How Many More Summers Like This Is It Going To Take?

We Need a Series of Revolutions. So Far, What We’ve Got Is…the Opposite.

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There’s a question that keeps racing through my mind these days. But before I get to it…let me paint a portrait for you of why I ask.

This is the summer climate change got frighteningly real — incredibly fast. Have you seen the pictures of floods around the globe, from America to Asia? It’s hard to remember that the orange skies over Manhattan were just…mere…weeks ago. Canada’s still burning. Ocean temperatures are off the charts — hitting the point where marine life doesn’t survive, bang, gone. Meteorologists are speaking of a heatwave without foreseeable end about to hit the south of the US…again. Heat domes? Try “death ridges.”

How many more summers like this is it going to take? How many more summers do we have?

You see, this is 2023. Over the last few years, the mega-scale impacts of climate change have been arriving. But they’ve hit here and there, maybe, leaving room for complacency, irresponsibility, negligence, and of course, “skepticism.” But now? It’s hard to dispute that climate change is here, it’s real, and it’s deadly. So think of how this summer, things just got dramatically worse. Suddenly.

Suddenly, the air in major American cities was unbreathable. Suddenly, the giant smoke plume from Canada reached across the Atlantic. Suddenly, ocean temperatures leapt off the charts, heat domes lingered, and ice caps began to do incredibly strange things — this summer, the Antarctic (where it it’s winter)…hasn’t recovered its ice, for the first time, here, have a look at the chart. Suddenly, scientists began to worry that all this signaled that tipping points were being hit, or were on the verge of being hit.

Our lives began to change this summer. But the strange thing is that…nothing changed. Politically, eocnomically, socially. I’ll come back to that in a moment — first, let me keep sketching the portrait.

We now should know — viscerally, by having experienced it — what scientists and models know and have tried to teach us. Climate is a nonlinear system, meaning that things can change just like that, in dramatic ways. So if climate change was this bad this summer — visible in everything from megafires to floods to unbreathable air to scorching heat — how bad does it keep getting? The trend now isn’t some kind of gentle linear one. It’s acceleration, in a vicious and severe way.

So: how many more summers is it going to take?

Now. I’m an economist, and the picture I want to draw for you isn’t just about the planet. It’s also about…how…our human world isn’t changing fast enough, in appropriate enough ways, to really be fit for, meet, answer, this Age of Extinction that’s we’re now entering, to many people’s disbelief shock and chagrin.

What do I mean by that? Consider this…fairly incredible…headline…from what may currently be the world’s bellwether of self-inflicted ruin, beleaguered old Britain.

After years of piling on debt and sucking out profits to pay shareholders rather than improve infrastructure, Thames Water is near collapse — leaving the city 24 hours away from having its supply turned off.

Did you get that? London’s 24 hours away from having no water. LOL, is this some kind of sci-fi movie? A post-apocalyptic script for a new show? No, this is reality. It’s where we are.

So imagine what happens if…as…this piece of investigative journalism says…London runs out of water. It’s one of the world’s major cities. But the taps have suddenly…run dry. Now people have to…flee, basically. There’s an exodus at the airports, train stations, along the motorways. And even if the water’s “turned back on,” LOL — how long do you really want to risk living without water?