Listening to the Climate Crisis

What does climate change sound like? 

In Louisiana, it sounds like children’s frenzied footsteps running upstairs, again, to escape flooded homes and neighborhoods. It sounds like horns honking as families evacuate, again, down crammed highways and toward transient refuge. It sounds like weathermen speaking Greek – “tropical storm Beta” – having exhausted our own alphabet, again, during a hyperactive hurricane season. 

In California, it sounds like silence, because the power is off, again. Then, the horns honking. The manic meteorologists narrating impending doom. The towns and forests flooded with deafening flames. 

In Illinois, it sounds like frustrated farmers, around the dinner table again with their families, facing a bleak financial future defined by deluged fields of corn and soy. 

As COVID-19 continues to bring an uncomfortable hush to the world, the many sounds of the climate crisis are becoming more audible. Today, I wanted to bring you a few of the clearest voices on this topic who have convinced me that to elude climate catastrophe, we not only need the political will, technological innovation and economic firepower; we need storytelling that inspires action.

David Wallace-Wells on Our Climate Future

Listen to David Wallace-Wells describe our range of potential futures, and your first reaction might be despair, even hopelessness. But keep listening, and the horrifying scenarios he describes lead you to one conclusion: we have to act now.

As Wallace-Wells laid out in his book The Uninhabitable Earth, the science points toward disastrous outcomes, not long from now, if we continue down the path of greenhouse gas emissions that we began toward the end of the 20th Century. (As he mentions, more than half of all industrial emissions of CO2 since the Industrial Revolution have been released since 1988 — the year it became widely known that carbon emissions are warming the planet.)

He points to a key problem in the media’s coverage of the climate story: “No one is telling it in its cinematic dimensions, by which I mean its horrifying dimensions,” he says. In other words, we need dramatic descriptions – which avoid hyperbole – to inject urgency about the scale and speed of the crisis in a way that the layperson understands. As he explains, “this is not a slow story, it’s a really fast story.” And its ramifications run the gamut from public health to mass migration to increased war. 

On the Longform Podcast, one of my favorite weekly conversations, Wallace-Wells discussed how writers and the public at large should shift their thinking about the evolving crisis. Thanksfully, Longform enabled free downloads, so you can listen below while you read the rest of this blog.

Bill McKibben and Elizabeth Kolbert on the Pandemic and the Environment

I’ll sneak another book recommendation in: Falter by Bill McKibben. One of the godfathers of climate change journalism, McKibben wrote the seminal book The End of Nature, in 1989 – a book whose prescience continues to become clearer. In Falter, though, he describes how humans – with their unchecked emissions, treacherous new technologies and toxic ideas (including the libertarianism championed by Ayn Rand and the Koch Brothers) – have deeply altered the planet. Hence the book’s subtitle, “Has the human game begun to play itself out?” 

In this discussion for the New Yorker Radio Hour, McKibben and the eminent environmental writer Betsy Kolbert discuss the relationship between the current coronavirus pandemic and the climate crisis. Their commentary is jarring, but, at times, hopeful.

McKibben explains what he believes should be clarified in the minds of everyday people after the COVID-19 pandemic subsides: “Physical reality matters … physics and chemistry are real, and you can’t spin them and make them compromise and negotiate. If that’s true for the CO2 molecule, it’s doubly true for the COVID microbe, and it doesn’t matter how much the guy in Washington stands at his little lectern and waves his arms.”

Kolbert strikes a note of optimism that this human health crisis will emerge as a turning point in the planetary health crisis. “For everyone, like it or not, it has been this moment of reset, of realizing that we don’t need” carbon-emitting activities like air travel and car usage as much as we thought.

McKibben agrees:

“I think that we might, just might, prize each other a little bit more and that if we do, we can begin to see how, in that pleasure, we might begin to replace some of the consumption that drives every environmental challenge that we face.”

Listen to the conversation.

Ferris Jabr on How Humanity Unleashed a Flood of New Diseases

Don’t worry, you can listen to this article (thanks Audm). And you should. Though it’s only tangentially related to climate change, this piece explores how humans have shot ourselves in the collective foot by spurring the spread of new and previously undiscovered pathogens.

In the piece, Jabr looks at how the COVID-19 pandemic feasibly might have begun. He illustrates how we have made it more likely that pandemics will recur more frequently, and how the pathogens we release in the world will only get more dangerous. In this way, he lays out how our mistreatment of the animal kingdom has, and will continue to, come back to bite us. As Jabr summarizes, “Humans are not the first creatures to transform global ecosystems, but no other species has so profoundly changed the planet in so many different ways in such a short span of time.”

Read or listen to the article here.

Snarky Puppy — Flood

I’ll leave you with this – a subtle reminder of what’s coming. Whether you’re in Louisiana, California, Illinois or anywhere between, listen to Snarky Puppy while you discern the best course of action to learn more about, and take action against, the climate crisis. Don’t wait for the next Flood.