The I.P.C.C.-the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change-tells us that, to limit the rise to less than two degrees, we not only need to reverse the trend of the past three decades. Some scientists and policymakers fear that we’re in danger of passing this point of no return if the global mean temperature rises by more than two degrees Celsius (maybe more, but also maybe less). Our atmosphere and oceans can absorb only so much heat before climate change, intensified by various feedback loops, spins completely out of control. Things will get very bad, but maybe not too soon, and maybe not for everyone. It will take the form of increasingly severe crises compounding chaotically until civilization begins to fray. Climate apocalypse, by contrast, is messy. Other kinds of apocalypse, whether religious or thermonuclear or asteroidal, at least have the binary neatness of dying: one moment the world is there, the next moment it’s gone forever. The planet, too, is still marvelously intact, still basically normal-seasons changing, another election year coming, new comedies on Netflix-and its impending collapse is even harder to wrap my mind around than death. Given a choice between an alarming abstraction (death) and the reassuring evidence of my senses (breakfast!), my mind prefers to focus on the latter. Despite the outrageous fact that I’ll soon be dead forever, I live in the present, not the future. Psychologically, this denial makes sense. The facts have changed, but somehow the message stays the same. Although this message was probably still true in 1988, when the science became fully clear, we’ve emitted as much atmospheric carbon in the past thirty years as we did in the previous two centuries of industrialization. Hardly a day seems to pass without my reading that it’s time to “roll up our sleeves” and “save the planet” that the problem of climate change can be “solved” if we summon the collective will. Or you can accept that disaster is coming, and begin to rethink what it means to have hope.Įven at this late date, expressions of unrealistic hope continue to abound. You can keep on hoping that catastrophe is preventable, and feel ever more frustrated or enraged by the world’s inaction. If you care about the planet, and about the people and animals who live on it, there are two ways to think about this. If you’re under thirty, you’re all but guaranteed to witness it. If you’re younger than sixty, you have a good chance of witnessing the radical destabilization of life on earth-massive crop failures, apocalyptic fires, imploding economies, epic flooding, hundreds of millions of refugees fleeing regions made uninhabitable by extreme heat or permanent drought.

Today, the scientific evidence verges on irrefutable.

The goal has been clear for thirty years, and despite earnest efforts we’ve made essentially no progress toward reaching it. The struggle to rein in global carbon emissions and keep the planet from melting down has the feel of Kafka’s fiction. I’m talking, of course, about climate change. But it seems to me, in our rapidly darkening world, that the converse of Kafka’s quip is equally true: There is no hope, except for us.

“There is infinite hope,” Kafka tells us, “only not for us.” This is a fittingly mystical epigram from a writer whose characters strive for ostensibly reachable goals and, tragically or amusingly, never manage to get any closer to them.

I am pretending that i am dead