Never Normal Again.

[ancianita]

The truth is much scarier. That is, the end of normal; normal never again. We have already exited the state of environmental conditions that allowed the human animal to evolve in the first place, in an unsure and unplanned bet on just what that animal can endure. The climate system that raised us, and raised everything we now know as human culture and civilization, is now, like a parent, dead. And the climate system we have been observing for the last several years, the one that has battered the planet again and again, is not our bleak future in preview. It would be more precise to say that it is a product of our recent climate past, already passing behind us into the dustbin of environmental nostalgia. There is no longer any such thing as a "natural disaster," but not only will things get worse; technically speaking, they have already gotten worse.

Even if, miraculously, humans immediately ceased emitting carbon, we'd still be due for some additional warming from us the stuff we've put into the air already. And of course with global emissions still increasing, we're very far from zeroing out on carbon and therefore very far from stalling climate change. The devastation we are now seeing all around us is a beyond-best-case scenario for the future of warming and all the climate disasters it will bring.

What that means is that we have not at all arrived at a new equilibrium. It is more like we've taken one step out on the plank off a pirate ship. Perhaps because of the exhausting false debate about whether climate change is "real," too many of us have developed a misleading impression that its effects are binary. But global warming not "yers" or "not," nor is it "today's weather forever" or "doomsday tomorrow." It is a function that gets worse over time as long as we continue to produce greenhouse gas. And so the experience of life in a climate transformed by human activity is not just a matter of stepping from one stable ecosystem into another somewhat worse one, no matter how degraded or destructive the transformed climate is.

The effects will grow and build as the planet continues to warm: from 1 degree to 1.5 degrees to almost certainly 2 degrees and beyond. The last few years of climate disasters may look like about as much as the planet can take. In fact, we are only just entering our brave new world, one that collapses below us as soon as we set foot for it.

From The Uninhabitable Earth. Wallace-Wells, a columnist and deputy editor of New York Magazine, wrote this best seller in response to what he saw as abstract coverage of climate change.

"I started seeing a lot of really alarming papers in 2016, the severity of which weren't being reflected in conventional writing and storytelling about climate." He predicts that alarming change could be coming as soon as the end of this century including an estimated $551 trillion in global damages ...