up from below deck to fight back. But their numbers are still small compared with the many who remain below. In the relative comfort of their berths, they hear the shouting from above but try to ignore it (or cheer it on; this crew still has its supporters). Those below deck soothe themselves with the small, unremarkable view from their porthole window, where not much has changed. “Maybe this will blow over,” they think.  

But above deck, this evermore power-hungry crew is now forcing people off the ship and into the water. Families. Children. Terrorizing them for who they are. Those who would defend their fellow humans are growing desperate. And the captain and crew appear to be just waiting for provocation to draw their weapons on the ship’s passengers.  

This is the ruthlessly, callously steered ship we find ourselves on, and they are sailing us toward violence. 

We are in a knife’s edge authoritarian moment. Where our democracy, our nation, and our future hang in the balance. Where, without our overwhelming, peaceful response, we could all find ourselves under full authoritarian rule any day now. This is where you and I are needed. 

A manufactured crisis

We’ve been watching the rhetoric and official signals mount since January 20^th, when the new president signed a “National Emergency” Executive Order that considered invoking the Insurrection Act of 1807—i.e., deploying troops on US soil—to “secure the southern border.” A preliminary 90-day mark for that decision passed, perhaps due to public outcry. But in the last couple of months, unlawful and violent raids by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have increased dramatically, with some deportees shipped to foreign prisons where our constitutional protections don’t apply. The terror campaign being waged against immigrants, naturally, has driven new activist opposition.    

Which brings us to this week, where the situation in Los Angeles, the looming prospect of the president’s military birthday parade this Saturday, and the widespread opposition that will be voiced that day are a tense and dangerous mix. 

But the situation in LA is a manufactured crisis. 

On Tuesday, President Trump said that governors should be able to handle disasters without FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency—the same week he insisted that governors cannot handle protesters without the US Marines. He cannot mean both things. What’s happening in LA, in Governor Gavin Newsom’s words, is purposefully inflammatory and will only escalate tensions. President Trump’s response to LA protests of ICE abductions of innocent people has been to override the governor, LA Mayor Karen Bass, and local law enforcement—all of whom insist that involving US military in the situation is uncalled for.  

Manufactured to consolidate power 

Why is the Trump Administration doing what it’s doing right now in LA? Here are four of the reasons I and other observers are seeing: 

1. To test run deploying military forces on US soil and see how far they can get. Historically, deployment of the National Guard to quell civil unrest is rare, deployment of active-duty troops is rarer still, and their presence in the past was short term. If the administration does deploy troops more broadly and makes any headway in establishing a sustained military presence, it would provide precedent and lasting latitude for them to rule in unprecedented, unconstitutional ways. And it would have lasting implications for our freedom, including to free assembly, speech, and fair elections.  

Let’s be clear: There’s no democracy under martial law. 

(2) To create a huge distraction that draws attention away from the One Big Bonus for Billionaires Bill.  

The bill contains such terrible things and comes with such terrible costs, that some of the terribly disingenuous lawmakers who voted for it are now playing dumb and distancing themselves from it. It also contains expansion of ICE’s increasingly unpopular activities. This is a bill with something for everyone to hate. But not if they’re terrified about our second largest city unraveling into violence.  

If we, the American public, are terrified and transfixed, all manner of injustice is possible.  

(3) To provoke, demonize and disempower the resistance.  

Across the US, people of conscience are appalled at the ICE abductions. Some are organizing to protect people and to protest ICE’s presence. Their actions have been overwhelmingly peaceful. This is true in LA, too, though instances of vandalism and looting have also occurred.

Though local law enforcement insist they are capable of handling the situation, the Trump administration appears to be deliberately building pressure in LA by calling up 4,000 National Guard and then 700 Marines. Unlike state and local law enforcement, the US military are not typically trained in the general de-escalation ethos essential to peacefully calming civil unrest. This dangerous mismatch was demonstrated during the 1992 riots in LA when Marines were also deployed. Members of the military are being forced into roles they may be unprepared for. And peaceful protesters are in grave danger should violence break out on militarized streets.  

It’s not difficult to see how a cycle of violence begetting violence could easily lead to a public relations opportunity for the Trump administration and its supporters. Footage can shape and shift public opinion from support of people exercising their rights under the Constitution to support for martial law to quell what they perceive as violent mobs.   

If the administration wishes to test drive domestic military deployment, public opinion and opposition is one of the few things in its way. But public opinion in a world of disinformation is a highly-engineerable thing.  

Speaking of which: 

4) to project inevitability of their takeover 

Since his inauguration, President Trump has been pushing the nation away from democracy and toward authoritarianism: releasing the January 6^th insurrectionists, ignoring judicial orders, degrading institutions, punishing opponents, demonizing vulnerable groups, inflaming prejudices, and deepening division. This is the authoritarian playbook and a show of military force on US soil is right on schedule. As the organizers of No Kings call out: “For the would-be dictator, success depends on projecting power and creating an aura of inevitability.”  

That’s part of this LA show-of-strength and the military parade. With tanks rolling through DC and our neighbors being ripped from the streets, a shocked, awed, and disheartened public is more likely to accept the previously unthinkable as inevitable.  

All of us who are alarmed, outraged, and terrified by the increasingly authoritarian actions of the administration need help shedding that sense of inevitability. We need reason to think democracy, love thy neighbor, and care for our planet will win. We need each other. 

What now in this increasingly authoritarian moment? It’s our move

To counter the above, we need a massive peaceful opposition. Millions of everyday people mobilizing and showing up in the streets, demanding the administration walk back from authoritarianism. And not just the stalwarts who have been protesting administration actions since day one. Not just frontline communities, BIPOC activists, LGBTQ+ folks, white educated women, and youth activists. We need everyone who believes in democracy, human rights and our constitutional freedoms.  

If we show up, millions of peacefully mobilized people will:  

• Demonstrate broad opposition to the abductions of immigrants, tearing apart of families, and heartless ICE policies and actions. 

• Directly discredit the administration’s claims of radical, violent mobs and undermine its calls for domestic military deployment.  

• Defuse the “distraction bomb” the administration is hoping will provide cover for the heinous reconciliation bill.  

• Show the nation and the world that resistance is broad, powerful, and peaceful and that violence toward those of us protesting would be an authoritarian crime. 

• Show the nation and the world that there is nothing inevitable about this authoritarian juggernaut. This is still the United States of America and we do not bow to kings.  

Critically, we need to do this peacefully. There is abundant guidance on how to engage in peaceful protest, help to de-escalate violence and counterprotest situations, and keep ourselves and each other safe. I’ve done my share of protests but I’m no expert, especially not in these times, so please consult expert resources closely. Know your rights and risks. Mind your health and digital safety. Learn how to safely document and be a good ally. There are real risks of showing up to protest, especially amid the administration’s escalation. And there are assured costs of us failing to mount a massive public opposition. 

The next important opportunity to show up and be heard is Saturday, June 14^th at the No Kings demonstrations. The thousands of protests planned around the nation that day will, collectively, be a huge, peaceful counter to President Trump’s dictator-esque military birthday parade.  

But again, we need numbers. People by the millions. History provides evidence that when movements grow to involve a critical share of the population—in this country, around 10 million people—they can topple authoritarian regimes.

Our vigilance or our neglect?

And here I want to go back to the ship and the quiet majority biding their time below deck. We have seldom had anything more important to do than fight the authoritarian takeover of our country. If you can show up, show up.  

I recently re-read a powerful 2023 commencement speech by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson. (My eldest child just graduated college and the start of these people’s new lives at this tumultuous time is much on my mind.) In it she quotes words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. that are apt today:  

“We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time…. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residue of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: ‘Too late.’ There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect…. Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter—but beautiful—struggle for a new world.” 

It is not too late. But soon, it could be. If we lose this nation to an authoritarian ruler and waste these four years undoing climate progress at home and abroad, it will be too late for our near-term climate goals, too late for certain life-sustaining ecosystems around the world, and too late for the hopes of better lives for many of the world’s vulnerable people. But it is not too late today.  

Do not stay home. Yes, they are steering the ship, but that doesn’t mean they have total control of it. It doesn’t mean they decide what happens next. The ship is everything and everyone we love is on it.  

Do not give up the ship.

For me, it was the powerful Congressional testimony by the Director of NASA’s Goddard Space Institute, Dr. Jim Hansen, in 1988. What he was telling the world sounded unbelievable. But he was from NASA, one of our nation’s—and the world’s—premier science agencies, so I knew this was real. I was a distracted, big-haired teenager, frozen in my tracks. I’ve been working for climate solutions ever since.

Fast forward to today…

I know…

Our political crises are a lot to hold. But as part of the climate movement, you also know that climate change is the context in which all of these crises are unfolding. You know that if we are successful in slowing down or stopping the Trump administration’s authoritarian roll and restoring democracy, we still have this colossal global climate problem to contend with. What you may not know—what is just now becoming clear through leaked documents covered in the press—is that the administration is preparing to bring climate science in the United States to its knees. This illegal overreach will make the work of contending with climate change so much harder for many years to come.

We have to stop them.

The insatiable anti-science Trump agenda

The infamously anti-science Trump administration, back in February, requested reorganization plans from each federal agency by April 14^th. The planned cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), according to news reports, are not the equivalent of trimming but of sawing a whole tree down to the ground. Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR), for example, is at risk of elimination, a move that would gut NOAA’s ability to pursue climate change research itself and to support, as it currently does, countless research efforts across the US and around the world.

As my colleague, Marc Alessi summarizes in his blog, the leaked memo “proposes closing all 16 Cooperative Research Institutes in 33 states, every one of the 10 research labs, all 6 regional climate centers, slashing the budget for the NASA Goddard Space Institute, and ending $70 million in grants to research universities. Thousands of seasoned scientists, early career scientists, and young scientists in graduate schools will lose funding.” As of this writing, the rich online resources of three of the Regional Climate Centers have already been taken down. The destruction is underway.

Also requested in February and presumably being finalized now are plans for “large-scale reductions in force (RIFs)”. Those firings of federal employees would come on top of the hundreds of NOAA staff who were fired last week—for the second time, this time permanently.

This is what I mean by bringing US climate science to its knees. And as my colleague, Rachel Cleetus, details in her blog, it is at the same time incredibly reckless and carefully premeditated by those behind Project 2025.

Climate science tracks and unpacks the dangerous trends that will harm people’s lives and livelihoods, and already are. It shows, for example, that both the strength and rapid intensification of hurricanes are increasing, that the intensity and duration of drought and extreme precipitation are increasing, that sea level rise and coastal flooding are increasing, and that wildfires are increasing in frequency and size. If we look back just a handful of months, from Hurricane Helene to the L.A. wildfires, the devastation our changing climate is causing in people’s lives is clear. The proposed cuts would ravage our ability to understand and meet these evolving threats.

The entire global climate science community relies on NOAA scientific expertise and the science it produces. A passing anti-science administration, hell-bent on destruction across our federal government, has no right to make these legacy scientific resources disappear. They belong to us. NOAA belongs to the millions of people warned and kept safe by our National Weather Service, to the diverse economic sectors informed by its annual, seasonal, and monthly outlooks, and to the thousands of communities dependent on good information to invest and plan for the future. This anti-science agenda is anti-people and it must be stopped.

Federal climate science IS climate science

After my 1988 wake-up call, many indelible moments of new climate awareness followed—so many bearing the fingerprints of NOAA and NASA science. For millions of us in the climate movement, it was the first time we saw the “Keeling Curve”, the iconic chart illustrating the steady rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels since 1958, as recorded at NOAA’s Mauna Loa Observatory. (The observatory’s support office is on a DOGE list of federal leases slated for cancellation.)

For many, seeing the “hockey stick” chart or NOAA’s global historical temperature anomaly record sent shockwaves of recognition through us: we are in unprecedented territory.

NOAA’s sea level rise projections similarly transformed our collective sense of the future of our coastal communities and the inevitability of large-scale human migration: seismic change lies ahead.

Just yesterday, new climate research was released using NOAA’s long-term historical record of carbon dioxide levels to show a dramatic recent spike in CO₂. While the scientific community needs to determine what this means for our climate, it is a terrible trend—and a vital one for us to see, track and understand. These measurements are part of the work of the Global Monitoring Laboratory—one of the laboratories proposed to be closed by these cuts.

Speaking of laboratories, NOAA’s  Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) is targeted for closure. GFDL developed the world’s first global climate model and remains at the forefront of climate research. Its loss would represent a serious wound to climate science, globally.

It is no accident that these watershed moments in public awareness of the climate crisis (alongside climate disasters of historic proportions like Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy) came courtesy of our federal agencies. This is a central purpose of government: marshalling collective resources for the public good. This is our federal science at work—as we want and need it to work—advancing and innovating over time to bring our changing climate into focus in service of the public’s well-being, today and into the future.

Climate science serves people

Our federal climate science isn’t just big picture trends and long-term projections. It also provides us with the localized, near-term data, information and expertise we need to perceive current changes at granular, community and neighborhood levels and to anticipate unavoidable impacts for which we must prepare.

Put bluntly, NOAA science saves lives and money. Improved hurricane forecasting by institutions like those currently slated for closure is estimated to have yielded nearly $5 billion in avoided damages for each major US-landfalling hurricane, not to mention the many lives saved, while the cost of letting those institutions do their job is a fraction of that. With climate change driving more dangerous and costly hurricane seasons, this is bad math.

The pillars of NOAA’s mission include “1. To understand and predict changes in climate, weather, ocean and coasts. And 2. To share that knowledge and information with others.” As it quips on its website, climate is what you expect, weather is what you get. Its work is based on the understanding that climate and weather are inseparable, that each year, climate change manifests in more extreme weather events, and that we must understand these changes in order to meet them.

We’re still making sense of the implications of these cuts for everyday people, but as my colleague writes, they could lead to a significant decrease in hurricane forcasting accuracy, since the proposed cuts would end support for NOAA’s hurricane hunter missions; elimination of important climate monitoring and decision support for farmers with the loss of the NOAA Regional Climate Centers; and coastal communities left without the National Ocean Service and the critical information it provides, e.g., on flood risk from extreme weather events. 

NOAA and NASA are able to respond to the mounting threat of climate change because of many decades of taxpayer investment in their work. Americans value the services we receive from this science and use them every day. No one but the Trump administration, Elon Musk, and the creators of Project 2025 is asking for the dismantling of the public US scientific enterprise. But like barbarians at the gate, the administration is ignorant and/or uncaring about the painstakingly-constructed, globally-prized scientific asset that NOAA and NASA represent. They only seem intent on sacking and claiming the spoils, apparently to make a small dent in the cost of tax breaks for billionares and to pave the way for greater profits for big corporations.

Make it hurt until they make NOAA whole

So, Climate Movement, I know we don’t feel like a “climate” movement right now, and that’s as it should be. Too many urgent fronts to fight them on. But we’re still here. And this assault on climate science requires the greatest response we can marshal. If they succeed, we will be badly delayed in building the climate future we need by having to rebuild the climate science past they stole.

The Trump administration claims a “mandate” to justify the destruction, but a strong majority of the American public is concerned about climate change. Amidst the coming, inevitably-bruising summer—or “Danger Season“—of climate extremes, frustration will rise over the administration’s crushing of both federal climate science and disaster preparedness efforts. Layered on top of this will be the volatility, harm and added vulnerability people will be facing from the administration’s countless other egregious actions, from cuts to housing and cooling assistance to ever-expanding rights violations.

Congress has an opportunity to stop this madness and we need to make them. Members should hear encouragement to be bolder or face constituent anger at every turn until they stand up for NOAA, climate science, and the public good.

The people, especially those of us with privilege, have an opportunity to stop it, too. The streets, local media, town halls, the market place should fill with our bodies and our voices calling for the restoration of these vital agencies and programs—as well as rights and freedoms and the rule of law, however misaligned those are with the Trump agenda. It’s time to be bold and go hard. They can’t take it from us if we refuse to let it go.

Vital federal agencies face fates ranging from near-total destruction in the case of USAID, to deeply diminished functioning in the case of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), even as we face an intense and lengthening wildfire season and approach another hurricane season, to dangerous muzzling in the case of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, even as bird flu spreads. The moves are wasteful, harmful, egregious, ill- or uninformed—and in many cases, illegal. They are, as my colleague, Julie McNamara writes, pushing American innovation to the brink. And they are devastatingly costly, not just in wasted taxpayer dollars, but in human lives.

It’s our house and they are hacking it down

Federal agencies represent generational investment in a functional society. They are an asset of today’s generations to pass on in good form to the next. Are reforms important over time? Absolutely. This is not reform, though, it’s wreckage. But rather than verbally light my hair on fire for you, here’s a clumsy but apt metaphor for what the destruction means for everyday people.

You have a home.

It’s nothing fancy, but you’ve been building and investing in it for years and now it has all the necessities and basic comforts. You have to pay each month to keep the lights on, and sometimes you need to do repairs and upgrades, but you’re a careful homeowner on a budget and you make it work. Someday you’re going to pass it on to your kids.

These days, though,  your partner has different ideas.

One Monday you come home from work to find someone has torn your shed down. Your partner says, “It wasn’t doing anything useful.” You say, “but I was using it. Where am I supposed to keep my bike and my tools? Why was this necessary?” But they are taking a call.

On Tuesday, you come home and all your appliances have been hauled away. Your partner says, “They weren’t working efficiently”. You ask, “How are we supposed to keep our food cold? Or have clean clothes?” Your partner says a little short-term pain is worth the long-term gain; you’ve been signed up for an appliance subscription service. “But we owned those ones”, you say, “They worked just fine. How is this good for us?” But they have turned on a show.

On Wednesday, you come home and all your windows have been smashed. “They said they were drafty,” your partner relays as they board up the empty frames with plywood. “But how will we have any light? How will we get fresh air?” you ask. “I guess we’ll pay for more electricity and ventilation,” they say. You ask, “How is this good for us?” But they don’t hear you over the hammering.

On Thursday, you come home to find your solar panels and the roof beneath them are gone. “I don’t believe in them,” your partner says, as you frantically staple a blue tarp over the hole in your house. “Believe in what?!” you ask. “Solar electricity? Roofs? The sun? How is this good for us?!”

The next morning you wake up in a dark room to the drip of rainwater from your exposed attic. You put on dirty clothes and are fumbling your way downstairs when the jackhammering starts. Outside, a crew is hacking away at your foundation. “Stop!” you yell. “This is my home! What are you doing?” The foreman checks his clipboard and says, “Well, it’s basically worthless now, so we’re going to clear it out.”

You turn to your partner, who is finally looking confused and afraid, and you ask again, “So tell me, how is this good for us?”

Our federal agencies are vital

Your partner in this story is people in America who are either initially supportive of these agency cuts or not paying close attention, but in either case, are due for real harm right along with everyone else. Those of us who can go about our lives with a sense of confidence and security do so in no small part due to the existence and effectiveness of our federal agencies.

Check your weather app before you get dressed? Thanks, NOAA. Turn on your tap water with confidence that you can drink the coffee you make? Thanks, EPA. Review your kids’ college aid awards over breakfast? Thanks, Education Department. Opt to wear a mask to work because you heard the flu is surging? Thanks, CDC. Talk with your aging mom over lunch about a promising new dementia trial? Thanks NIH. Ask her how a cousin’s recovery from Hurricane Helene is going? Thanks, FEMA. Stop for some groceries on the way home because a big storm is coming? Thanks again, NOAA….

These agencies and their functions didn’t sprout from the head of some government mastermind. They came to be because we needed and demanded that these functions be filled. They were built over time because we funded them. And they exist today because we need and use them.

Destroying them is theft

Ripping them down like Elon Musk and DOGE are doing, with President Trump’s urging, is not governing in the public interest. It’s ruling by impulse and arrogance and out of the selfish, profit-minded interests of the billionaire class and big polluters. And for the public, it’s the governance equivalent of being carjacked by a gaslighter: violent, illegal, and what the hell—I’m using this car!—all while being told by the carjacker they aren’t taking anything they shouldn’t take….

And like a car-jacking, if and when we rescue these agencies from the chop shop, real damage will be done. To replace and rebuild what we had on January 20th will be incredibly costly and in the near-term, impossible: an unparalleled knowledge bank drained by the hemorrhaging of expert staff; skilled delivery of vital services stopped short by the firing of seasoned, dedicated public servants; decades-long data records vital to science permanently compromised by forced gaps in collection; infrastructure—from buildings to work stations—liquidated. These are all things paid for by us—not just for how they serve us today, but how they will serve us in our unfolding, uncertain future. And these are all things stolen from us.

For what?

The spectacle of the world’s richest man slashing federal programs, services and workers in the name of efficiency would be a bad joke, except for how much it hurts and costs. And for what? Obviously not for efficiency, possibly for ruinous tax breaks for the wealthy, certainly for the privatization of public goods and the colossal grift entailed.

So when we hear of more cuts, we should strongly support and defend the people losing their jobs, and we should feel anger for the blatant destruction and theft of our legacy of investment, say “how dare you,” and fight it all, tooth and nail.

There are also things that this administration is doing of a more blatantly authoritarian nature, like threatening to defund colleges that allow students to exercise their right to free speech, threatening deportation of people for their political views, and working hard to dismantle the free press. They want to rule, not govern, so they are coming for everything that makes a democratic society possible.

And so we need to fight them on every front, get every win we can, punch holes in their fascist power play and petro-masculine money grab. Protecting federal agencies like NOAA from being gutted and privatized is one of those fronts. But fighting on any front is important.

So, what can we do?

What we can do depends on the day and on the kind of risk our personal privilege enables us to take. Not everyone in this country can afford to take risks right now. But for those of us who have privilege, now is the time to use it, and the time to start stretching outside our comfort zone.

For the moment, we have to keep giving Congress hell:

• Over the spring/Easter Congressional recess (April 11^th through the 27^th), we can go to our members’ local town halls, if they are still holding them. And if they are not, we can demand that they hold them by writing letters to the editor, contacting the local media, building pressure on social media, or standing outside their office with a sign. Republicans have complete control of the federal government; they have no excuse to hide from their voters.
• Write a letters to the editor. Here’s the UCS letter to the editor guidance for writing an effective one. Feel free to use points from this or other UCS blogs!  
• Call members of Congress and tell them to defend against these attacks. Here’s a UCS resource for making calls.
• And write them specifically about protecting NOAA. Here’s another UCS resource.

And we can show up for federal agencies and staff:

• Support federal staff and scientists in our communities. Here’s a UCS resource for folks to have on hand.
• Keep our ear to the ground for opportunities to show up in person and demonstrate support for agencies and rejection of the ongoing harm.
• Help to amplify the stories of fired staff and the stressed staff who remain on social media and other channels.

I’ll be the first to say that this is not enough to turn the tides right now; it’s just about being and staying in the fight. At the same time, taking care of ourselves and each other and not burning out is essential. So let’s stay awake to evolving threats, unify in as big and bold a front as we can, and get ready for when it’s time to go bigger and be braver.

Ahead of Memorial Day, the unofficial kick-off of summer, we are back with an annual warning that gets more pointed each year: it is now Danger Season 2024, and everyone needs to be ready. Because the hits are coming, and they’re going to hurt.

“Danger Season” refers to the warmer months when, turbo-charged by climate change, extreme events like heat waves, heavy rainfall, wildfires, and poor air quality bring miserable and often dangerous, conditions. You already know you’re not experiencing the summers of your youth (given the accelerating pace of climate change, this applies to almost anyone who can read this post). It’s important to know, also, that climate change isn’t going to unfold for us in barely perceptible increases in temperature, upticks on a graph we can scan in the morning news. It’s going to crash into our lives in the form of damaging, even devastating, extreme events, particularly in Danger Season.

Here at UCS, we’re tracking Danger Season impacts on a daily basis with this interactive tool, capturing and communicating the climate change connections, highlighting harm to vulnerable people, and talking about what we can do to prepare, to build equitable resilience, and to slow down this runaway climate train with a fast, fair phaseout of fossil fuels and accountability for the fossil fuel companies whose deception and delay tactics played a huge role in getting us into this mess—and who continue to profit as people suffer.

What happened to summer?

Summers–and all the seasons–happen because of Earth’s tilt on its axis as it orbits the sun. With this tilt, the Northern Hemisphere will face more directly toward the sun during the months surrounding the June solstice, causing us to experience summer, while the Southern Hemisphere experiences the opposite seasonality. “Danger Season” follows that more direct gaze of the sun. With fossil-fuel pollution trapping heat and driving up global average temperatures, those warmer months are warmer than ever. And, in human history, I do mean ever. Higher ocean and air temperatures manifest in storms, heat, precipitation, drought and wildfires that can be more intense, more frequent, and/or longer lasting.

Wherever one lives in the U.S., these trends are inescapable. Whether we’re under the orange skies millions experienced last summer amidst smoke from Canadian wildfires or evacuation orders from those same fires, whether unnerving or downright traumatizing, climate change is making its presence known, and these warm months—Danger Season—are its main stage.

Now, is every extreme weather event we experience made worse by climate change? No. But we know that climate change has made many disasters more frequent and more severe. Scientific analysis, called “event attribution,” can help quantify whether and how the fingerprint of climate change impacted a particular event, and these analyses are often available in rapid response formats following a disaster.

What’s happening with this summer?

Any sense that climate change would unfold gradually was laid to rest in 2023 when so many significant climate records were shattered by previously unthinkable margins. The first few months of 2024 have seen the continued march of record global heat conditions. April marked the 11^th hottest month on record.

Average ocean temperatures have also been at record levels since May of 2023.

This heat was enabled in part by the fact that we were in the El Niño phase of the so called El Niño Southern Oscillation inter-annual climate cycle. El Niño typically drives higher global average temperatures. Here in 2024, we are seeing the transition from El Niño to a neutral phase, and we can likely expect a shift to La Niña to happen late this summer. Given that global average ocean temperatures remain at record high levels, and air temperatures continue to break records, there’s uncertainty about how summer 2024 will play out. But here’s what NOAA, our federal climate agency, is currently forecasting.

• Widespread above-normal heat

The forecast for July through September is for above-normal heat conditions from coast to coast, with highest heat risk in parts of the country—like the Southwest and Texas—that weathered unprecedented heat last year.

• A hectic hurricane season

Just this morning, NOAA released its Atlantic hurricane season outlook, anticipating an above-normal and possibly record-breaking season. The North Atlantic remains incredibly hot, and hot water is a hurricane’s source of fuel. With the official start of hurricane season next week, we’re entering a “hope for the best, prepare for the worst” situation.

• Precipitation and drought forecast

An updated drought forecast will be released next week, but at this time, drought persistence and development are forecast for large areas of the Northwest, Southwest and South Central U.S.

It is worth noting that the drought conditions our northern and southern neighbors are facing are currently far more severe, with much of Mexico facing severe, extreme, or exceptional drought.

• Wildfire forecast

Atmospheric rivers doused California with such exceptional rainfall earlier this year that the threat of wildfire there has for now been greatly tamped down (though this also spurred the growth of vegetation that will fuel future fires). The persistent dry conditions in Canada, unfortunately, point to an active wildfire season there, with potentially harmful air quality impacts for Canadian territories and U.S. states downwind. And Hawaii, still reeling and recovering from last year’s devastating wildfires, faces another season of wildfire risk.

What we’re already seeing on the ground

It’s the third week in May, and already we’re seeing extremes that alarm us in their magnitude and hurt like hell on the ground.

Canadian wildfires are once again burning and compromising air quality in the Midwest.

A prolonged heat wave has beset a large swath of the Southeast. In Florida, Key West was shocked with 115 degree Fahrenheit heat index conditions last week, tying the all-time record high temperature in the middle of May.

Much of Puerto Rico has endured heat index conditions well over 100 degrees. And Texas… whew.

The derecho that slammed down in Texas earlier this week has left the Houston area reeling and the recovery situation is being made much worse by early-season extreme heat, an outbreak of mosquitoes, some of which are testing positive for West Nile Virus, and power outages which, though largely addressed, left hundreds of thousands of people without electricity and air conditioning over a miserable several days.

The connection to climate change remains less clear for some extreme weather events, like derechos, than others, such as extreme heat. But the concentration of these extremes during our warmer months means heightened summer risk for which we need to be better prepared.

The official start of summer may be a month away, but Danger Season has begun.

What’s next?

As outlined above, the forecasts are coming into better focus. Inevitably, it promises to be a dangerous season. And given the enduring inequity and legacy of racism across the nation, it promises to harm marginalized and historically disadvantaged people most. Tune in soon for my colleague Juan Declet-Barreto’s take on the outlook for inequitable harm as the season’s impacts unfold.

We’ll be tracking the 2024 Danger Season in our daily-updated web feature, and with quick-breaking analyses focused on issues of racial equity. We’ll be flagging fossil fuel accountability for climate harm. And we’ll be calling for more ambitious climate action on both heat-trapping emissions reductions (e.g., the clean energy transition and a modernized grid) and adaptation (e.g., just and climate-informed preparedness and recovery efforts in the wake of inevitable disasters).

Follow us on social media for rapid response updates as situations unfold.

Stay tuned, prepare now, and let’s try to stay safe.

Climate change smothered us in heat this season, here in the US and across much of the world, but it has not affected us as equals: some of us can stay relatively safe and cool while many of us cannot and suffer instead. With summer largely over, a priority in the coming cooler months should be to use this respite to build equitable resilience to next year’s inevitable deadly heat.

Basic inequities of keeping cool

Climate change causes harm and suffering primarily by creating and exacerbating weather extremes, like extreme heat. These extremes are most acute during the warmer months of May through October—what we at UCS now call Danger Season.

Whether one can come through Danger Season unharmed depends heavily on present and historic inequities. And by acutely harming the more vulnerable among us, e.g., making us sick, preventing us from working, or damaging our homes, climate change can deepen these inequities and exacerbate this cycle.

Climate change is only accelerating, and so the threat to vulnerable people is mounting. Both forces—climate change and inequity—must ultimately be bent toward justice.

With dangerous heat a prominent feature of summer 2023 nearly everywhere in the northern hemisphere, and expected to be even worse next summer when El Nino is in fuller effect, this post outlines some of the ways in which that heat will hurt the more vulnerable among us, and flags a few of the things we can do today to counter this harm.

People working outdoors

Record-breaking heat across much of the country this summer created a formidable landscape in which working outdoors—or anywhere without access to cooling—was dangerous, even deadly. Because heat exposure exacerbates so many other medical conditions, data on heat-related illness and death severely undercounts the real impact extreme heat has on public health—yet heat is still by far the number one cause of weather-related death each year.

Despite the risks, though, outdoor workers currently have no federally-guaranteed protections from heat. As my colleague Alicia Race relays in her blog post, access to water, rest, and shade, however essential during dangerously hot days, are “not legally guaranteed for most people who work outdoors or in hot indoor facilities”. UPS employees made air conditioning in delivery vehicles a key demand in recent union negotiations—and won—but elsewhere, big corporations are lobbying against vital worker protections like these.

In the agriculture sector, most of the nation’s produce is harvested by low-paid workers; a large share of them are Hispanic and a large share (roughly half of hired crop workers) lack legal immigration status. Many of these workers are paid, not by the hour, but by the volume they pick, incentivizing exertion. Most California counties, where a huge share of the nation’s fresh produce is harvested, experienced more than a dozen extreme heat alerts this summer. In places like the Yakama Valley in Washington state, cherry pickers and other farm workers have shifted to nocturnal work schedules to avoid the daytime heat.

Much of the US South experienced a summer of heat conditions that obliterate past records. This includes Texas, where Governor Greg Abbott recently signed what’s become known as the “Death Star bill” for its blatant inhumanity. Among other things, it nullifies existing local regulations that grant outdoor workers the right to water breaks.

I suffered from heat exhaustion a few years ago after some exertion on an unusually hot spring day. I was confused and bone-tired and it felt like a bed of coals had been lodged deep in my guts, burning and overheating me from the inside.

But I had access to a cool room. I had people who brought me cold drinks. I could drop everything and sleep, which I did for hours. Now, when the temperatures soar and I see people toiling in the sun, I remember that feeling—how dangerously unwell a hot day had made my body—and think: God, I hope you can stay safe. It takes a certain gall to sit in an air-conditioned office and sign this into law while record-shattering heat sent the overworked to emergency rooms across the Sun Belt.

As we at UCS recently outlined in a call-to-action for our supporters, “A lack of federally-mandated cooling protections such as access to water, rest, and shade means workers continue to get sick or die because of extreme heat.

If we don’t act urgently on climate change, extreme heat would cause tens of millions of US outdoor workers to risk losing a collective $55.4 billion in earnings each year by midcentury, a peer-reviewed Union of Concerned Scientists analysis shows.

Even with bold action to limit heat-trapping emissions, outdoor workers would face severe and rising risks from extreme heat—and that’s why we must act now. Additionally, outdoor workers must be able to access basic, life-saving measures without fear of retaliation or docked pay. The Asunción Valdivia Heat Illness, Injury, and Fatality Prevention Act being considered in Congress will hold employers accountable to keep workers safe from extreme heat and prevent more senseless deaths.

What you can do today:

With some big businesses lobbying against heat protections, outdoor workers need widespread support. Tell your members of Congress to support and pass the Asunción Valdivia Heat Illness, Injury, and Fatality Prevention Act. One way to do so is here.

People living in prison

The US is the global leader in imprisonment, with roughly five percent of the world’s population but more than 20% of its imprisoned people. Black people in the US are imprisoned at roughly five times the rate of white people. In summer, it gets hot behind bars, and this summer’s heat has been torturous.

Data on the presence of air conditioning in prisons is patchy, but according to the Prison Policy Initiative, “at least 13 states in the hottest regions of the country lack universal air conditioning in their prisons: Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia”.

Most of these states rank in the top 20, nationally, for rates of incarceration. And if we look at Texas, the largest prison system in the second hottest state, one analysis finds at least 22 have no air conditioning. Most of Texas’ prisons are located in counties that were under extreme heat alerts dozens of times this summer.

Limited access to cooling for prisoners was dangerous in yesterday’s climate, but in today’s ever-hotter climate it can be like being jailed in a pre-heating oven.

In Louisiana, minors are being housed in un-airconditioned cells at Angola prison in feels-like temperatures of 120°F, conditions known to pose “extreme danger” of heat-related illness and death. And indeed, in today’s climate it’s turning deadly. Though Texas hasn’t officially recorded a heat-related prison death since 2012, analysis by the Texas Tribune suggests there have been at least 40 such deaths in this year’s heat alone, including more than a dozen prisoners in their 20s and 30s.

No one should have to suffer or face death from heat while imprisoned. People are meant to serve time, they aren’t supposed to be tortured. But this summer—and without reforms, for all summers to come— for the people locked in uncooled prisons, torture is what it can feel like.

What you can do today:

The data make it clear: our country needs reforms to its criminal justice system and the mass incarceration it has created.

Given the staggering numbers of people we have put behind bars, and the increasingly deadly summers they must survive there, we face an immediate challenge of making our prisons places where people can safely serve their sentence. In addition to supporting climate action, consider supporting prison policy reform-focused groups like the Equal Justice Initiative, the Sentencing Project, and the Prison Policy Initiative, and groups with specific state targets, like the Texas Prisons Community Advocates.

People without shelter

One of our basic human needs is adequate shelter to protect us from the elements, and with climate change, the elements are more dangerous than ever. But in the US, between 500,000 and 600,000 are estimated to be experiencing homelessness at this time, with roughly one-third of those people sleeping “on the streets” and exposed to storms, flooding, poor air quality, and this year’s deadly heat.

Phoenix, Arizona, with a surging population of unhoused people, is an epicenter of extreme heat suffering and harm this summer. The city saw 54 days with temperatures above 110 degrees and a month’s worth of nights when temperatures never dipped below 90 degrees. Unhoused people sought refuge in cooling centers and were admitted to emergency rooms with heat stroke and serious burns from exposure to scorching pavement.

So far this year, 202 people in Phoenix and surrounding Maricopa County are confirmed to have died of exposure to extreme heat (with more than 150 others under investigation), and though unsheltered people account for far less than 1% of the County’s nearly 4.5 million people, they account for at least 42% of confirmed heat-related deaths this year. 

With the end of the COVID-19 eviction moratoria, more people are becoming housing insecure or unhoused, deepening the nation’s existing housing crisis. And with climate change, much of our existing housing is being exposed as inadequate to changing climate conditions—e.g., with insufficient (and/or inefficient) cooling.

While not a panacea for homelessness, addressing the nation’s affordable housing crisis will help. It will require not just the creation of quality, affordable, energy-efficient housing, but housing that is sited and constructed to keep people safe and sheltered from climate extremes.

What you can do today:

UCS is thinking more and more about the importance of safe, affordable, resilient shelter in meeting the needs of the most vulnerable people amidst climate change. While we expand our expertise in this space, we encourage people to support organizations already heavily engaged in it.

Visit, for example, the National Low Income Housing Coalitions Action page for a list of ways to engage on the issue and urge Congress to do the right things to address our homelessness and housing crises. Look for and support local groups in your community, too, who are fighting for safe, affordable housing; the problem is everywhere.   

People living in urban heat islands

More than 80% of the US population lives in cities, and this summer’s heat engulfed most of them at one point or another. Within cities, treeless urban landscapes are almost invariably the hottest areas and are more often home to low-income communities and people of color who have been historically consigned to live there.

These urban heat islands are created when the sun’s heat is absorbed by building materials like concrete and released back into the city environment, elevating both day and nighttime temperatures. In neighborhoods with less tree cover, more heat is absorbed.

One particularly dangerous effect of urban heat islands is the way they elevate nighttime temperatures. Cool nights give our bodies a chance to recover from daytime heat; when we’re deprived of this, especially over a long period of time, our risk of heat illness can increase. Extended heat in cities has also been linked to increased violence. With climate change, nights are warming faster than days.

With more extreme heat turning our cities into ovens, we should be racing to cool them—starting with the low-income and historically under-resourced neighborhoods where the heat hurts most.

What you can do today:

Encourage your federally elected officials to cosponsor legislation Sen. Sherrod Brown and Rep. Ruben Gallego have introduced in the Senate and House of Representatives respectively, the Excess Urban Heat Mitigation Act (S. 1379/H.R. 2945). This bill creates a grant program through the Department of Housing and Urban Development to provide resources to local governments to help with the effects of excess urban heat such as providing “cool pavements, cool roofs, tree planting and maintenance, green roofs, bus stop covers, cooling centers, and local heat mitigation education efforts.” Tell your electeds, we’re going to need all that and more!

And many others…

Extreme heat makes hard lives harder.

People with chronic medical conditions can face heightened risks amid heat waves. For example, the added cardiovascular strain of cooling the body can increase heart disease risks.

Those living with obesity tend to retain more body heat and can struggle more than others to stay cool.

Some medications, including those taken to treat many mental illnesses, can make it harder for the body to shed heat. Escaping the heat in a cool location can be harder for people with disabilities or mental illness, as well.

People who are elderly often fit one or more of the above profiles and are thus at higher risk, generally, than younger people to heat-related harms.

That said, young children require special monitoring in extreme heat, on the one hand because their small bodies are less efficient at cooling themselves, but also because they may not know when to regulate their activity level amid hot conditions.

Pregnant bodies, too, are less efficient at shedding heat.

Then there are the larger circumstances that make extreme heat a dangerous burden for so many of the world’s people. Whether people enduring deadly desert heat to migrate to the US, people persisting in refugee camps situated on baking marginal lands, or people hustling in oven-like urban slums around the world, there are billions of people living hard lives made painfully harder by killer heat and the other faces of climate change.

A better world

This week, the U.N. Secretary General, Antonio Guterres convened a Climate Ambition Summit, calling on the nations of the world to get serious.

Tens of thousands marched in the streets and people were arrested, all demanding an end to the fossil fuels that brought us this problem. There is an air of urgency—and increasingly, desperation—about it all.

Desperation, in part, because of the extreme heat that the climate just showed us it can generate with less than 1.5°C of average warming—and because we’re still hurtling toward much greater warming.

The vulnerable people discussed here are essentially tied to the bowsprit as we sail into this dangerous future while others of us are, for now, safer in our cabins below deck. But the whole ship will sink before long if we don’t steer a different course.

We each need to resist the madness, abhor the injustice, believe in that better world, and most importantly, get out there and act on it.

Society needs rule breakers

If an unattended child is sweltering in a locked car, one should destroy a stranger’s property to get them out. If a stranger enters anaphylactic shock outside a shuttered drug store, one may justifiably break down the door for an EpiPen. A healthy society needs rules, as well as those willing to break them.

In the face of longstanding discrimination and abuse, Black Americans risked their freedom, families’ safety, and very lives to engage in the civil disobedience that grew into the civil rights movement. Society as a whole only acknowledged in hindsight the essential role of this courageous rule-breaking in driving the United States toward greater racial justice. Now we honor Dr. King’s strategy and vision with this week’s federal holiday. The willingness of these individuals to bear the consequences of their actions gave —and continues to give—civil disobedience and direct action their moral weight.

Today, members of the climate movement are using these tactics to drive climate progress. In the U.S., they tend to face far-lower personal stakes than their civil rights predecessors, though this cannot be said for less-privileged activists, especially Black, Indigenous, and other activists of color, and in the global South, people have been targeted and killed for their activism. Almost universally, the climate movement’s bolder activism is being met with society’s resistance and reprimand but members are persisting out of a sense of urgency and desperation. The mainstream dislikes and disavows specific actions, and that societal disapproval is precisely how these tactics derive their power.

Historically, scientists have not been a major force in this kind of bold, risky activism. But that is changing, as I think it must. Scientists from my organization have been arrested during climate protests. Members of my team ask with each new dire development, “is it time to chain ourselves to something?” And we’re not alone in asking.

Why break the rules: The moral dilemma of the “well-behaved” scientist

Science must be objective. But what of scientists? The magnitude of the climate threat, made clear by climate science, has cracked through a longstanding scientific culture that holds that science should exist outside of the political realm. These cracks were set off in 1988, many say, by the seismic–and arguably activist–Congressional testimony of James Hansen, George Woodwell, Suki Manabe, and Michael Oppenheimer, when they told Congress not only that global warming was underway and caused by human activity, but what needed to be done about it.

Today, most climate experts continue to operate in a business-as-usual manner, doing our jobs, attending our conferences, and playing by the social norms and rules (even as those “rules” continue to expand, thanks to the pioneering efforts of prominent climate scientists to responsibly but firmly tell it like it is; and, frankly, by the work and organizing of groups like UCS).

It’s understandable. We’re human, we have lives, we’re doing good work. Shouldn’t that be enough? As the accelerating climate crisis so clearly outpaces our efforts, no, what we’re doing and saying is not enough.

We need stronger words, more voices, and bolder action. We all know that business-as-usual is over for the climate and so experts face a moral dilemma that deepens each day: If you can see the devastating future of climate change—in the data and evidence and catastrophic events that continue to accelerate— when others cannot, how should you behave?

Four years ago, Greta Thunberg implored world leaders, “I want you to act like your house is on fire, because it is.” At last year’s UNFCCC Conference of the Parties in Egypt, UN Secretary General, António Guterres warned, “We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot still on the accelerator.” And just this week, Vanessa Nakate and other youth leaders presented a “cease and desist” letter to fossil fuel companies at the World Economic Forum in Davos, citing scientists’ warnings that no new fossil fuel projects can be built if the world is to limit warming to 1.5 degrees C.

Climate experts provided them all with the scientific basis for their warnings. We proved the house is on fire. Yet beyond our inner angst and our climate-conscious lifestyles and decision-making, few of us outwardly follow their calls and behave to the world like the house is burning.

If climate experts are to play our most impactful role in solving the climate crisis, this will have to change. Many more of us are going to need to put our privilege and professional standing to use, put some skin in the game, have the backs of activists with less privilege, and break some rules.

Rule breakers vs. rule makers: Navigating the tension that bold activism requires

Activism comes in many forms, but direct action and civil disobedience are the tactics that often garner significant attention and have become increasingly prominent in the climate fight. These tactics are—and to be successful they require—forms of resistance. Resistance to direct action can come in the form of punishment, fines, censure, tags of illegitimacy—all unwelcome to be sure, but a system that doesn’t resist activism is probably not a system gravely in need of change, and an activist who doesn’t meet resistance is probably doing it wrong.

Scientists are more accustomed to resistance to their work (their methods and conclusions, e.g.) than their personal actions and choices, so embracing these forms of activism can be a leap. When scientists do engage in activism, they should expect resistance, but they may also face disproportionate repercussions–a chilling reality that must also change or we risk sidelining this important group of latent activists.

One recent example in the news is front of mind for many climate scientists.

Last month, at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), one of the largest annual gatherings of geoscientists in the world, two climate scientists broke some rules. Dr. Rose Abramoff and Dr. Peter Kalmus took to the stage in a plenary session, unfurled a banner reading “OUT OF THE LAB & INTO THE STREETS,” and, over the recorded presentation that had begun to play, called on participants to take action. Conference staff quickly pulled their banner away from them and ushered them off stage.

What followed is a set of repercussions that are predictable in some cases, shocking and arguably disproportionate in others. In keeping with AGU’s code of conduct, Abramoff and Kalmus were forced to leave the conference, the work they were to present was removed from the agenda, and they were told they would be arrested if they returned.

AGU’s response, though upsetting to many, is what made Abramoff’s and Kalmus’s action effective direct action. Though they may not have intended things to unfold as they did, AGU’s response brought attention and visibility to their effort and call to action, rather than it passing as a quite minor activist moment with little attention. Again, direct action requires resistance; AGU provided that by forcing them out. Abramoff, however, paid a far steeper price: she was fired from her job at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) for taking this action.

Since then, arguments have raged about the incident and the degree to which AGU’s and ORNL’s responses were fair or justifiable. We’re not in possession of all the facts but, on face value, a scientist losing their livelihood and suffering reputational damage for engaging in legal, non-violent activism in their personal capacity would be an egregiously disproportionate price to pay. 

AGU’s stance at least has become somewhat clearer—their CEO issued a letter on January 11th acknowledging the incident, invoking their ethics policy and code of conduct as the basis for their action, and pointing to their track record of having “a very proactive stance on aggressively addressing the urgency of climate change.”

AGU does have a track record of supporting science advocates in valuable ways, and the CEO could have voiced support for the important role that scientists and the scientific community can play in climate advocacy—including through activism—but did not.  

Our main concern is that, in the absence of a clear endorsement of the objective (not the means) of Abramoff and Kalmus’ actions, AGU’s response, coupled with Abramoff’s firing, may be seen by the scientific community as a strong, disapproving, and chilling signal to scientists to step back from climate activism—just when the world needs them to show up in new, courageous ways.

(An open letter to AGU in support of Abramoff and Kalmus shares these concerns and has over 1,300 signers at the time of this post.)

Rule breakers to the front

In this all-hands-on-deck decade, it will not be enough for climate experts to keep our heads buried in the science. Some critical mass of us will need to put our standing and privilege to new use because the climate crisis requires us to throw everything we have at it.

Most UCS staff scientists are not yet independently engaging in direct action or civil disobedience, and our organization hasn’t stepped into this sphere in a big way (besides participating in various marches). But how we can increase our impact, as individual scientists and as an organization, is increasingly on our minds. I don’t have a theory of change for how scientists help drive the societal wake-up that’s needed, but some essential elements my colleagues and I see are these:

It’s time for the scientific community to normalize scientist activism. Confrontational activism isn’t for everyone; nor does everyone need to act for essential change to happen. But the world of hurt hurtling toward the most vulnerable people demands that some of us with standing and security take greater risks. Given the severity and even brutality with which state and non-state actors can meet BIPOC and less privileged activists, not everyone can take these risks, but the scientific community needs to make room for direct action and civil disobedience among its willing ranks. The integrity of climate science isn’t compromised by the activism of its scientists, but at some point, is the integrity of climate scientists compromised by our inaction?

Clear organizational guidance on activism is needed. Institutions don’t need to embrace confrontational activism, but they will need to acknowledge and develop a response to it. Ideally, guidance that doesn’t require people to risk their careers and livelihoods for their non-violent, independent activism.

Risk takers and rule breakers to the front. As Peter Kalmus has said, he and Rose Abramoff disrupted the AGU meeting that day because they “believe that climate scientists have a key role to play in breaking society out of the ’normalcy bias’ or bystander effect that still has most people thinking ’this is fine.’” I couldn’t agree with this objective more. And I see, in the price they have paid and the attention it has received, some small but perceptible movement toward it.

The bolder tactics of activism carry real risks—including for scientists the risk of eroded credibility as a widely-trusted messenger. Yet, the greater the risk, the greater the potential reward. If the reward is actually breaking society out of our collective trance and into a state of real, transformative action, what professional—and even personal—risk wouldn’t be worth it? Climate scientists, what would you risk for that reward?

It’s great.

On cue, pundits from all corners showed up in near-perfect embodiment of the movie’s various villainous stereotypes and began their pecking. It’s inaccurate! It’s simplistic! It’s despairing! All true. (It’s also/ˈsaˌtī(ə)r/.)

I come from a team of climate scientists, analysts and advocates. For us, Don’t Look Up was both like pulling teeth to watch and air-punchingly validating. My colleague José Pablo Ortiz Partida blogged about that very feeling. We felt desolate and seen. (JLaw, if you’re listening, this 90% female team is here for Kate Dibiasky.) We saw the futility of our work reflected, and its necessity. We feel hopeful some people can be moved to action. And more than ever we want to gnaw the bones of the obstructionists. (Legal says to be clear that’s humor.) So basically, another day at the office.

Except all of you were holding this with us. Thank you. Don’t let go. Here are some reasons why.

It’s inaccurate, not wrong

Satire is inaccurate. It can still be spot on. But how do reality and the film actually differ?

Climate change is not like a comet strike. You probably knew that. Sticking with the metaphor, it’s more like having smaller meteorites hit your town every day, getting bigger and more frequent all the time. Eventually this place is going to be a total disaster and you really need them to stop.

Unlike the comet’s impact, climate change isn’t about annihilation in, e.g., 2030. To use another metaphor (courtesy of Adam Levy), it’s more like getting punched in the face. You’re going to have to live with the bruises of the beating already underway, it would be good to adapt to all the punching and shield your face, but hey guys, enough with all the punching.

So then, are climate solutions like averting a comet strike? No again. Unlike nuking the comet to stop its impact, we don’t have any time left to stop climate change. It’s here. We’ve already forfeited the climate we have; we already live in a “new normal.” So just as we don’t face a choice between stopping the threat or getting annihilated, we also don’t have a date beyond which all is lost. The climate will continue to change, rapidly or slowly, punctuated by critical tipping points, depending on what we do today, then tomorrow, then the next day. Every 10^th of a degree of warming seen or avoided matters and actions now matter most for avoiding that warming.

I believe we’re smarter than this but lack proof

And there—will we act?—is the rub and one of the more difficult but on-the-nose aspects of the film. If we quit fossil fuels quickly, making big, economy-wide shifts as rapidly as possible, we’ll avert the more catastrophic climate impacts. If we’re unwilling to disentangle society from our fossil-fuel dependence, we’ll face those impacts.

But like the public in the film, to date, we can’t seem to pay attention close enough or long enough to see what’s really at stake and act on it. Polls say we get it. But we’re still walking trance-like toward an end to the world as we know it because… what? It looks too hard to change direction? We’re distracted? We’re comfortable?

To be fair, in 2021, COVID-19. And to be fair, too many people barely have the means to get through the day this or any year; they’re not in a trance but a fight for survival. But too many of the rest of us are busy earning our generations a damning epitaph: They could have saved the world but it was inconvenient.

I’ve read reviews of the movie that complained they didn’t like the ending, to which I can only say, no kidding? Well then, pitter patter, let’s get at ‘er.

It’s damning. But not enough.

The comet analogy and the movie don’t give the fossil fuel industry, its political lackeys and their decades of obstructing climate action their scathing due. In the movie, the political machinery is so bent on power and the capitalist’s appetite is so insatiable, they’ll risk all of humanity to get them. It’s both mind-boggling and terrifyingly familiar. In reality, fossil fuel interests bent on keeping the coal, oil and gas flowing have, for decades, directed U.S. politicians, distorted science, misled the public and quashed policy action. Those were the decades in which we urgently needed to act and even now, when the risk to all of humanity is clear and acute, they double down.

Look at the Build Back Better Act, the nation’s best shot at deep, timely emissions reductions, which has been rejected by every single Republican in Congress and held hostage by coal-baron democrat, Joe Manchin. Right now, they’re risking our very future (and theirs) for their continued profit and power.

Why do they still have a social license to operate? Why on Earth do we take it?

It’s despairing and infuriating. Be furious.

In panning the movie, Rolling Stone complains that the film “can’t crawl out of the tarpits of its own despair.”  Again, SO SEEN. On my team, everyone sits in their respective tarpit of despair. We zoom into meetings from our tarpits. They’re like our sweatpants; we’re like “Astrid, move your camera, your tarpit’s showing.” What can we say, much is lost and despair is appropriate.

But look, we’re also furious. We have despair for what’s lost and fury for those standing in the way of saving what’s left.

The cheerleaders of the status quo, many of them with histories of denying or downplaying climate change, are, of course, defensive about Don’t Look Up. They claim it insults people’s intelligence, as if satire weren’t a thing. They urge pragmatism through climate adaptation, as if shielding your face was more pragmatic than stopping the punching. They say stopping a comet is easier (what?) than transitioning off of dirty fossil fuels, as if we shouldn’t do something existentially non-negotiable because it’s hard. (And let’s be clear, a lot of it is easy and well underway.)

But you’ve seen the movie. Remember the first talk show interview where Kate Dibiasky appropriately loses it? Climate science has had that moment, several of them. Late in 2018, for instance, scientists of the world outlined the unbearable price we would pay by not deeply cutting emissions and keeping global temperature increases below 1.5 or, God help us, 2 degrees Celsius. 2030 emerged as a timeframe in which massive progress must be made for those goals to be in reach.

Since then, we’ve used up more than 1/4 of those years with little to show and issued a new report with even less bearable findings. Here in 2022, anyone telling you that you don’t need to fight hard for climate solutions is essentially telling you “Don’t look up.”

Yes, we feel seen. It’s not about us.

With the superstars playing the ignored scientists, a lot has been said about climate experts feeling “seen.” Sure, that’s true, but much more important is the massive, still-growing viewership: we feel some relief watching it tick upward and knowing, again, that people are holding this concern in ways they don’t every day but, pardon me, should.

Climate scientists aren’t heroes. But most of us are trying to save the things we love and the odds are thinning so a rational, bone-deep worry just goes with the work. A Thwaite’s-sized glacier of worry. And it feels a little like a hundred million people are holding their chunk of that, at least for a moment, like, hey, we’ve got this. So, thanks. We’re not heroes, we’re pretty tired, and I slept like a baby that night.

Now what?

The 2020s are arguably the most consequential decade for humanity yet, we’re 2 years in with little to show for it, but we do have a small window of opportunity.  

Don’t Look Up lands squarely in that window, a popular-culture moment for the climate, however fleeting, and possibly a chance for more people to feel the absurdity of our heads-down march toward climate chaos and just…. Stop…. Look up. Turn it around.

We have most of what we need to solve the climate crisis— except the political will. So push hard toward a social and political tipping point, toward the politics — and policies, like the critical Build Back Better Act—we need.

One of the many frustrating aspects of the movie was the way the female scientist, in speaking the desperate truth with the passion it warrants, was tuned out and ignored. It’s terrifying but we can’t tune it out. And as activists, we can’t let ourselves be tuned out. Innovate, try new messages, be heard, be unstoppable, throw everything at this. Something’s going to stick. Something could still tip it all for good.

People made climate change political but the climate doesn’t care. It’s hurting us and as DiCaprio’s character says, “sometimes we need to just be able to say things to one another.” Things like, “it’s bad,” and “we don’t have much time.” But also, “why are we living like this?” We could have a better world.

These corporations rely on a social license to operate – one they’ve proven they don’t deserve. As with the tobacco industry before it, their destructive business practices have eroded public trust to the point that their social license is at stake. What the tobacco industry did to downplay the dangers of smoking was criminal and they deserved their Congressional grilling and the game-changing regulations handed down. What the fossil fuel industry has done–and still does today–will reverberate in global, multi-generational hardship and suffering and it deserves lawmakers’ and societies’ harsh rebuke. They should face an unvarnished line of questioning on the public stage.

I hope that Committee members ask the hard questions tomorrow. I hope the fossil fuel executives get caught between a rock and a hard place: having to admit their role in spreading disinformation and blocking action, or lying like the tobacco executives did only to have those lies come back to haunt them. And I hope that the public finally gets the chance to see the industry for the gross transgressor it is, that its social license to operate is soon stripped, and that climate action, freed from its influence, charges forth, putting us rapidly on a path toward a safe climate future.

Given the multi-generational harm brought on by the industry’s obstructionism, these leaders’ morality needs to be in the hot seat as well. If I could ask these witnesses questions tomorrow, it would be questions like these:

Were your company’s profit and your personal wealth worth irrevocably damaging our children’s futures?

In the 1980s, 90s and even 2000s, we could have readily avoided a 1.5 degrees C increase in global average temperatures–the threshold science warns us not to surpass–with the introduction and steady pursuit of low-carbon energy policies. In those decades, however, your corporations were buying political influence and revving up climate denial and disinformation campaigns, repeatedly undermining and beating back the political will to take important steps when there was ample time to do so.

Now the chances of avoiding 1.5 degrees C of increase are incredibly slim and we need to brace for new harms like the accelerated shrinking of water supplies and strained crop production. The more than 1 degree C of temperature increase we’ve already seen is wreaking havoc and costing lives. This year alone, the U.S. has experienced devastating wildfires, heatwaves, drought, and flooding, with costs topping $81 billion dollars and counting. You have succeeded in running down the clock and securing those years’ worth of profits for yourself; the price we have paid is our safe climate future.

Here in 2021, we’re fighting, not to avoid climate change–we’ve experienced plenty already and locked in much more. We’re fighting to avoid catastrophic climate change. Change that will drive upheaval, conflict, displacement, and loss; a world transformed, that no child should inherit. The science couldn’t be clearer on this point: “unless there are immediate, rapid and large-scale reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, limiting warming to close to 1.5°C or even 2°C will be beyond reach” says the IPCC in 2021.

So my question is: Knowing full well that continued heavy reliance on fossil fuels will be unfathomably costly, indefinitely, and will mean profound hardship and suffering for large swaths of the world’s people, why are you prioritizing a few more years of corporate profits over humanity’s safety and well-being?

The science is very clear on the solutions, as well: we need to reduce global emissions at least 50% by 2030. Elements of the Build Back Better Act (BBBA) can accomplish that level of reduction here at home. And can do so with a just and equitable transition to clean energy that, studies also show, would be a boon for public health, job creation and the economy.

But in recent months and weeks, your industry has pulled out all the stops to block those parts of the BBBA. As my colleague, Elliot Negin reports, US Chamber of Commerce President Suzanne Clark “vowed in an August 24 press release that the [US Chamber of Commerce] “will do everything [it] can to prevent” the proposed [BBBA], which would slash carbon emissions from the electric power and transportation sectors, “from becoming law.””

I have another question: Knowing full well that blocking those vital policies and programs will directly imperil our ability to achieve those emissions reductions and avoid catastrophic climate change, why do you do it? What is the price, Ms. Clark, of selling out the world?

How do you propose we prepare for, pay for, and survive the catastrophes your corporations’ actions have helped unleash?

During the unprecedented summer heat wave in the Pacific Northwest, hundreds of people from Oregon to British Columbia died of heat-related causes. Temperatures during the heat wave were found to be virtually impossible without climate change caused by the burning of fossil fuels. Studies like ours at the Union of Concerned Scientists find that, by midcentury, without emissions reductions, more than 8 million people in the US will face a week or more each year of life-threatening heat index conditions over 120 degrees F.

Another question: Knowing that your product is driving a trend that costs people their lives, their property, their local and regional economies, how do you justify aggressively lobbying politicians to quash emissions-reducing policies–including lobbying Senator Manchin, just this month, to kill critical emissions reduction tools like the Clean Energy Performance Program?

Back in the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s, when your corporations were generating and covering up reports about the reality and grave threats of climate change, the use of your product was accelerating the global warming and sea level rise that is flooding communities today. Now, within the lifetime of an average home mortgage, more than 310,000 homes along the coasts of the lower-48 states will flood chronically, tanking property values and destroying communities.

Allow me to ask: What would you say to the homeowner, working hard to pay a mortgage, whose single greatest asset will be all but worthless in the next couple of decades because of sea level rise set in motion while your company was working to undermine climate science and obstruct the shift toward cleaner energy?

What do you have to say to the children whose future you’ve vandalized?

When I was a teenager in the 80s and learned about climate change and the looming threat it posed, I was frightened. But I was also sure that we, as a society, would never let that happen. We would never let a world in which we can thrive slip away from us, replaced by a world for which we’re unfit and scrambling to survive. But that’s just what we’re doing. Not because we want to. But because the fossil fuel industry and people like you have refused to let those who would tackle the crisis do so.

The engines of the world don’t have to run on your dirty, antiquated product. But here in 2021, too much of the world still does, like an addict with one foot in a better life but a pusher who just won’t let go.

What I didn’t understand back then is that there are people like you. People who are so in thrall to a profit model that if it requires sacrificing almost anything in the world to keep profiting, they’ll do it. For example, among other things that unfold in the 1.5 degree C world we’re rapidly living into is the widespread loss of sensitive species and systems (i.e., the really magnificent ones), including the expected loss of 70-90% of the world’s warm-water coral reefs. If your industry had not vigorously obstructed climate action, as has been documented since 1990s, your grandchildren and mine might have lived in a world cool enough for wonders like coral reefs. Instead, they will live a world where too much of nature’s splendor is going dark.

So my question is: What will you say to the children in your lives when they ask you why you put corporate profits over natural beauty, whole ecosystems, and the livelihoods that depend on them? What can you point to, and say, “That was worth ocean acidification and vital fisheries; that was worth the Andean glaciers and the crops that depended on them; that was worth the Great Barrier Reef?” How would you answer David Byrne’s timeless question: “My God, what have I done?“

Our one job–any generation’s one job–is to pass on as bright a future as possible. Instead, young people got you, like some sci-fi super villain, peddling complacency and an irrational devotion to business-as-usual and running down the climate clock while they were still learning to tell time. They are furious. They are sad. And, the worst part, too many are hopeless, all around the world. Some even see a hunger strike as a necessary escalation in this fight.

My final questions to you are: When children ask why their future was irreparably damaged, and the answer is because people like you–and I do mean you, Darren Woods, David Lawler, Michael Wirth, Gretchen Watkins–thought their corporation’s fleeting profits were more important, did you know that this would be your lasting legacy? Do you regret that you may be despised for years for your role in the climate crisis? Have you stopped to fathom the shame that awaits you?

Everyone knows this nightmare: It’s the night before a huge assignment is due and you haven’t attended class for months, you haven’t written a word, you’re in deep trouble, and you have no one to blame but yourself. Right now—with devastating wildfires, heat, and hurricanes, all on a worsening path, and with policymakers doing the leadership equivalent of dorm-room day drinking—is like that nightmare. 

We’re so badly screwed that it’s now a question, not of acing this important class, that won’t happen, but of how fast we cram, how hard we’re willing to push ourselves and, as a result, how much of the situation we can salvage. And Senators on both sides of the aisle want to crack another beer and go to bed.

Unlike this nightmare there’s lots of blame to go around. Much of the blame rests on the fossil fuel industry and the decades it has spent denying climate science, spreading disinformation, downplaying and sowing doubt, to grievous lasting effect. Much of the blame rests on the elected officials who have done that industry’s bidding and repeatedly blocked meaningful action during the years when it would have made all the difference—and here, when it’s evident our climate is skidding off the rails, still do. Thanks to the power- and profit-over-all mindset of these people, we’ll face losses we’ll grieve every day. And of course, blame also rests with many of us who’ve had the knowledge and capacity to do more and have instead favored the status quo and the lifestyles it affords us.

Unlike this nightmare, our failure to pass this test doesn’t mean failing a class, it means—and this is not hyperbole—an end to the world as you and I know it. If we don’t shift this decade onto a track that can arrive at net-zero before 2050, we will lose coastal properties by the hundreds of thousands and interconnected coastal economies. We will lose summers that are safe for outdoor work and play. We will lose cities, vital infrastructure and lives to more monstrous storms and flooding. We will lose species and ecosystems and all they provide. And our children and grandchildren will lose the sense of safety and of possibility we tried to give them when they were small—ask them, they already are— and instead face so much risk and danger. We will lose, we will lose, and we won’t stop losing for decades and centuries to come.

We can’t afford to lose.

Unlike this nightmare, failing this test means failing all future generations, very much including those alive today. If they fail in this moment, our leaders won’t get an earful from their parents, but they will someday get one from their kids and grandkids. It’s only a matter of time and the pace of climate change before many climate obstructionists are begging forgiveness.

Unlike this nightmare, we’re not alone. Quite the contrary, we’re in this together, though many still don’t realize it. We have the potential might of the federal government and our collective tax dollars to help us get through this. We have a many-millions-strong study group and the resources to pull an all-nighter, cramming to pass this climate test.

So how hard are we willing to work in the time we have left? And most immediately, how hard are we willing to push in this reconciliation crisis moment? 

The $3.5 trillion in the investment package is the equivalent of the U.S. brewing a first strong pot of coffee, some fuel for the challenging night of work ahead. Make weak coffee or not enough cups, as some members of Congress are suggesting, and we’ll flag, falter and fail.

We can’t afford to fail. So, to Congress:

For the love of whatever you hold dear, splash some cold water on your faces, grab a cup of coffee from the dining hall, show up in this pass/fail moment, and don’t you dare fail us.

1. Summer is now danger season

Summer is deeply ingrained in our society as the time to have a good time. Fun, play, vacation, barbecues, picnics, days at the beach. In June each year, with schools across the country letting eager kids loose and the playful season wide open before us, we want to enjoy summer. This year, especially, we need to enjoy summer. The pandemic has kept us cooped up, stuck at home, away from our favorite people and places. We have living to catch up on.

That’s just our human truth this summer.

The climate truth this summer is different, and not necessarily compatible with our plans.

Most of us have noticed that our climate has been different for some time now. With each passing year, the summer season, weather-wise, only strays farther from what we know as “normal”. NOAA recently updated the 30-year climate period it uses to define “normal” conditions: “normal” is now warmer than in the past. This may result in fewer weather forecasts calling out “unseasonally hot” temperatures, but it won’t change how bad a heat wave feels in June.

Hurricane season started June 1, and we are anticipating yet another one with above-average storm activity. Large parts of the country are dealing with drought, which will worsen as the summer wears on. The western United States is facing a frightening wildfire forecast, now through fall, following last year’s record-torching season. Already, wildfires in Arizona have exploded in size in recent days, necessitating evacuations and highway closures.

And it’s going to be hot. Here in early June, it already is; much of the US is blanketed by what some are calling a “heat dome”. If you had the money to pick yourself up and relocate for the summer to a location free from these threats, you would need to leave the continental US.

2. We are not remotely prepared

At 12:30 p.m., the heat index has hit 98 degrees Fahrenheit outside, even with the breeze. I’m wondering about my 12-year-old son, who is at outdoor school today (a COVID adaptation), with a thermos of melting ice cubes to sip on. I’m also wondering about my husband, who must be sweltering along with his students, in his unairconditioned high school classroom. I’m joining work calls but staying off video because I’m wearing the skimpiest tank top I could find. I’m feeling foolish for being so unprepared. I have the resources for air conditioning, and in the last couple of years we broke down and bought a couple of window units at a yard sale. But it’s only June 7^th and we haven’t installed them yet. Just like we haven’t recharged the car’s AC coolant yet. Just like our bodies haven’t acclimated to the heat yet…

From households to municipalities to states and the federal government, we’re not remotely prepared for the summer climate we now have. Many schools in the US Northeast are releasing students early today because their buildings lack air conditioning. (I just received a notice that my son will be sent home early tomorrow. Today at outdoor school, they coped with the heat by just hosing kids down in their clothes). Parts of our transportation infrastructure have been found to buckle and melt in extreme heat. Too much of our public housing, even in the steamy US South, lacks air conditioning. As I move from room to room, seeking the coolest spot for me and my laptop, I imagine being in cramped, urban public housing with no AC, and with the added misery of the urban heat island effect amplifying daytime heat and blotting out the cooling relief of nighttime. I read a story about the ongoing, record-breaking heat wave in the Middle East and Central Asia, where temperatures topping 120 degrees F are widespread this week. I’m sweating here in my old New England home, but thinking: wow, this is nothing.

3. Summers are only going to get more dangerous in our lifetimes

Pick a region, choose a climate impact and look at a year in the future – it doesn’t much matter what you choose, it’s all trending in a dangerous direction. This summer could be brutally hot and still be the mildest summer for the rest of our lives. To drive this point home, here’s a comparison between this week’s oppressive heat and the projected extreme heat my team explored in our 2019 analysis and report, Killer Heat in the United States: Climate Choices and the Future of Dangerously Hot Days.

• In Minneapolis, starting this past weekend, temperatures are expected to top 90 degrees for at least six straight days, then hover around 90 for an extended period. According to our analysis, without action to curb climate change, the city could experience nearly 50 such days each summer, on average, by mid-century.
• Around Tulsa, Oklahoma, the heat index is forecast to top 100 degrees F this week. This isn’t uncommon; historically, Tulsa has seen roughly 25 days each summer with such temps. But mid-century, it could see more than 75 such days and late century, more than 100 such days – effectively, the entire summer.
• And in Charlotte, NC, the heat index will approach 100 later this week – certainly not unheard of, but something that happened, on average, 7 times a year between 1971 and 2000. By mid-century, without action to curb climate change, these conditions could occur nearly 50 days per year and by late century, 80 days – more than a 10-fold increase.

Add a power outage to this heat (as was seen in the deadly Chicago heat wave of 1995), and the AC goes off and people start to die of heat stroke. These are just cities I plucked from the NOAA heat index forecast. To look at your city’s current heat index forecast, go here, and for its future heat index projections, go here.

4. Some people face greater risks

Storms, flooding, drought, wildfire, extreme heat – whatever the climate extreme they’re hit with, people fare differently. Take Hurricane Katrina, for example. The vast majority of people who were still suffering weeks and months after the storm were low-income people and people of color. Take that Chicago heat wave. The vast majority of people who died were elderly, and many had limited mobility or were simply isolated. My phone says the heat index is now approaching 100 degrees Fahrenheit. In conditions like this, many people are at risk of heat stroke and other health risks (see table below). People who are elderly, pregnant, very young, physically or mentally disabled, living with underlying health conditions (like heart disease or obesity), homeless and/or impoverished typically face the greatest risks. In the US, because of systemic racism, a disproportionate number of people living in poverty and living with serious health conditions are people of color. In addition, people who are otherwise healthy but who work outdoors – in farming, for example, large proportions of whom are people of color – face significant health risks under these conditions and must take great care.

Saving summer and ourselves

It’s 1:00 in the afternoon and the second floor of my house is now off limits: too hot. I just found my rabbit breathing rapidly so I took some scissors to her heavy fur coat and put her in the basement, the last remaining cool place. I’d sit there myself if it weren’t so musty and dark. My local birdwatchers group is posting stories of chicks dying of heat in their nests. Out my window, I’m eyeing the birdhouses in my yard that I know to be occupied. Nature can handle extreme heat, as can people. But it’s a question of when it strikes, how extreme, and for how long.

I have a particular fear that nags at me when it comes to extreme heat. It’s a scenario where we wake up to a couple of weeks of 100+ degree days across much of the country. And, because we haven’t built resilience to this kind of heat, the power grid fails across broad areas, air conditioning shuts off, people die by the thousands at home, chaos ensues in places, everyone suffers, some acutely. It would be fair to call this a dark, dire thought, but it wouldn’t be fair to call it far-fetched. According to our 2019 analysis, “with no action to reduce heat-trapping emissions, by midcentury (2036–2065), the following changes would be likely in the United States, compared with average conditions in 1971–2000”:

• The average number of days per year with a heat index above 100°F will more than double, while the number of days per year above 105°F will quadruple.
• More than one-third of the area of the US will experience heat conditions once per year, on average, that are so extreme they exceed the current NWS heat index range—that is, they are literally off the charts.
• Nearly one-third of the nation’s 481 urban areas with a population of 50,000 people or more will experience an average of 30 or more days per year with a heat index above 105°F, a rise from just three cities historically (El Centro and Indio, California, and Yuma, Arizona).
• Assuming no changes in population, the number of people experiencing 30 or more days with a heat index above 105°F in an average year will increase from just under 900,000 to more than 90 million—nearly one-third of the US population.

Sobering, no?

But I also have a scenario I revisit where I wake up to the news that we’ve had a huge political breakthrough or clean energy innovation and can now readily and rapidly decarbonize the nation and the world. We’ll succeed in slowing climate change and can focus on adapting to the changes we can’t avoid.

And the truth is, we don’t need a huge breakthrough or shiny new technology, we just need to get down to doing the hard work:

• We lack and badly require resilience to the dangers of current and future climate.
• To build resilience requires slowing the pace of climate change through a rapid clean energy transition and other measures to rein in heat-trapping emissions, as well as adapting to the climate change that is underway. Aggressive movement on both fronts is needed if our climate and our ability to cope with it are to align. As we said in our Killer Heat report, “By cutting emissions quickly and deeply, we can slow global warming and limit the increase in the number of extremely hot days. Every 10th of a degree we avoid in increased temperatures will matter to our overheating world.”
• To build resilience also requires asking: resilience for whom? Society isn’t working for a lot of people. So when we invest to keep people safe in a changing climate, we must prioritize those at greater risk today. Toward this end, the Biden Administration’s commitment to Justice40 can be a promising start; when it comes to extreme heat, the funding in the new budget for heat-stress mapping and mitigation are vital, too.
• Building resilience also invites us to ask: resilience for what? Is it resilience that prolongs the status quo? The status quo that doesn’t currently work for – and often actively harms – too many of the world’s people? Or can we build toward something better? Something that centers well-being and community. We can. And if we’re going to invest many billions in long-lived infrastructure and other decisions that we’ll live with for decades, now is time to do so.

It’s 2:30 p.m. and the heat index has dropped a bit to 95 degrees Fahrenheit. There won’t be a real break from the heat tonight where I am, but we’ll open all the windows at sunset and run fans to pull in as much cool air as we can. I’ll put my little AC unit in the window of my tiny home office, make myself presentable for Zoom tomorrow, and hope that the various dog, cat and rabbit ears that stray onto the screen as we cram together don’t distract too much. And for the next week or so, extreme heat will pulse across the country, straining power grids, outdoor work, seasonal activities, and people’s unacclimated physiology. Those with resources will keep themselves comfortable and those without will suffer.

When this dangerous heat finally lifts and we taste seasonal June weather again, we’ll be reminded how sweet summer can be and, I hope, be resolved to fight our hardest to keep it.

Some decades, like the 1860s for the Civil War and the 1960s for the Civil Rights Movement, are seismic and stand out in history for generations. The 2010s weren’t like that (though politically it’s been one long mixed-martial arts cage fight) but in this decade, amidst the stampede of everyday life, climate changes, sometimes subtle or invisible, have locked down their profoundly consequential influence on our future–with us, until recently, scarcely noticing.

In the 2010s, more stable climate futures that we could have adapted to were quietly foreclosed on, more dangerous ones that we’ll struggle to cope with were inked into the script, and we may, it seems, have stumbled over catastrophic climate thresholds without even knowing.

In this same time, millions have seen the signs and joined the climate fight. Together we’ve felt grief as bad news mounted, rage as monied interests blocked the world’s efforts to save itself and, as climate denial made a political comeback at home, we’ve felt at times like the mythical Cassandra, cursed to tell the truth and never be believed. And though recent years have brought few clear policy wins and many setbacks, we have also watched clean energy soar to new heights and the youth climate movement surge onto the world stage and we’ve taken heart.

Members of our Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) climate team have been reflecting on the last ten years and what really shook us, for better or worse. Below are climate moments, some universal, some personal, that stood out. These are not the only or even the most important ones. But their observations woven together tell the story of a historically consequential decade, when climate change became a climate crisis and in doing so changed us all. Knowing now what we only feared in 2010, many of us would give anything for a do-over, to be our bravest selves before it was widely seen as necessary. But by living these years as we did, millions upon millions of us are meeting the 2020s deeply changed, frightened but fierce, and ready to put it all on the line.

Here’s what we’ve seen. What have you seen? And are you ready for what comes next? We welcome your comments.

2010: A decade is born as a climate policy dies

The decade began at the end of a long, bruising battle for US climate policy. Angela Anderson, Director of the Climate and Energy Program here at UCS, lived this up close. Here’s how she tells it:

“The decade opened by dashing the rising hopes that Congress would pass climate policy to guide our emissions downward.  After the 2008 midterms, President Obama and the Democratic House majority declared climate a priority and the House passed Waxman-Markey’s 1200 page American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES, H.R. 2454), in part to advance international negotiations toward a climate treaty the US could lead and join in the UN meeting in Copenhagen at the end of 2009.  The bill was not enough to deliver an international agreement, leading to the first real collapse of those talks.  When ACES went to the Senate, it faced a Republican minority led by Mitch McConnell, who had earlier pledged to block every Obama priority.  The Democratic strategy had been to persuade the American people and elected officials to support the bill because of its ‘green jobs’ and health benefits.  One columnist’s assessment of that strategy was that, ‘It was like “Fight Club“—the first rule to passing climate legislation was that you could not talk about the climate.’ So we began the decade with the climate community in disarray, dispirited and directionless.  But before too long, we realized that we had to figure out how to help the American public understand how climate is affecting and will continue to affect their lives if we were going to have the political support needed to address what would become a climate crisis.”

So, we did our best to dust off, check our discouragement, and get on with the work.

2011: What happens in the Arctic…

The Arctic took a more prominent role over the course of this decade as a key harbinger of climate change. But unlike canaries in coal mines which alert us to danger through harm done to them alone, it has been noted this decade with increasing alarm that “what happens in the Arctic doesn’t stay in the Arctic.” UCS’s Director of Climate Science, Brenda Ekwurzel, has followed these trends for many years. Looking back at the 2010s, she recalls early troubling developments:

“In 2011, the proportion of Arctic sea ice greater than 4 years old—a key indicator of sea ice’s resilience—dropped to less than 5% and has never recovered. After dipping to an all-time low in 2012, 7 of the 10 years with the lowest minimum sea ice extent have occurred since. The absence of ice can devastate communities that rely on such ice for food, transportation, and their way of life.  On a global scale, disappearing Arctic ice can also contribute to the severe cold snaps and extreme weather we’ve experienced over the last decade.”

More than sea ice has been disappearing from the Arctic this decade. In her work on carbon and boreal forests, our Kendall Fellow, Carly Phillips, has been watching other accelerating changes.

“Arctic permafrost is continuing to thaw and fail at alarming rates. As permafrost thaws, anciently stored carbon can be released to the atmosphere as greenhouse gases, and that, of course, further amplifies warming.  Indeed, while the 2011 Arctic Report Card observed ‘A major uncertainty is whether continued Arctic warming and permafrost thawing could cause these high latitude ecosystems to become a net source of CO2,’ the 2019 Report Card warned that  ‘Thawing permafrost throughout the Arctic could be releasing an estimated 300-600 million tons of net carbon per year to the atmosphere.’”

Polar bear on an ice floe in Alaska’s Beaufort Sea. Their plight has only worsened this decade.

2012: Hurricane Sandy’s wake-up call

Astrid Caldas, Senior Climate Scientist, recalls when Hurricane Sandy rained destruction, scarred communities, and shaped the climate perception of millions of people from “meh” to “this is dead serious.”

“October 29, 2012. It was unreal. Katrina was certainly in my mind as the powerful “superstorm” Sandy blew across the populous, developed Northeast U.S., blowing minds in its wake. I was fortunate to be out of its reach, but I couldn’t unglue my eyes from the TV. Nobody in the storm’s path had seen anything like it. The images and on-the-ground devastation brought home the realization of what storms could be like in a warming world, of the new, true risks of coastal living, and certainly of the seriousness of climate change (yes,  Sandy was made worse by it). Thankfully, Sandy spurred important initiatives like Rebuild by Design that urged us to think big about how to increase resilience; we tried to learn and build back stronger. But since then, warming emissions have kept rising, and Sandy—at the time the second costliest extreme weather event in U.S. history after Katrina—has been surpassed by hurricanes Harvey and Maria in 2017. As we have learned about the role of climate change in making extreme events worse (e.g. here, here, and here), and about the alarming trend in stronger hurricanes, will the US and the world do something about it? How long will coastal communities be able to keep their heads above water, if not?”

2013: CO2 reaches 400 ppm

Climate science tells its story in numbers and in that story, carbon dioxide plays a lead role. Kristina Dahl, Senior Climate Scientist, recalls how in 2013 CO2, invisible to the eye but a potent determinant of the planet’s temperature, had the numbers equivalent of a mic drop moment.

“On May 9, 2013, the concentration of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere hit 400 parts per million for the first time in at least three million years. Geologic records suggest that the last time CO2 was at this level was the Pliocene when the Earth was a very different place, e.g., with sea levels roughly 25 meters higher than today. We know from Antarctic ice cores that for the 800,000 years leading up to the Industrial Revolution, the concentration of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere never exceeded 300 parts per million (ppm). When scientists began directly measuring CO2 in 1958, its concentration had risen to 315 ppm. By 1988, when James Hansen testified before Congress that human-induced global warming was detectable and scientists called for sharp reductions in fossil fuel use, CO2 levels were at 350 ppm. Over the next 25 years, those warnings went unheeded as we marched to 400 ppm in 2013. Like Hansen’s testimony, the 400 ppm mark could have been a wake-up call to humanity. Instead, we sleepwalked to where we are today: 411 ppm.”

2014: Power to the Peoples’ Climate Movement

With climate records seeming to fall at an alarming clip by mid-decade and with no real movement on climate policy, many of us working on the issues were desperate for a shot in the arm. As Kate Cell, Manager of our Climate Campaign recalls, 2014 delivered.

“When I first started campaigning for climate action, I was frequently asked: ‘What does it take to get us in the streets?’ In 2014 the Peoples’ Climate Movement answered the question by assembling a huge coalition of climate justice activists, union workers, faith leaders, scientists and health professionals, and thousands more to advocate for climate, jobs, and justice. UCS folks joined more than 300,000 people in a September march in New York City, timed to coincide with that year’s UN Climate Summit. Three years later we were one hundred days into the Trump administration’s anti-climate, anti-justice, anti-science agenda and it was time to march again. This time UCS didn’t just walk. I was privileged to serve on the steering committee that planned the April 2017 mobilization and to organize the attendance of more than 1000 UCS supporters, some of whom also participated in a legislative day to demand action from Capitol Hill. During the march itself, we led the science and health section. I was exhilarated that UCS helped gather 200,000 people in the capital. To all who asked: we’re in the streets now and there’s no turning us back.”

New York City, Sunday, Sept. 21, 2014.

2015: The Paris Agreement

In 2015, we watched in horror as Syrians and other refugees fled crises that, we learned, were exacerbated by climate change. But in a dramatic and hopeful development, the year closed on an historic high note in Paris. No one (perhaps literally) knows these highs and lows better than 28-year veteran of the international climate negotiations and UCS’s Director of Strategy and Policy, Alden Meyer.

“On December 14, 2015, the Paris Agreement was adopted, setting a goal of ‘holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels,’ and requiring countries to put forward self-determined emissions limitation pledges. These initial pledges collectively fell far short of what’s needed to meet the temperature goals, so countries were asked to consider “updating” their pledges before finalizing them in 2020. This means that next year is shaping up as the moment of truth for Paris: will countries step up their ambition, or condemn current and future generations to truly devastating climate impacts?

Two days into the next climate summit, held in November 2016 in Marrakech, Morocco, Donald Trump unexpectedly won the U.S. presidential election. At a packed press conference the next morning, I told reporters Trump’s presidency would pose a threat to Paris, but also noted the growing numbers of states, cities, companies, and others making strong climate action commitments. In the days that followed, these governors, mayors, and corporate CEOs issued statements pledging to meet the U.S. Paris commitments, despite Trump’s election; they now comprise the We Are Still In coalition, which represents more than two-thirds of the U.S. economy and population.”

The Eiffel Tower illuminated during the December 2015 climate negotiations.

2016: Ecosystems and species pay a price

One of the great injustices of climate change came into clear relief this decade: that people who have contributed least to the problem–the global poor–will pay most dearly for it. Another breathtaking, far-reaching injustice, the climate-driven collapse of whole ecosystems and extinction of species, came into stark focus, too. The Deputy Director of our Climate and Energy Program, Adam Markham, describes the disaster that was unfolding for coral reefs.

“The third-ever global coral bleaching event got underway in 2015 and would play out over the next two years, eventually becoming the most significant event ever documented in geographic extent, length and severity. Warm-water reefs everywhere experienced elevated water temperatures, and by June 2017 70% of the world’s coral had been exposed to waters hot enough to cause bleaching.  The consequences for Australia’s 1,600-mile-long Great Barrier Reef, the world’s largest coral reef system, were especially severe. By June 2016, surveys showed that 93% of the corals of the northern section had been affected and that more than 20% had died. The conditions were so extreme that corals such as staghorns suffered catastrophic die-off, altering the species mix and biological structure of the reef. Coral spawning–the mechanism by which reefs can reproduce and recover–was down by nearly 90% on the Great Barrier Reef in 2016 and 2017. The future looks bleak for warm-water coral ecosystems without governments’ most ambitious emissions reductions according to both a 2017 UNESCO report and the IPCC’s 2018 report, which found that almost all living reefs will be lost if we do not keep warming below 2.0°C.”

 2017: Hurricanes’ unprecedented lashing

The 2010s reshaped our perceptions of the seasons as climate change pushed our normal seasonal cycles to palpably abnormal and destructive extremes. Before giving way to the most extensive wildfire season on record in California, at least until the next year, the 2017 hurricane season landed terribly costly blows, in lives as well as dollars, on Caribbean nations and the U.S.. With family in Puerto Rico, 2017’s hurricane season left deep impressions on Climate Vulnerability Social Scientist, Juan Declet-Barreto.

“Seventeen named storms was the balance that 2017 left us. Ten became hurricanes. Six of those were Category 3, 4, or 5, and three made landfall in the U.S. or its territories. No wonder NOAA was glad to declare at the end of November that the ‘extremely active 2017 Atlantic hurricane season finally end[ed].’  Nowhere in the western hemisphere was that felt with more ferocity, destruction, and misery than in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. After the near-miss of Hurricane Irma in early September, Puerto Ricans breathed a sigh of relief. But a few weeks later, Hurricane María battered the islands, leaving the U.S. territories without power for months and unleashing a humanitarian crisis that contributed to thousands of deaths. Meanwhile, Texas was reeling from Hurricane Harvey, which dropped rainfall that was literally off the charts, prompting NOAA to add more colors to its maps. There, environmental justice communities faced both climate change and acute toxic pollution when structures that house toxic chemicals collapsed due to the rain, exposing residents to toxic emissions.  As the decade closes, I wonder about the abysmal difference between the sort of recovery the U.S. Caribbean requires, and what it got: a despondent and bungled federal effort, exemplified by the indecorous spectacle of the President throwing paper towel rolls at victims; plans to continue burning fossil fuels and even bring untested nuclear technologies to the energy grid, instead of a transition to renewables. Still, I am hopeful that Puerto Ricans, wherever they may live, will continue to demand an equitable recovery for our island.”

And while all communities hit by extremes wish to be safer, this decade, some began taking aim at those that bear some responsible, as Kathryn Mulvey, Fossil Energy Accountability Campaign Manager, recounts. “Communities across the US began to file lawsuits seeking to hold fossil fuel producers accountable for the mounting costs of climate damages and preparedness. With a majority of Americans thinking that fossil fuel companies should pay for climate damages, these cases are informed by attribution science that quantifies the contributions of particular fossil fuel companies to global average temperature increase, sea level rise, and ocean acidification.” Something to watch closely.

Hurricane Irma, flanked by Tropical Storm Katia (left) and Hurricane Jose (right) on September 8, one of several punishing storm weeks in 2017.

2018: Science pulls no punches

Climate scientists can feel like they’re howling into the abyss, but things shifted in 2018. This latest year to see a rash of devastating wildfires, hurricanes and other extremes in the U.S. also saw a heightened awareness of and concern for climate change, as Senior Climate Scientist, Rachel Licker recounts.

“Two major climate science reports came out in 2018 that seemed to pack a one-two punch in the public’s imagination, quickly giving rise to the terms ‘climate crisis’ and ‘climate emergency.’ First came the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s report on Global Warming of 1.5°C. The report made clear that there are dramatic differences for life on Earth between 1.5° and 2°C warming, let alone anything higher (which is where we’re headed). The report also made clear that we don’t have a lot of time: to limit warming to 1.5°C, we need to make deep cuts to our emissions in the next decade and achieve net zero emissions by midcentury. Shortly after, and while deadly wildfires roiled California, the Trump Administration released the full Fourth National Climate Assessment (NCA4) on Black Friday in an attempt to bury the report. The strategy backfired, with the report appearing on the cover of major media outlets. NCA4 put a price tag on climate change for the US in a way that wasn’t possible before and underscored how the most vulnerable among us are likely to be most affected. Previous reports seemed to go unheard by many. Something was different this time around.”

2019: People power, climate justice

Rattled by the weight of 2018’s climate science, and with a newfound awareness of the price we are paying for decades of inaction, people around the world rose up by the millions in 2019 to demand a crisis-level response to climate change. Rachel Cleetus, Policy Director for UCS’s Climate and Energy Program, who has seen this unfold in her role as an ally to activists, a mother of climate strikers, and herself a protester in the streets, reflects on the surging energy of youth and indigenous movements, the hope and courage they inspire, and their implicit call that hangs in the air: join us, it’s your fight too.

“2019 was the year we saw climate protests and strikes take off around the world in record numbers, inspiring us at a time when climate impacts are already so dire and hope so desperately needed. Everyone knows the inimitable Greta Thunberg. Alongside her are many climate justice advocates leading indigenous peoples’ movements and youth movements worldwide. They are fighting with a moral clarity that is impossible to deny.  Hilda Nakabuye from Uganda was galvanized to action after realizing that climate change was affecting her grandmother’s ability to grow food crops. At COP25 in Madrid she spoke powerfully: ‘I have come to think that the climate crisis is another form of environmental racism and apartheid.’  Indigenous activists like Nemonte Nenquimo, Emergildo Criollo, Sandro Piaguaje, and Taita Pablo Maniguaje, who are part of the Amazon Frontlines movement, are fighting for the future of the Amazon often at great peril to their lives. Chief Raoni Metuktire of the indigenous Brazilian Kayapó people writes: ‘We, the peoples of the Amazon, are full of fear. Soon you will be too.’ Perhaps some amazing young people in your lives are part of the global strikes for climate justice, putting pressure on political leaders to respond to the climate emergency now. Adults, please support them. Together, we are gaining strength and we will not be denied.

‘El pueblo unido jamás será vencido…The people united will never be defeated!’”

In Madrid, a young activist rallies the crowd at the climate strike on 6 December 2019. Though activist efforts to influence the Madrid climate talks were unsuccessful, these efforts are only growing.

Photo: earthtoeyes

Whether you think about the problem a little or a lot, climate change requires us to hold two opposing beliefs in our minds at once, which is the definition of cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, that our most important job is raising these people up right. And on the other, that the world in which they’re supposed to be good people and live good lives is becoming inhospitable to the acts. It’s like thinking “I hope you settle down someday and raise a family yourself”. And then “someplace safe from the flood, fire, drought, deadly heat, and other growing threats of climate change. So, nowhere I can think of.”

If you spend a lot of time in that state of cognitive dissonance, you know it’s not just bewildering, it’ll break your heart. But hold those two things we must because we’re their parents and it’s a fact: the future ain’t what it used to be.

On most days spent as a parent we focus on the mundane but necessary features that make up a family’s life: clean bodies, cooked meals, finished homework, folded laundry. Assuming we’re lucky enough not to live under the strain of poverty, we give these things and our 9-to-5 jobs nearly all our energy. We do this because, the story goes, they move the enterprise of our families and the people in them forward. Devotion to our day-to-day industry is supposed to help ensure our children’s safety, expand their choices, and secure their future. It’s not a formula that all in America can believe in, given racism and other enduring inequities, but it’s a formula most of us sign up for, believing or not.

But either you know or I have to break it to you (and in either case, I wish we were doing this over coffee or a beer): because of climate change, no amount of your day-to-day hard work and preparation can do that. You can no longer give them a secure future because the whole future is at risk.

Today, we’ve warmed the planet 1 degree Celsius over pre-industrial levels, and with just this modest warming, each year brings new unprecedented hurricanes, floods, heat waves and wildfires. Young people, from recent high school graduates on down, have only known a world of record-breaking temperatures. Kindergarteners starting school this month have lived in the five hottest years on record. And with this warmth, the world’s sensitive systems from the poles to the equator (you know, the really wondrous ones) have suffered. E.g., during two of those years, warm water killed half the coral of the Great Barrier Reef.

We could surpass a global temperature increase of 1.5 degrees C in just the next 5 years, which would accelerate harm like shrinking water supplies and strained crop production. And scientists expect an increase of 2 degrees C, which today looks hard to avoid in our kids’ lifetime, would be accompanied by devastating changes, upheaval, displacement, and loss: a world transformed.

A world no child should inherit.

Youth climate strikers. Photo: Laura Campbell

But on our watch and with our participation, we parents and grandparents, the future got broken like a hundred-generations-old family heirloom that we disregarded and dropped. As that meme tells us, “You had one job.” And that’s the thing about being a parent in the climate era. We still have to fulfill the day-to-day compact of raising good people to live good lives. But we have to face it: presently, the legacy we’re going to leave all children is a dangerous, damaged future. Emissions reached an all-time high last year and are continuing to rise, critical policies like our federal Clean Power Plan are being repealed, the US intends to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement, the list goes on.  If we don’t get it together right now to do this one all-important job and work for a safer, more stable future, then the rest of our labors won’t count for much in the long run to the good people we raised.

It’s a raw deal. When they deserved to be children with uncomplicated hope for the future, they were instead made stewards of a 21^st century all but sacked by natives of the 20^th. When they needed us to act to safeguard their future, they got complacency and deepening injustice, an irrational devotion to business-as-usual, and a winding down of the climate clock while they were still learning to tell time. If they’re not yet furious with us, they will be.

For many adults, we feel busy, stressed, and overworked. The status quo and its emissions are just comfortable enough, to date, and in that comfort, some of us don’t perceive and others of us ignore what a rapidly growing threat the status quo is. Polling will tell you that a large majority of Americans think climate change is real and caused by human activities. But to date, there are never enough bodies, voices, or votes in the climate fight to make the difference. As Swedish youth activist, Greta Thunberg, warned us earlier this year, “I want you to act like the house is on fire, because it is”. Many adults, it seems, understand that something’s burning, we’re just not getting that it’s the whole damn house and everything that matters is in it.

Not so, our kids. Separate polls released this week show how deep their concern runs, and how seriously they are taking the science. But it also shows how resolved they feel, and how very many of them – one in four teens according to one poll – have taken some action, including joining a school walkout. Someone has to make the difference while older generations are MIA.

Our kids have stepped up in huge numbers to become the vanguard in the climate fight. And they’ve been using the limited tools at their disposal – their bodies, their absence from school, their gathering in numbers – to disrupt and demand attention through the school climate strikes. With business-as-usual eating their future, and without money or power, what else can they do?

Fair question, asked by student strikers at the March 2019 strike, Columbus Circle, NYC. Photo: Pamela Drew

On September 20^th, they are aiming for the biggest global strike yet. There are over 4,500 strikes planned in over 150 countries – 958 strikes here in the U.S. alone at last count. But this time they are asking us to join them. And many thousands of adults will do so, including members of major labor unions, employees of companies large and small, and now a growing coalition of employees from 8 big tech companies including Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter (hopefully Apple by Friday).

If it’s not a fully “mainstream” view, that it’s necessary to miss a day of school or work to help shift the balance in the climate fight, it’s clearly a widely held view. More than a hundred companies are supporting the strike, the NYC public schools have given its 1.1 million students a green light to strike, and more than 600 doctors and medical professionals have signed a “medical excuse note” to help justify student absences. And it will inevitably become a mainstream one. As extreme weather events get even more frequent and devastating, and even more people are harmed, then it will be mainstream. And some people will wait until then to act, landing on the wrong side of history and the future.

Don’t wait.

My whole letter comes down to this: as parents, it’s our fight, too.

If the young people in your life want to strike, will you support them?

And if you can take the day or a few hours to strike yourself, will you join them?

Please do. Read this post for a round up of what adults need to know about the strike. Accompany your younger children to a strike near you. Let your older teen strikers know that you have their back. (Tell them you’ll be the one with the “One Mad Dad!” sign; you can probably do better.) Be an ally. Not for nothing, your kids will know that, while anyone could see this threat coming, you got it and you stepped up and you did it for them.

And, look, we can do this. It’s possible to steer the world in a different direction. It will be hard. And it requires us to make some “heroic assumptions,” what scientists call it when we assume the stars align and best-case scenarios prevail. But there is uncertainty in all directions. Just as the frightening things could be worse than we know, breakthroughs and game-changers are out there, too, societal, technical, and political. Take these young and determined people. No one was counting on them, but there they will be on Friday, all around the world. A glorious game changer.

When we, on my team, try to hold the two things in our minds it once — the climate odds and the people we love — and we acknowledge the heroic assumptions required to make it all go well, my friend Kate will say: “then I’m going to assume heroes”.

She means you, too.

TOMORROW, Friday, September 20, a rare moment will take place in the long and bruising climate fight: a youth-led, global demonstration of power, solidarity, and determination—and if history is any guide, real beauty, too. On this day, in thousands of locations around the world, young people—perhaps millions—will strike against a status quo of complacency, inaction, and injustice on climate change, and join voices to demand a livable future. Here are some exciting updates on how the strike is shaping up:

• There are over 1000 events planned across the United States alone!! This is not just big city thing. This is not just a coastal thing. This is wall-to-wall America. Check out the map below.
• There are over 4500 events happening in 142 countries worldwide. Find one near you!
• In the U.S., NYC has given the green light for its 1.1 million students to join the strike and teacher organizations are encouraging their members to support student strikers.
• LOTS of adults are planning to turn out, including trade unions representing hundreds of millions of people.
• Organizers count more than 1000 companies as strike supporters. A partial list is here.
• A coalition of tech workers from some of the biggest tech companies (Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, and more; though so far, not Apple) are walking out.
• There are 5000 websites participating in the digital climate strike so far.
• More than 700 medical professionals have signed this “doctor’s note” for striking students.

That’s a lot of strikes. Find one near you in the U.S. and around the world. Credit: https://strikewithus.org/

Wow, right? But as the strikes begin with students walking out of school in protest, some confusion, wariness, even skepticism on the part of adults is still common and understandable, but can hopefully be addressed and dispelled so we can make the most of this important moment.

Here are some things you need to know to about the strike, including why this moment is so vital, and how you can show your support as an ally to youth around the globe and right here at home.

Young activists at the March 2019 Youth Climate Strike in Santa Rosa, CA. Photo: Fabrice Florin.

What is the climate strike?

Just as striking workers gather to demonstrate their power and express their demands, like safer conditions and fair pay, students will walk out of school on September 20 to gather and voice their demands for urgent action and climate justice for all.

Credit: David Solnit

This strike is youth-led, with the 16-year old Swedish climate activist and original climate striker, Greta Thunberg, among its leaders. It is global, with more than 2500 events currently planned in 117 countries, and a large and growing number (511 and counting!) here in the US. It precedes the UN Climate Action Summit in New York City on Monday the 23rd and kicks off a week of climate actions and events planned around the world.

And it is meant for all: in a departure from the student strikes of the past year-plus, which have grown increasingly large and garnered increasing media attention, the youth organizers are not just welcoming but urging adults to participate side-by-side with them.

Why a strike?

Unlike a march or rally, a strike disrupts the business-as-usual workings of the day, thereby directly engaging those disrupted (e.g., employers, customers, supply chains) and gaining much broader attention. In the global climate movement, high points to date have included, here in the US, the People’s Climate March in New York City, 2014, and in Washington DC, 2017, where roughly 311,000 and 200,000 people turned out, respectively, in those cities alone. These events served to demonstrate the size of the movement and, as any participant can tell you, boost the morale and sense of solidarity of its members. But disruption was not the goal of these events.

That changes on September 20, because we are clearly at a moment in the climate fight when business-as-usual needs disruption, including those that strikes can provide.

Under business-as-usual, emissions from the burning of fossil fuels and forests have led us to a dangerous place. But for many adults, it’s been a comfortable ride so far; many in the US can’t easily reconcile the seeming security of their status quo with the existential dangers it’s bringing and profound injustice it’s deepening through climate change.

Business-as-usual is marching us toward an era of unrelenting climate strife, so if adhering to it is now a kind of lunacy, then disrupting it is vital. The world needs a loved one to grab and shake it and shout “what are you doing?” And, sadly, who better than its children? How better than with their global strike?

Why should we support it?

A 12-year old girl (my daughter) at the 2014 Climate March in NYC. Photo: Erika Spanger-Siegfried

When I was around Greta’s age, climate change was already in the news and on my mind. But unlike today, we had time then to arrest the problem, bend the upward curve our emissions were on, and avert really dangerous changes and impacts. And unlike Greta and today’s young climate activists, I had great confidence that we would do it. Anything else would be insane, disastrous, unthinkable. But here we are, several decades later.

We’ve already warmed the planet 1 degree Celsius. Young people, from recent high school graduates on down, have only known a world of record-breaking temperatures. Kindergarteners starting school this month have lived in the five hottest years on record. And with just this modest warming, each year brings new unprecedented catastrophes: hurricanes and cyclones, inland and coastal flooding, droughts, wildfires, and heat waves.

Today the problem is spinning rapidly, soon to be out of our control. Unlike the less-complicated hope and optimism I was fortunate to grow up with, today’s young people can’t hope to simply stop climate change. They must hope for things like slowing its rate of acceleration and learning to live with its consequences. Many are, sadly but rationally, growing up with fear and dread for the future. Also rationally, they have little confidence that our leaders will, on their own, do what’s needed to contain the crisis. Who can blame them? Emissions reached an all-time high last year and are continuing rise, critical policies like the US Clean Power Plan are being repealed, the US intends to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement, the list goes on.

The world is still busily becoming a more fractured, exhausted, unjust, and now feverish place. Young people know we’re going to hand them a mess beyond fixing unless we start working harder and faster at fixes today. But they lack power to make those decisions. The youth climate movement is their collective voice. The strike is their moment to make the world listen. And they’re asking adults to help them be heard.

My colleagues and I recently analyzed the changing spread and frequency of deadly heat. It was a sobering piece of work and deeply troubling to many on our team. We found, by mid- and late-century, a quadrupling and an eight-fold increase, respectively, in days of deadly heat in the US, and the alarming spread of days so hot they defy calculation with the National Weather Service heat-index formula.

In wrestling with how to communicate these  results, we concluded that there’s no excuse for holding back anymore. The time for reticence has passed and it’s time to take risks, speak up, fight hard.  We concluded that report this way: Our future […] is not a future the children of the 21st century would choose for themselves. The rest of us chose for them. We now face another choice: to protect what we can of that future and ensure it is recognizable and safe for today’s children and youth as they live out their lives. Or to let us all, but especially them, face the gravest consequences of the course we have set. The people who will inhabit and steward this rapidly changing century deserve our hardest, most ambitious work today to hold the line and defend the future.

In fact, it is those people who are already trying to hold the line and defend their own future through these strikes. They deserve so much better. At the very least, they deserve our support and solidarity on September 20. And frankly, they deserve those of us who can to join them in the streets.

Two boys at the 2017 People’s Climate March in Washington DC. (My son on the left.) The green sign reads: Climate Warrior in the Making. Photo: Erika Spanger-Siegfried

UPDATED: How can we help?

If we can, we should strike on September 20.

Find a strike near you, take a few hours, show up. Not only will you be showing up for the younger generations and playing a direct role in the climate fight, you’ll be helping to represent the millions of adults concerned about climate change, many of whom can’t afford to miss a day’s wages, can’t take a day off without risking their jobs, can’t get to a strike, or can’t physically participate. You don’t necessarily need to take the entire day, but if you can attend a strike event in person, do it.

Most importantly, the youth strike organizers are asking all supporters to do the following TODAY (this is a a copy and paste from their shareable doc here):

1. Go dark on social media! Update your profile pictures to the black circle attached.
2. Make and post a #StrikeWithMe sign if you haven’t already done so.
3. If you’re attending a strike on Friday, learn how to submit photos and video to us, plus sign up to be part of our nationwide live-stream.
4. Send any pre-strike content you’d like to be featured in our live-stream to content@strikewithus.org, such as photos and videos of you preparing to strike, your art builds, making signs, etc. by 5 pm Thursday 9/19.
5. Post to Twitter/Instragram/Facebook: TOMORROW, young people and adults are coming together all over the U.S. and world to call on government officials to take immediate climate action. Visit StrikeWithUs.org to find a #ClimateStrike near you! #StrikeWithUs

And there’s more:

• If you’re a member of an NGO, faith institution, business, union, community group, or other organization, sign on as a strike supporter here. And if you haven’t yet informed your members of the strike, now’s the time! You can encourage people to join a strike in the U.S. here and outside the U.S. here.
• Does your organization, business, etc. have a website? If so, join the digital climate strike! Check it out.
• Grab and distribute some of the beautiful strike artwork on paper, stickers, posters, social media or some other creative way you might have up your sleeve.
• Speaking of creative, take a page out of this person’s book and advertise the strike in a prominent spot. A little chalk, e.g., goes a long way in grabbing attention and helping to build the buzz.
• Make your sign tonight! Here is some inspiration from the November strike last year and others here.
• On the day, take photographs and share them on social media.
• And remember, adults didn’t create the climate strike. Young people are the hosts, we’re invited guests, and we should act accordingly and follow their lead.

If you can’t leave work tomorrow, I’m sorry, we’ll miss you, but there are other ways you can take part and lend your support.

• Participate in one of the many activities during Climate Week.
• Support the young activists in your life as they join a strike or organize one of their own.
• Try doing some of these things from the job.
• Donate to the cause.
• Talk about the climate crisis: with your family, friends, neighbors, and coworkers.
• Amplify the strike in your circles and on social media in the lead up; the organizers have created lots of resources for you to use.
• Write a letter to the editor after the fact.

From the signs and art, speeches and singing, and the spirit and passion of those on strike, I expect that the day the youth climate movement is building will be something to behold. As happens when strangers gather in an act of peaceful protest, it will be a gift of solidarity that strikers give each other to energize and sustain for the fights ahead. And it can also be that shoulder-shaking gift, given by millions of strikers, to a world that so badly needs it.

There are few moments of truly great potential in this grueling, bruising, too-often-losing climate fight. This is one of them. We need it. By stepping up, you can help make it so.

Photo: maisa_nyc

Kristina Dahl co-authored this report. She is a senior climate scientist for the Climate & Energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Extreme heat and humidity are forecast to smother much of the lower 48 states this weekend, Friday through Sunday. Depending on where you are in the US, it may have already arrived.

In the coming days, DC is expected to feel as hot as Death Valley; Philadelphia has declared a full-blown heat-health emergency; and temperatures up to 20ºF above normal for this time of year are likely to break all-time records across the country. With nighttime temperatures expected to hover around 80ºF, many places will have little hope of relief until the weather pattern breaks.

Staying safe in the face of this brutal heat will mean having to adjust our daily lives and our approach to the outdoors for a few days. But this heat wave is also like the ghost of summer future: it’s giving us an opportunity to pause, reflect on the new climate reality that we have created, and ask ourselves if the path we’re on leads to a future we want to live in.

As the temperature rises this weekend, here are three things we can do to ensure our safety now – and in the decades ahead:

1. Plan wisely – including changing or scrapping your plans

It’s peak summer and lots of people have plans for the weekend, whether for work or play. Depending on the heat index forecast for where you are, you may need to change those plans. Developed by the National Weather Service (NWS), the heat index is “what the temperature feels like to the human body when relative humidity is combined with the air temperature.” And the heat index is going to be through the roof.

• If you plan to be active: think twice. If your weekend involves working outdoors, playing sports, or exerting yourself in some other way, you could be at significant risk of heat illness. This is especially true for more northern parts of the country where people are less acclimated to the heat. (My two teen daughters have farm jobs and this week when the heat index (HI) rose well into the 90s here in Massachusetts, they both came home with heat exhaustion.) Many people who are scheduled to work outdoors this weekend will not have the option of doing otherwise. But employers and employees who can reschedule work should do so, and where this isn’t possible, they should be on the lookout for heat illness (see figure below) and take care to follow worker safety guidelines that include regular water breaks and access to shade. Download this workplace heat safety app developed by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to get tailored safety reminders for the specific, real-time heat risk at your location.
• If you plan to be in the sun: don’t. Many events scheduled for this weekend will be canceled or postponed because of the health risks. But if you’re planning to attend an outdoor event (think not just sports events, concerts, fairs and festivals, but also outings to public parks and pools, beaches and backyard gatherings), you may want to reconsider. The heat index gives you an idea of what it will feel like in the shade. But if you are in the direct sun, you could feel as much as 15 degrees hotter than the heat index forecast. And sunburn can also exacerbate heat stress.
• If your plans include small children or elderly adults: proceed with great care. The heat index is forecast to top 100ºF in many places, which can be dangerous for anyone, but is especially dangerous for these people. E.g., kids often don’t read their bodies’ signals to rest and re-hydrate and elderly skin is less effective at sweating.
• If you’re in the city: plan on it being hotter, including at night, because of the Urban Heat Island effect. The man-made material of the urban landscape (e.g., concrete, asphalt) absorbs excess heat on hot days and releases it at night, making city days and nights hotter than less urbanized areas. And on that note…
• If you have plans at night: it will still be hot. One notable aspect of this heat wave is the failure of the nighttime low temperatures to drop low enough to provide relief. As Rich Giudice, executive director of Chicago’s Office of Emergency Management, warns “Even after the sun goes down, the temperatures will not drop much below 80 degrees, offering little to no relief.”
  

  Residents of New York’s Lower East Side neighborhood escape the heat in one of the city’s designated cooling centers in New York, Saturday, July 24, 2010. More than 190,000 New Yorkers have visited cooling centers since the summer’s first heat wave on June 28, the city said in a statement. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

2. Treat extreme heat like it’s deadly (it is)

Heat is one of the top weather-related causes of death in the US, with an average of more than 600 deaths per year. To stay safe, it’s important to treat heat as the dangerous threat it is and stay informed and vigilant. For general guidelines, there are lots of resources to draw on, from the CDC, NWS, and others. And for location specific guidance, listen to your local weather forecaster, check your town website or call. Across the country, our phones are ringing with automated messages from emergency managers and other local officials. Listen and take note.

• Locate the cooling resources you need: In a heatwave, you’ll need to drink more water than you think, so have it handy at all times. You’ll need shade, so stay indoors or carry an umbrella if you need to step out. And you’ll need access to cool temperatures. If you don’t have air conditioning at home or ready access to it, know where the nearest cooling center is and have a plan for how to get there. Calling 211 can help you locate the one nearest you. Some municipalities are providing transportation to the local cooling center. Calling one’s town government, including a police station, can also help track down this information.
• Know what to do if the power goes out: heat waves drive up electricity use as demand for air conditioning spikes. High temperatures and increased electricity use can strain the power grid, and indeed, there are risks of power outages this weekend. If this happens and your AC goes down, you’ll need to get to the closest cooling center with backup power.  Many cooling centers are municipal buildings with generators for backup power, but not all are equipped, so you should confirm before making the trip.
• Offer help: Your neighbors may not have access to AC, or people to check in on them. If you are able-bodied, be that person. The deadly 1995 Chicago heat wave became a profound tragedy with many elderly lives lost due simply to their isolation: no one stopped in to check on them and to help with their mounting heat stress. We can also watch out for strangers. My colleague, Dr. Adrienne Hollis, has been tweeting about the need to carry and hand out water during this extreme heat. Watch out for people on the street, people on the job, homeless people. Consider printing and handing out copies of this at-a-glance heat illness guide. [A link to the attached pdf] A deadly heat wave is a crisis and we need to watch out for each other.

3. Don’t let dangerous heat become everyday heat

Nobody is going to enjoy this heat wave. While most of us will simply bear the heat, many people are going to be sickened by it, and it’s likely it will cost others their lives. The heat wave has already claimed two lives in Maryland and one in Arkansas. These are not sultry days of summer; they’re dangerous, even deadly days.

Our latest work, Killer Heat, was undertaken so we could all see the threat of many more such days coming. And they are coming by the dozens, even hundreds, in our lifetimes. Unless we slow them.

Consider how meteorologists’ descriptions of what we’re facing right now compare with the frequency and extent of equivalent conditions by midcentury if our global carbon emissions continue to rise:

• “More than 150 million people in nearly 30 states were under a heat watch, warning or advisory on Thursday morning…” —CNN
  • Per the National Weather Service’s general national guidance that suggests issuing a heat advisory when the heat index exceeds 100ºF, by midcentury more than 150 million people across the US would be under a heat advisory for 30 or more days per year.
• “Over the next few days, more than 85 percent of the lower 48’s population will see temperatures above 90ºF…” —CNN
  • By midcentury, more than 85 percent of the lower 48’s population would see a heat index above 90ºF for 30 or more days per year.
• “A total of 290 million [people] will see high temperatures of at least 90 degrees at some point in the next week…” –USA Today, based on a tweet by meteorologist Ryan Maue
  • By midcentury, roughly this many people would see a heat index of at least 90ºF for 30 or more days per year.
• “Heat wave expected to bake two-thirds of nation through weekend.” —NBC
  • More than two-thirds of the nation by population—roughly 220 million people—would be exposed each year to the equivalent of a week or more with a heat index above 105ºF by midcentury.
• “Metro Detroit is looking at about a 109-degree heat index value [for Friday].” –Detroit Free Press
  • By midcentury, Detroit would see six days with a heat index above 105ºF in an average year.
• In New York City, “the heat index…is forecast to reach close to 107 degrees Saturday.” –NBC News
  • By midcentury, New York City would see eight days with a heat index above 105ºF in an average year.

By mid-century (2036-2070) regions of the United States with little to no extreme heat in an average year would experience such heat on a regular basis. Heat conditions across the Southeast and Southern Great Plains regions are projected to become increasingly oppressive, with off-the-charts heat days happening an average of once or more annually.

So this weekend, try stepping outside for a minute when the heat index tops 100 or 105 and ask: what would my world be like if it felt like this more than 30 days each year?

If we let global emissions continue to rise through the end of the century, the forecast for an average summer would be unrecognizable to people sweating through the summer’s heat. 180 million people facing more than a months’ worth of days with a heat index exceeding 105ºF. 120 million people exposed to more than 7 days’ worth of heat each year that actually exceeds the NWS heat index chart, feeling hotter than 127ºF, but how hot we can’t say because they’re literally off the charts. You get the idea.

Killer Heat shows that even in an optimistic scenario in which we cap future warming at 2ºC, the US is in store for substantially more heat than we’re used to. So we need to adjust to this reality. Read our report for details on solutions. But if fail to reduce emissions and let the world blow past that important 2ºC mark (3.6ºF), we’ll look back on heat waves like this weekend’s three sweltering days, even with all the dangers they bring, as child’s play.

Six-year-olds Justin Mosquera, left, and Luke Taylor, relaxing in a stream of water from a fire hydrant near the Boys and Girls Club in Bowling Green, Ky. July 21, 2011

A climate scientist and dear friend told me back in 2008 that she had moved into a “post-hope” stage of her life. She wasn’t despondent, more matter-of-fact, as she left her job here at UCS for a 6-month “breather” in Antarctica. I didn’t understand her at the time; what comes after hope? A few months later, though, through my work analyzing climate impacts and following climate science, I had my first paralyzing run-in with climate grief and since then have gone a few times round the grief cycle. And today, we have the latest science and most recent abdications of leadership underscoring how dire things are. I understand better now.

But I think she misunderstood hope.

I don’t have some hopeful gospel to preach to you; I’m not even going to encourage you to be hopeful. But since my teens, through my work and personal passions, I’ve been wandering a path from climate awareness to climate anxiety to climate anguish and I couldn’t help but learn something about the true nature of hope after all these years of running it over with a bus. That knowledge – not optimism or determination, or any virtue on my part – has become my superpower over climate despair. In recent years, in fact, I’ve realized that I’m just immune to it; it lands but can’t stick. You may be the same, though you might describe it differently or not even know it yet.

You’re not wrong

You’re not wrong: it’s bad. There’s this great, intricate weaving – the one we’re all walking around on – and someone’s been snipping intermittent threads that attach it to the loom. Things are starting to unravel in obvious, abrupt patches, sending us scrambling. Other changes are coming through gradual but widespread loosening of strands. We race about hastily tying threads back together, but we’re not as good as the weaver. The patterns are starting to become disorderly. How many more strands can be cut before they’re unrecognizable? And why haven’t we taken away the scissors?

But who needs metaphors when we have science. As 2018 wound down, science walloped us. The IPCC 1.5 degree report, the U.S. National Climate Assessment, and other scientific works were released with stark assertions about the things that are all but lost, the things we can fight for if we bring our strongest ambitions to bear, and the waning gap between such ambitions and where we are headed. We saw the UNFCCC Conference of the Parties (COP) come and go in Poland with progress made, but vastly insufficient to the long-term goals.

If you’re a realist, and you’re absorbing these things and where it’s all pointing us, you’re apt to feel some despair. Aldo Leopold wrote that if you study ecology, the price you pay is to walk through a world of wounds. But wounds are for healing. Today, if you follow the changing climate, you walk through a world of ghosts – creatures and places and, today, even people whose claim and foothold in the future is now fatally undermined. Coral reefs are fading before our eyes, an Arctic food web is fading with the summer sea ice, and delta and island homes are fading into the sea.

At some point in our climate awareness many of us begin to grieve (and maybe to rage or panic; more than once, I’ve had this momentary visceral urge: how do I get off this ride?) And the grief we feel cycles between the poles of acute anguish and resignation, but it never really lifts. Many of us, understandably, have felt our hope grow thin. At some point, we lose a climate fight we really needed to win and we feel hope tear. And at another point, we reach for its comfort and we don’t feel it at all. It’s gone, sublimated like vapor from ancient Antarctic ice. We might think the despair we feel has taken its place.

But here’s the thing: it’s not that easy to lose hope.

The true and gritty nature of hope

When people think of hope, personified, it’s usually a butterfly, or a dove, or a sapling sprouting from the ground. Yes, and. That’s not the hope we’re talking about. Bring it along, but it’s not the kind of hope we’ll be using so much where we’re going.

In Finland, there’s a word, “sisu”, which gets crudely translated as determination, grit, and courage. The Finnish side of my family liked to celebrate it. But it’s meant to be more; something like extraordinary resoluteness and perseverance in the face of extreme adversity. The Finns also have an epic poem, The Kalevala, handed down in the oral tradition for over a thousand years, and finally captured on paper in the 1800s. Like most myths, it is pretty nutty, but myths endure for a reason and I found one in the story of Lemminkäinen’s mother, a nameless woman who, for me, defines sisu and redefines hope. Let me tell you the short version:

The brazen young hero, Lemminkäinen, is murdered for his womanizing, and his body is utterly destroyed, blasted into tiny pieces and cast into the black river Tuona that courses through the underworld. All his mother knows is that her beloved boy is missing so she searches the world over to find him, every difficult mile in vain. Finally, she asks the sun and it gives her the terrible, heart-shattering news. Okay, she says. I’m going to need a rake. Make me one, she tells her friend the blacksmith, and she descends into the darkness and begins to seek her boy anew. She rakes the river Tuona for untold days, in her wet shift in the cold rushing blackness, all the way to the ocean. Nothing. So, she turns and begins raking her way back upstream. And somewhere in the blending black days and weeks she finds…. a piece of his shirt. So, on she rakes. And she finds a bone, eventually a rib, finally a hip. On she rakes, maybe not even thinking enough to despair. Just striving to save her boy. Because if she thinks she possibly can, then how can she possibly stop?

Eventually, she finds all of him. And she begins to sew him back together. Every bit of sinew attached to every bone, every patch of flesh rejoined, every eyelash made right in her inconceivable toil. Finally, he is complete. And with a drop of honey to his lips, Lemminkäinen stirs and comes to life. His mother has fought long and hard and far, far beyond all limits of what we think of as hope. Her hope is no butterfly. It’s more like the monarch’s miraculous migration and the green-fuse force of life that drives it.

Painting by Akseli Gallen-Kallela, depicting a scene from Kalevala, the Finnish epic poem. Here, Lemminkäinen’s mother has retrieved and restored his body.

In English we say “hope springs eternal”. In Russian it’s “hope dies last”. In The Kalevala, it’s what sends the woman back into the black river. They’re different vantage points on the same human impulse: if you love something, you hope. You move. You keep. You rake. You don’t even get to decide.

However poorly we tend it, however fragile we think it, this hope thing will not – really, cannot – quit. We might feel anguish, but despair just won’t stick because it’s not over. Maybe it’s an evolutionary impulse to save our own skin and our loved ones’; to quote a friend “hope is a discipline for survival”. But I’ll call it love. I’m not sure they’re different. And therein lies hope’s unstoppable power: if you love – anything – you hope.

And sisu, that untranslatable term – to me it’s how that unstoppable power shows itself. It’s both a question for dark times: what wouldn’t you do for what you love? And its own answer: nothing.

The fight we didn’t sign up for

It’s no longer the same fight we signed up for however many years ago. But you knew that. And we’re not bearing the same hope we started with. For many of us, our hope had to relinquish and shapeshift and detach from the objects of its desire. And instead hew only, but closely, to its driving spark. Our hope had to mutate and evolve. We don’t necessarily hope for this, or for that. Our hope doesn’t even say I’m going to have to hope for the best. Now it just says I’m going to have to fight like hell.

I struggle to neither over- nor understate the fight. History is pocked with the terrible things humans have survived in body and spirit, and we are the most fortunate generations ever to live. Lots of bodies are in the way of climate harm, but rarely ours, and today the fight itself isn’t one we fight with our bodies. Today, the only thing we need to ask of ourselves is, whether it’s defeating the fossil fuel industry, winning pro-climate elections, defending climate science, or getting out in the streets in demonstration, that we’re still in. I think we’ve got that.

Aurora borealis over Finland.

At the same time, no generations have ever had to question and concede the future quite like this. (That kids and young people just starting their lives are now tuning in to all of this and being told “it’s up to you to fix it” is the thing that very nearly breaks me. Like hell it is. Many of us would stay in the black river forever if it kept them on the banks.) And we’ve never had to fight quite like this, against an enemy that both opposes us and is us, over and over, and without clear hope of winning. There’s no simple “winning” when so much is lost. Not gone, but condemned.

But look: it’s still beautiful, isn’t it. I’ll fight for that.

You, my weary friend

Lemminkäinen’s mother doesn’t even have a name in her story and I like to think that’s because she and her actions are elemental to all of us: each of us working to add our small piece to the whole, many of us weary of all this but cloaked in our miraculous hope, where despair can touch us but it can’t hold us for long, because we love and therefore we hope. And because this fight is far from over. It starts new each day.

The fight we signed up for is now the fight for what’s left and the people who get left with it. That’s all, really. But it’s also everything. And you, my weary friend, will never stop.

UCS banner in a US airport.

What happens when half-frozen seawater suddenly floods onto roadways? Can something the consistency of a milkshake and 3 feet deep be plowed? There’s a large dumpster floating down the street… What depth of water is sufficient to do that? What happens if some of this water freezes in place before it retreats (as I write this, the temps have plummeted to 12 degrees F and dropping)? Will those cars now filled with seawater in the snow-emergency parking lot run again? What if the water freezes inside them over the weekend, can that punch out doors?

The stories are countless. In Salem, MA, my mother watched out her window as fire and rescue workers hauled someone to safety on a raft through at times waist-deep water.

A rescue underway on normally busy route 107 behind my parents’ house in Salem. (Note the “flood zone” sign and mentally add exclamation points.) Credit: Fred Biebesheimer.

My colleagues and I think about coastal flooding a lot, but the footage from yesterday had our brains buzzing with new unknowns and threats never considered.

I’ve been keeping an eye on social media, the news, and hearing from friends and family, and these three questions emerged for me as needing to be asked and answered.

Why was this flooding so much worse than forecast?

In the lead up to yesterday’s storm, dubbed “Grayson” by the Weather Channel, the coastal flooding forecasts shifted from minor to moderate, from moderate to major. Coastal residents monitoring  this would have been concerned but not nearly enough. Even as the storm was getting underway, the flooding forecasts greatly understated what actually played out on the ground.

In the end, severe flooding struck multiple areas of the coast of Massachusetts from the North Shore to the Cape, with chest-high water in some locations, emergency boat rescues, and damage that we’re just beginning to take stock of. People were caught off guard, greatly increasing the risk to public safety and the damage to property.  For example, below is a shot of the Gloucester High School parking lot where residents are instructed to park their cars in a snow emergency. Ouch.

Look closely! These are cars submerged in record coastal flooding in #Gloucester Massachusetts! People were asked to get their cars off the streets and park at the local high school. Then the football field turned into a lake! @fox5dc pic.twitter.com/e6d8mdoSwe

— Sue Palka DC (@suepalkafox5dc) January 5, 2018

Why didn’t we see this coming?

The reasons given by local meteorologists for the surprising severity are the astronomical high tide (Monday was a full moon) that coincided with the storm’s path, and strong onshore winds creating significant storm surge and damaging waves. The tide itself is no mystery and our ability to forecast storm surge is pretty good. The wind speeds and snowfall totals were mostly as forecast. So where was the gap between our forecasting methods and tools and this storm’s true coastal flood potential? And how do we close it? Have asked the National Weather Service Boston Office, and can report back.

Was this flooding made worse by climate change?

Boston’s Mayor Marty Walsh declared “If anyone wants to question global warming, just see where the flood zones are. Some of those zones did not flood 30 years ago.” And he did so while the storm was still lashing the city. The days of tiptoeing around this question are clearly over.

So, what can and can’t be said here on sound scientific footing? Like any storm, there were a lot of factors responsible for yesterday’s: wind speed and direction, and the resulting storm surge and wave height. And there are two ways that climate change plays a role in the impact of storms like this.

On the one hand, it can influence a storm itself – causing it to form faster, become stronger, etc., so that when it strikes, it has greater potential for doing damage. Tracing this to climate change is harder to do, but the science is catching up. As climate scientist and colleague, Rachel Licker, pointed out this week “According to the American Meteorological Society’s new report, science is now not only able to detect a climate change signal in individual extreme events, science is now able to determine whether climate change caused by humans was essential in the development of an extreme event. In other words, science is now at the point where it is able to tell us whether certain extreme events would or would not have happened without climate change.”

We don’t know the day after, however. Such research takes time. But I expect we’ll hear more about the detection of climate change fingerprints on this storm in the months to come. See my colleague Brenda Ekwurzel’s blog for more on this specific topic.

The other way climate change plays a role in the impact of storms is clear and can be discussed more definitively today: today’s storms have higher water levels to “work with” due to sea level rise. In Boston, water levels have risen ~5 inches just since the blizzard of ’78. (This upward trend is also responsible for the increased tidal flooding along Boston’s waterfront.) So ANY storm that hits our coasts today is working with water that is higher and closer to our cities, buildings, homes, and infrastructure, than when we first put them there.

It was interesting to note that the tide height associated with this storm topped the Blizzard of ‘78 by hundredths of an inch. In its defense, the Blizzard of 78 was working with an ocean that was 5 inches “shorter”. If that exact storm happened today, the flooding would be worse than it was in 1978 given this additional water. And importantly, the damages would likely be worse as well, given the additional people, property, and stuff we’ve put along our coasts since that time.

But speaking of comparisons. We released an analysis in 2017 that identified areas along the entire US coast that would flood on a chronic basis, just with normal tidal fluctuations. By 2060, the general area of Boston that flooded yesterday would flood at least 26 times per year, irrespective of storms or rainfall, with a high rate of sea level rise. (Add storms and rainfall and the frequency rises.) That’s about 45 years from now, well within the lifetime of the buildings and infrastructure we’ve built and continue to build in these areas. With a more moderate rate of sea level increase, it would flood chronically a couple of decades later.

Boston’s storm-flooded area becomes it’s tidally-flooded area later this century.

This sunny-day flooding—the kind seen today at places like Long Wharf during extreme high tides—wouldn’t have the destructive waves of yesterday’s storm. It would, however, put large areas under inches and potentially feet of sea water, it would be unaffected by the construction of major harbor storm barrier, and it would preclude business-as-usual along some of the busiest and highest-value parts of Boston’s waterfront. Go to this link to view your own coastal community.

Importantly, our analysis also shows that a lower rate of sea level rise, associated with adherence to the Paris Climate Agreement, could greatly reduce this flooding.

What are some responsible takeaways?

We’ll be taking stock of this storm for some time to come.

Boston, a city with a strong and growing commitment to coastal climate preparedness and resilience, an unsurpassed local expert community, and uniquely engaged business and philanthropic sectors, can emerge as an even stronger national leader in the wake of this storm.

Massachusetts, with its growing if patchy commitment to the same, can recognize its mounting exposure to coastal flooding and get much more serious on this front. Republican MA Governor Charlie Baker’s Executive Order on state government adaptation efforts shows that sensible, bipartisan action is possible. Passage of the bill to establish a comprehensive adaptation management action plan (CAMP) would codify this Order and represent a serious commitment toward tackling our climate risks.

The important takeaway for Boston, Gloucester, Scituate, Barnstable, Salem, and on down the line—as well as for places in other states that dodged this bullet, this time—is not simply how do we prepare for storms like this. It’s how do we prepare for a future —and to a certain extent, a present—where storms have the potential to be more destructive, and where no storm is needed for transformative flooding to occur. In Massachusetts, we can do that, and the sooner we start, the less costly and disruptive it will be.

My kids’ favorite playground during the storm. Credit: Caroline Maloney.

We had a bad feeling about 2017 from start. When the year turned and a Donald Trump administration took control, we were deeply uneasy. We felt like the storybook orphan who meets their new sketchy stepmother or distant-uncle-turned-guardian: okay, this is bad. But surely not as bad as it looks…

Oh, innocent January 2017 selves! No, kids. It was way, way worse.

Now we see 2017 for the sleazy, shambolic dumpster fire in the 10th circle of hell that it is. Just my take – I know others take a truly dim view of the past year.

We started the year full of fight — and we’re still fighting, make no mistake. But man, the hits kept coming. Facts were devalued, lies were legitimized, shame went AWOL. It’s not that our resolve to resist has weakened. It’s just that, after a point, all the outrages shot from a firehose started to blend together. Resist… which?

We became convinced that the president woke up on Monday demanding a list of the most destabilizing, divisive, and ideally, rude things he could do on the national and global stage that week, and then set about tweeting them into reality from bed. There were some weeks you could only laugh. What?!! He shrunk our national monuments, upended decades of Middle East diplomacy, and formally endorsed accused child molester Roy Moore? Someone get an XL Havahart trap with a diet Coke to the West Wing, STAT. By the holidays, he’ll be skeet-shooting puppies. With Congress reloading.

So, in a matter of days, it’ll be 2018, at last… Then what? Is there reason to think we’ll be more effective fighting back? Is there reason to think we haven’t hit rock bottom, when it has gathered such a bottomless quality?  I’m not sure about the last one – things may get worse in some ways before they get better. But I would say hell, yes to the first. You can already see signs of it, thank you Alabama. More on that in 2018.

But before we do any of that, some rest and rejuvenation is in order. Some celebration, even. I hear (from my kids every waking moment) there are holidays happening. I hope, whatever you do, you get to start the new year feeling refreshed.

My family does a little solstice celebration each year where we go to the edge of the woods at dusk as the longest night gathers. It’s a nod to the darkness – okay, you rule the world right now. But as we light small, defiant candles, it’s also a way of standing with the light. Of welcoming it back. Of believing in what lies ahead and being hopeful.

We hold these candles and we talk about what we’re grateful for from the closing year, and what we’re hopeful for in the coming year. Last solstice, we were scared, but we hoped lots of people would stand together and stop bad things from happening. This solstice, I’m grateful for the millions and millions of people who have fought so hard this year — for truth, justice, decency, our shared and deepest values. We’re wounded but wiser and, actually, we’ve just begun to fight. So this solstice, I’m hopeful once again for the future of this country as together we bring back the light.

Step 1: Rejoice! Step 2: Revive. Step 3: Resist.  And, as needed, Repeat a year from now.

Happy New Year, all!