Vigil for a livable climate

03/30/2026

An excellent piece on the climate crisis, what it's doing to America now, and how it may play out.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2025/12/trump-climate-change-acceleration/684632/?gift=WG6fi1o5C89sVyqdUj7xRdtSoKdlpvUUEniggpDkIoo&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

Note: it's long-form, and from last December.

Many places may become uninhabitable. Many people may be on their own.

12/03/2025

!!!

It's the eighth country to run exclusively on renewables, but perhaps even more intriguing is the way it was achieved - they used agrivoltaics.

08/27/2025

Some good climate news for a pleasant change!

Clean-energy growth helped China’s CO2 emissions fall by 1% in first half of 2025, extending a declining trend that started in March 2024.

08/23/2025

Signs of the times... and of future times, too.

In El Paso, heat deaths hit record highs in 2023 and 2024. Advocates say not enough is being done to protect the region’s most vulnerable people.

07/15/2025

Climate change impacts:

In peak vacation season, many of the continent’s most desirable getaways are becoming places to get away from.

05/07/2025

A good milestone on a daunting road!

For the first time in history, fossil fuels supplied less than half of the United States' electricity generation for an entire month, marking a significant shift in the nation's energy mix.

04/23/2025

The administration in Washington doesn't want you to know this, but things are still getting worse for the biosphere:

Harmful bleaching of the world’s coral has now grown to include 84% of the ocean’s reefs in the most intense event of its kind in recorded history.

02/24/2025

Still a long way to go, but...

"This is great news and to be applauded."

10/10/2024

Not a surprise, but yet another confirmation that we shouldn't be voting for people advocating that we "Drill, baby, drill!"

Climate change fueled abnormally high temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico and worsened Hurricane Helene’s winds and rain causing ‘massive damage,’ scientists found.

10/07/2024

A thoughtful, and challenging, response to Helene and climate change, from someone who loves Asheville. I think we don't need to abandon hope, and shouldn't. But there is such a thing as false hope. Helene is a terrible event, and we'll be hearing more about that as recovery continues, and the death toll keeps rising. But it's not a "new normal"--there won't be one, until we stop actively making things worse with our continued greenhouse gas emissions.

Which is why we should pay attention when one candidate has as a central campaign promise the three simple words: "Drill, baby, drill!" And perhaps that's also why that same candidate is pushing lies and conspiracy theories about Helene response. The political gambit is obvious, but less obviously, it's also a distraction from the fact that human-induced climate change made Helene (like Katrina, Sandy and others) worse than it would otherwise have been. And from the fact that, as I said above, the trend is ongoing.

The hurricane leveled Asheville and other towns in western North Carolina. The push for optimism about our climate future rings hollow right now.

09/30/2024

Well, we're doing OK. But the lake is definitely in flood, though for the moment at least the water seems to be receding, slowly.

09/24/2024

Got asked today whether Jane Fonda was right, that voting for Kamala Harris is our only hope of "climate survival." Well, "climate survival" isn't a well-defined term, but here's what I said:

It’s hard to be sure if she is correct about that, in the sense that we may be able to survive even catastrophic levels of global warming and the other climatic changes that come with it—extreme weather, including both extreme drought and extreme rainfall events, challenges for agriculture, sea level rise and so on. We are a generalist species, and while our dependence upon the cultivation and elaborate processing of food is a weakness, we have managed to colonize almost every corner of the terrestrial globe.

However, Fonda is definitely right in that Trump’s platform is extremely dangerous. It calls for him to pull us out of the Paris Accord—again!—which would impede climate action on a global, not just a national, scale. All forms of climate action would be ended at the federal level, and if the Project 2025 agenda were to be adopted so would all climate-related research. NOAA would be broken up, with many of its functions simply ended. Very likely our abilities even to moniter climate systems would be severely degraded—again, something that would be felt on the global level.

And on top of that, Trump also has a “Drill, baby, drill!” energy policy and would do everything possible to encourage and promote the production and use of fossil fuels. Therefore, a Trump presidency would be a true nightmare for the climate.

Would humans as a species survive? Probably.

Would our civilization survive more or less intact? Maybe.

Would people die unnecessarily, life be made harder and more precarious, wealth be destroyed, and biodiversity devastated? Count on it.