A Familiar Disaster

Adrienne Buller, David Wallace-Wells Issue 3 Interview Published 6 May 2026

A conversation on the state of the climate movement, the paralysis of the Democratic party and the meaning of catastrophe. This interview was recorded remotely on 11 February 2026 between Vancouver, Canada and New York City.

ADRIENNE BULLER Your book The Uninhabitable Earth was published in 2019—something of a peak for the climate movement. Since then, that momentum and energy has waned. Why do you think that is? How do you interpret the depleted energy in climate politics of the past several years?

DAVID WALLACE-WELLS I think we have to start with an acknowledgement of that failure. If you go back in time and think about where the world was just on the eve of the pandemic—and in fact, it kind of continued through the emergency phase of the pandemic, even though the protest energy dissipated at that time—we were in a real frenzy of awakening all around the world. You could also see the way that those concerns, anxieties and demands were being heard by the world’s most powerful people, who would get up on stage at places like Davos and echo the language of some relatively alarmist—even extremist—climate activists.

Much of that was of course empty rhetoric, from those powerful people, and many of us knew that at the time. But at least it was more empty rhetoric than we’d ever gotten before. And so it represented a kind of promise, even if half-hearted, which could be used to hold those people to account when they faltered.

We’re not in that situation at all anymore. We’re not in a place where those leaders are making promises. We’re not in a place where the world’s richest people even seem concerned about the climate. And we’re not even really in a place where people who do care about climate can hold them to account. One of the things that’s remarkable about this phase shift is that, according to surveys, there is as much climate concern today as there ever has been. Different countries tell the story in different ways, but across the wealthy world, there has not been a great falloff in anxiety about climate change, even as the issue has almost entirely dropped out of political discourse. It has really dropped out of the geopolitical discourse as well, such that, again, where before the pandemic it seemed to be a conventional view of the global leadership class that the management of the twenty-first century would be substantially a climate management challenge, that is simply not the way those people are speaking now. Climate advocacy is on the backfoot, too: we simply have not reconstituted the level of activism or intellectual fermentation that was present in 2019, and I’m not sure how likely it is that we’ll do so in the near future, either.

Now, that’s not to say the whole game is lost and nothing is being done to limit future global temperature rises. There is amazingly inspiring, almost eye-popping, progress happening all around the world on green energy installation. It’s not the whole story, but it is still remarkable. There’s a lot of adaptation and resilience work being done at the local level, too. But to the extent that not long ago we related to this crisis in existential, political and mythological terms—which is, I think, a fair way of describing that 2019–2020 period—there are fewer of us who are doing that in the same way today.

There are many ways of recording and measuring that decline. But the thing that concerns me most is that we seem along the way to have also lost one of the climate world’s core commitments to global solidarity: the idea that the world’s most vulnerable demand the most attention and support from those who have the most. Those who care most about these issues still think and talk and theorize and mobilize in those terms. But higher up the food chain far fewer people in power have time for those appeals.

AB What do you make of the widening gap between that stalling political momentum you describe and the fact that the transition (though we might not describe it as a real transition) to green energy continues apace—is even accelerating?

DWW There are a few different threads there to pull out, one of which is the story of the transition and how we should understand it. We are not in a Global Green New Deal moment. But we are setting new records for global green energy installation every year. Those records are routinely breaking optimistic forecasts from just a few years ago. That is happening in many places without additional policy support. That is not just remarkable, it was also not very widely predicted. At the same time, we are still at or close to peak emissions globally, which means that at least for now that remarkable progress on green energy is a story of addition rather than substitution for the polluting energy sources. Why is that happening?

People tell very different stories, but my own view is a pretty simplistic one, which is just that the energy has gotten a lot cheaper. It’s a lot cleaner. So, particularly for countries around the world who have troubles with the cost of energy and lack a domestic energy supply, renewables often represent an incredible breakthrough and an opportunity to detach oneself from dependency on some actors that can be quite malevolent. Putting aside the story of global solidarity and how threadbare it’s become over the past few years, there is a hopeful story about the Global South here, too: five or eight years ago, when climate leaders in the Global North talked about what would have been necessary to bring the Global South along for the ride on the transition, they believed that an enormous amount of subsidy and material support was necessary—that we in the rich countries of the world would have to be directly bankrolling the green transition elsewhere, and indeed pushing it in places where the domestic politics weren’t eager for that kind of transformation. And that is not the story as it’s unfolding today in much of the Global South. Across Africa, you see remarkable records being set for solar installations and solar imports. Take a country like Nepal, where three quarters of cars sold last year were EVs.

Or famously in Pakistan, you see this huge solar revolution engineered by individual citizens fed up with the unreliability of the electricity grid [who are then] making themselves secure against those failures by installing cheap Chinese solar panels on their roofs in such large numbers that the country effectively doubled its electricity capacity in a single year.

There are problems with the Pakistani path—it makes the grid itself less reliable, and there’s a kind of a downward spiral in which people are fleeing from the national system of electricity to provide for themselves. There’s something potentially ugly about those impulses, too. But at the global level, when we’re talking about the different paths being taken by high- and low-income countries, it would have been astonishing to someone five or eight years ago that many of the most remarkable and dramatic green energy success stories of the last few years have been, in fact, in the Global South.

It may or may not be a coincidence that it has happened at the same time as the Global North has become considerably less committed to international solidarity—and not just around climate change. It’s coming out of the pandemic, when I think at the individual level many felt so burdened by the need to protect one another that they effectively told themselves they were never going to take measures to protect their neighbours, or those elsewhere living elsewhere on the globe, ever again. And our politics have taken a turn in that direction, too.

Now, it’s obviously not the case that nativist populism started in 2021 when we took off our masks. But it also does seem that the wealthy countries in the world are much more comfortable speaking in terms of narrowly defined nationalistic interests than they were in the previous era, where there was a layer of at least rhetorical commitment to global commitments, global brotherhood and sisterhood and so on. This is a story, I think, that is hard to reduce to any single cause or even any bundle of causes. And perhaps that’s only natural, given that the previous framework was something like the metapolitical narrative of our time. We went from an era in which most liberals in the wealthy parts of the world believed in a system of global coordination, and even perhaps global governance, to one in which we have a haphazard, self-interested model in which nations not only compete with one another much more openly, and more people in power seem to take for granted that the individual unit is the only way to measure the health or success of a particular community or policy.

And I think this is grotesque. It’s especially grotesque that it happened as a consequence of a pandemic. The lesson I always took from climate change is that we’re all on this planet together, and we can’t expect to survive dramatic transformations by consigning some parts of the world to real terror and hoping that other parts will survive intact, or even in ways that benefit them. And in my mind, just as climate change does, the pandemic taught us very clearly that our health, wellbeing and any other measure we might take of human flourishing—none of these are stories that unfold exclusively within the body of an autonomous individual, but through complicated global networks of exchange. In the case of the pandemic, [this was] the exchange of respiratory droplets.

But we didn’t come out of that experience feeling more solidarity and mutual dependency. We came out of that experience, I think, much more individualistic, more atomized and more resistant to the idea that we owed one another anything. That’s a tragedy on multiple levels, but among them is the basic ideological calculus that it reveals, which is that many people who previously subscribed to a system of global cooperation seem to have only done so because they believed it benefited them, not because they believed they owed much to those around them.

During the pandemic we saw this remarkable rise of this term “NPC” or “non-player character”, particularly on the online right. It described precisely this attitude of literally defining the people around us as discardable extras in the video game of our lives. I hope I don’t have to underscore how ugly that is. And it seems cognitively tragic that anyone would take that set of lessons from that experience, when to me, it seems intuitive that we should be learning the opposite.

AB And it’s particularly harrowing, of course, when we think about the relationship between an accelerating climate crisis, biodiversity loss and the likelihood of pandemic-type events happening again.

DWW Absolutely. I want to underscore that we are now living in a time when the leadership class of the Global North has decided that the climate crisis is not going to be all that problematic. And that seems to me to be a sort of self-interested calculation that has to do with the pace at which we are currently moving and how difficult it would be to accelerate that pace. So rather than trying to push the ball forward faster, leadership have come to terms with the chaos that we’re unleashing, by defining it as acceptable.

Now, that doesn’t mean the world will be an everywhere burned-over wreck as a result. When we tell stories about the distant climate future, I do think we tend to underappreciate how much adaptation and resilience can be built in to make those futures more liveable—I’ve certainly underappreciated it myself. But there’s nevertheless something at the cognitive and ideological level that is quite disturbing about how quickly we are normalizing climate futures that just five or eight years ago we were defining as completely unacceptable. I find myself shouting again and again lately, you know: “there is still a climate crisis going on!” The future that terrified Greta Thunberg into action and mobilized Sunrise, and Extinction Rebellion, that moved so many Americans to push for the Green New Deal, the climate future we were promised by the most alarming IPCC reports—we are on track to meet that future. We are not avoiding it. It is still coming. We’ve just decided that it’s all OK, after all. Or decided to pretend, at least.

This is one of the sadder and stranger features of the period in which we’re living: we are seeing in front of us the kinds of disasters that freaked us out to no end when we considered them as hypothetical possibilities, mobilizing us and focusing our attention considerably less when they arrive in reality than when they were mere predictions. Here I would just emphasize the story of the LA fires last January. Coming out of Hurricane Katrina in the US, many climate people would say: “okay, this was a climate disaster that woke some people up.” But it also played into these cultural and national stereotypes and allowed people to define the problem in part as, you know, “this is an impoverished Black city that’s being hollowed out.” The degree of empathy and sympathy that many Americans extended to those victims was insufficient by any objective measure.

Yet you could also find yourself hoping in some backwards way that future disasters hitting more well-off, more prominent, whiter, people, would generate a much larger political response. We had exactly that in Los Angeles: one of the wealthiest neighbourhoods in the world’s global cultural capital, full of many famous people with careers in film and television and music and on social media, whose entire community burned down overnight. Again, five or eight years ago that would have seemed to many of us almost too perfect a climate nightmare to write into a script. And yet it happened. Dozens of people lost their lives. Thousands of homes were destroyed. And it didn’t motivate or mobilize any large-scale protest action. It didn’t reinvigorate the climate movement in the United States at the grassroots level, at the policy level or at the level of culture. To some degree, people in Los Angeles treated the story as a case study in the failure of local government. Others saw it as merely an extreme version of the fire disasters the city told themselves were familiar from its history, though this disaster was much larger and much more destructive and much deadlier. And most Americans living outside the city seem to have responded to it and processed it almost immediately as background noise—news we already know, rather than something full of portent for what might follow.

AB You’ve written about the growing divide between the US, which is increasingly turning inwards and rolling back public green energy investments, environmental regulations and institutions, and China, which is increasingly oriented outward and almost singlehandedly driving the world’s energy transition. How are you thinking about what that divide means for the future of global climate politics?

DWW One way of putting it is that the landscape of climate geopolitics can look quite a bit bleaker from within the US than it does from elsewhere. It is easy to see America engaged in an atavistic embrace of a fossil fuel-dependent economy that the rest of the world is already moving past. This is not just a story of Donald Trump, or one that starts with the election in 2024. It’s really a decade-long story, even though that decade includes a lot of good news about American climate politics as well. When the Paris Agreement was signed, it was essentially illegal for the US to export natural gas, and it was doing no oil exporting. Yet today, ten years later, we are the world’s largest exporter of both. We are also the world’s largest producer of both. In some basic way, then, the United States is the world’s leading petrostate. We of course have a more complex economy than that, and I tend to think American policy over the last couple of years is better understood not as an embrace of fossil fuels per se, but as a big bet on AI. But nevertheless, to the extent that we measure contributions to the climate crisis in fossil fuels, the US is doing more to produce and export those contributions every year than anyone in the world.

At the same level of superficiality, you can tell a story about China’s Great Green Awakening—responsible for two thirds of all renewable installations anywhere in the world, rapidly increasing that production and enjoying such a commanding share of that technology that it’s almost impossible to imagine the world keeping pace with the transition timelines that we’re on now without China.

But on both sides, the story is messier than that. In the US last year, 92.5 per cent of all new energy installed was renewable. That was a slight drop from 2024 when it was 94 per cent. But if this is a race for the future, renewables are still running away it. Even in the United States, despite all the energy that Donald Trump has put into stopping that from happening, renewables are winning. Meanwhile in China, you’re still seeing more coal plants being built than ever before. They’re running at lower capacity, and the ultimate emissions impact is unclear. But it’s still the case that China is producing by far the most emissions of any country in the world. And it’s the case that the gap between China and the United States, which is in second place, has been growing rather than shrinking. Because, while China is now perhaps at or approaching a peak, the US’s emissions have been dropping for almost 20 years now.

At the geopolitical level, the United States under Donald Trump has embraced a much more combative, destructive posture towards all the systems of global hegemony (which the United States created for its own benefit and then benefited from). It’s now trying to pull the planet back towards some half-remembered version of nineteenth-century imperial history in which the great powers get around a table and divvy up the map.

AB Effectively, “Let’s bring back the mandate system! The good old days!”

DWW Yeah! And China’s opportunistic response has been telling and, I think, on some level useful, particularly on green energy but really across infrastructure investment and other forms of power.

Now, a year ago, when Trump came into office, I would have described this as a conflict that was building towards a crescendo. I would have said we had seen a decade or more of intensifying rivalry, which had begun late in the Obama administration and continued through Trump 1.0, through Biden, and which seemed to give a much larger share of at least the American foreign policy establishment, a sense that we were in a zero-sum competition with the world’s other great power.

China was never, in my mind, operating nearly as combatively on those fronts as the US was. They obviously have some designs on greater influence, but I think were playing their hand a little more carefully. I do think that we’ve now moved into a new phase in which the China hawks in the Trump administration have been somewhat marginalized. Trump has dropped his trade war with China. He’s loosened up the restrictions against AI chips. He’s had a few climb-downs in what were supposed to be showdowns at summits with China. And it feels to me as though his foreign policy focus is elsewhere—that the foreign policy focus of the United States is elsewhere. What that means beyond the Trump horizon is a big and important question.

This is really true of American politics more generally. The truth is that the Democratic Party has been so preoccupied with Trump for more than a decade now that it seems to have no clear path forward on any front beyond excising the cancer of MAGA and instituting some modified version of what I think many liberals understand is their “natural” right to rule in a technocratic fashion. That loss of purpose is really quite profound. We were talking earlier about this comparison to 2019 in terms of the climate movement. But thinking about it in terms of US domestic politics is just as striking. In that phase, you had an enormous amount of policy activity that was animating Democratic politics. There was a lot of talk about liberalizing the border. There was enormous interest in a huge clean energy climate policy agenda, which ultimately came to pass as the Inflation Reduction Act, though Trump has torpedoed much of it since. There was an interest in building out a much larger social welfare state, raising the minimum wage and offering some form of free college, etc. I mean, there was an enormous amount of possible political change on the agenda. And even if a sceptical observer might have said, “well, probably not all of these things are going to come to pass”, at least the politicians and their staffers and the academics and researchers whose work they were drawing on had a view for what they wanted to do with power. And today? It looks like there is an almost total vacuum on this question in the liberal political establishment in America.

I think that’s true at the international level, as well. A lot of quite reasonable people have said that the final break in the world’s faith in American hegemony came under Biden with the war in Gaza, which showcased just how nakedly tribal and self-interested American foreign policy was. It revealed the sham of rhetorical pretension around American foreign policy. And, frankly, I don’t know what is likely to follow.

AB I want to reflect a bit on the theme of this issue, “Airborne”. The contributors to this issue take up that concept in very different ways, but the most obvious interpretation relates to air pollution. I think, relative to the climate crisis and carbon, air pollution is today perceived as more quotidian or even outdated, despite the unbelievable impact it has at a global level on health, wellbeing and the environment. In my experience as a climate organizer and advocate often I was told to focus on pollution instead of climate change because it was seen as somehow less polarizing or political, when in practice it is a hugely stratified, political and global issue. How do you understand the relationship between these two crises?

DWW I came relatively late in life to the climate. I grew up in a city around very urban people who were progressive, and who understood that the environment was important, but who were not in a direct or emotional way invested in its health. Even though I knew from an early age that the climate was an issue—an important issue—it also felt very distant from my own experience. When I started really worrying much more about the climate, in 2016 or so, it was because I was encountering a new generation of scientific research that suggested my sense of distance from the crisis was really an illusion, and that my life, like everyone’s on the planet, would be affected by these forces in a profound way. I didn’t come to the climate through environmentalism; I came to it through a speculative interest in the shape of the future, which had suddenly seemed to darken quite dramatically because of climate research.

That put me in a somewhat unusual position. I think most people who are really concerned with the climate do consider themselves environmentalists first and potentially foremost. I came to it in the reverse order. I went through the climate to pollution. What was so striking about that was the way that it upended so many of my own assumptions about climate change and the scale of the risk it represented. Just one example of this: when I was first writing and talking about the climate, one of the most startling data points that I would cite was about air pollution. According to research by Drew Shindell, just the gap between 1.5 and 2 degrees of warming would produce an additional 153 million premature deaths from air pollution simply due to the extra fossil fuels that would be burned to produce that level of warming. That number was so large that whenever I said it, whether speaking publicly or even in casual conversations, I would watch people’s eyes widen. It felt like a completely overwhelming number, but it also illustrated to me a few things about the relative risks [at stake] here, because 153 million lives is almost certainly more than will be lost due to the direct effects of climate change this century. You can’t rule anything out, but the best model suggests that the mortality impacts are considerably lower than that. Air pollution, then, is a much deadlier factor in determining the human future than temperature rise itself is.

And it’s already quite bad—not something in the future, but something that is already killing us quite a lot. Perhaps 10 million people a year die from air pollution, largely from the burning of fossil fuels. We are not responding to that fact. We don’t think about it as a number of deaths commensurate with the Holocaust, every year, from air pollution. We’ve treated it entirely as background noise, particularly in the Global North, where we are dealing with it a lot less than we used to.

That said, even at the global level, we are probably already past the peak problem of air pollution. So, if we are conceptualizing the future around climate change’s possible impacts and really worrying deeply about what it will mean for human flourishing, on some level it’s profoundly destabilizing to think that the pollution effects we’re already living with are much larger than those we project from climate impacts. Partly, that’s destabilizing because it suggests that we should be much more alarmed than we are about the state of pollution today. But it’s also destabilizing because it suggests that we may well experience even quite significant disruption from climate change as relatively trivial in the grand scheme of things. After all, air pollution, which kills millions each year, has not profoundly transformed our sense of our place in the world. It feels much more a part of a normal reality than something beamed in from an apocalyptic future.

AB I want to come back to the LA fires as a political flashpoint, to ask you how we might resist the tendency you identified of becoming increasingly immune to these kinds of events—events of a scale and devastation that previously would have been described as unprecedented. As you wrote in the New York Times, taking stock a year after the fires:

“[One] possibility is that climate rhetoric was always likely to cool and harden once the disasters it predicted actually arrived—prophecy burns hotter when pronounced than fulfilled.”

How should we be engaging with this tendency within ourselves? Because it seems to me this is one of our most significant challenges as a climate or environmental movement: this complacency, or numbness—however understandable—in the face of harrowing crisis events like the LA fires or any number of climate-related disasters we’ve witnessed in recent years.

DWW I would start by saying that I think there is a real-time response that runs in the opposite direction, which may also be counterproductive but is at least an expression of resistance to that fatalism. Which is that: everyone is tempted to find someone to blame. For some, that was the LA mayor or the LA fire chief. For others it was the governor. For some people, it was environmentalists who prevented landscape management. For some, the homeowners who hadn’t maintained their own yards or brought their homes up to code. Whenever there’s a disaster, there tends to be finger-pointing. Take Lahaina in Maui County, Hawaii: there was an awful lot of talk right after those fires in 2023, with different people claiming it was the result of say, the developers hogging water. I don’t mean to say that’s not true; it probably is true, but it is also blinkered to say—in the context of this climate crisis, in which we are all struggling to adapt to a much more jagged landscape—that we can identify in a discrete, punitive way the person or the group at fault for a disaster that is inevitably multi-causal and shaped by many factors.

Of course, the opposite problem is pervasive, too. In 2019, I talked to Eric Garcetti, who was mayor of LA at the time, about the fires they’d experienced the previous year and what lay ahead for the city. And he said something like “nothing we can do will ever stop this. There’s no amount of fire engines we can buy. There’s no amount of air tankers we can fly that will allow us to live comfortably in this environment. The only thing that will allow that will be when the climate, probably long after we’re gone, returns to a more stable state”. That was the mayor of Los Angeles who said this to me. And there is of course some wisdom in what he said. But the city is also going to be much less prepared for future fire if the mayor genuinely believes there is nothing to be done.

But these debates are not just a way of coping in the immediate aftermath of disaster. They are also one way we try to make sense of the transformations we are all living through. On fire, in particular, I’ve been engaged now for years in a series of conversations, sometimes heated, between those who essentially wanted to talk about the wildfire crisis as an outgrowth of climate change and those who wanted to blame forest management—the idea being that Americans had suppressed fire so successfully for so long that the whole western US was full of all this waiting fuel, ready to explode. I’d come to the position, personally, of thinking that both factors were contributing, as was a pattern of development in which homebuilding was being forced deeper and deeper into the wildland-urban interface, where homes were much more in the path of wildfire.

The LA fires were particularly eye-opening in that context, because while they may have looked on first glance like another beat in the story of American wildfire, there is also a way in which they weren’t wildfires at all. They didn’t happen in the wildland. They didn’t happen in the wildland-urban interface. They happened in an urban setting. And while they started in smallish areas of brush and scrub, there were no forests around. It was not a matter of massive conflagrations burning through thousands of acres of forest landscape left primed to burn by decades of fire suppression. These fires basically started right in or right next door to what looked to any casual observer like a man-made suburb. The predominant fuels weren’t even trees or even brush or grass. The predominant fuel was homes—so much so that if you drive down the streets of Palisades today, you’ll see that many trees actually survived the fire, because the flames went from house to house fast enough the trees were spared. Not all of them, but many.

And it was not the first fire of this kind, in recent years, but the latest in a string of harrowing fire disasters which stretch back now about a decade, and which has been called the return of the “urban firestorm”. These are the kinds of fires that London knew in the seventeenth century and America in the nineteenth, but which had basically been eradicated from the experience of the modern world since. And now they’re back. It happened in Lahaina in Maui. It happened outside of Boulder, Colorado. It happened in Santa Rosa, California. It happened, famously, in Paradise, Northern California, and in a few towns in Canada as well.

We seem to be dealing with a very different set of dynamics in which the communities are not threatened because fire encroaches upon them, but because the communities themselves are directly burning. Certainly, it’s not the case that these fires are the result of failure to cut down trees in the California forest, because they didn’t start in any forest; they started in scrubland. This seemed to me to pull us entirely into a new zone, one in which many of the stories that we were telling ourselves and arguing about just a few years ago seem, practically speaking, irrelevant.

It has also made me wonder whether the pattern of communication that I and many of us were engaged in during the late 2010s has burned out. I might have said back then: “we need to talk about the future. We need to emphasize the risks so that people are aware of them, because their own impulses towards self-delusion are so strong”. I do think that this had an effect for a time. But if we’re now living in a world in which that anxiety has dissipated, in which homeowners next door to Palisades or Altadena can brush off the risk to their own communities and continue to believe they don’t need to do anything to protect themselves, it’s an open question how meaningful any effect through alarm raising can really be.

At the same time, I worry that an alternative communication strategy, one that emphasizes the material changes that can be made at the local level, faces the same problem of distrust and diminishing solidarity that we were talking about earlier. To believe that you, as a homeowner, should take dramatic measures to remodel your home to protect against fire risk, you need to expect something similar from your neighbours.

Otherwise, your measures won’t work. And not only are we not presently working towards a future with that kind of trust, it feels to me like we’re moving in the opposite direction. Even in a place like California, which is extremely climate-conscious, and full of people who are familiar with the landscape of fire risk. But when those people are presented with a proposal that asks them to make changes in their own home, the response is almost universally resistant. The result is policies that, if they are even enacted, are considerably watered down, not especially well targeted, and often unenforced. On all sides here, we’re kind of penned in by our own political and psychological deformations.

We can hope for a turnaround, and maybe it’ll even come quite soon. You’d like to think that a major disaster inspires those close to it, in the spirit of Rebecca Solnit’s “Hope in the Dark”. What we’ve been seeing recently gives me pause about whether that’s the case.

AB That reminds me of the staggering complexity of the relationship between climate and environmental challenges—it’s never as simple a calculus as we might think. I’m thinking here of the side effects we’ve seen as a result of cutting sulphur pollutants from shipping fuels. I’ve heard it described as a mini “termination shock”,1 because the sulphur pollution had a cooling effect on temperatures by reflecting incoming sunlight. Now that’s been eliminated. But almost no one would argue, I imagine, that we shouldn’t have done it, given the immediate and substantial health and environmental benefits.

DWW The first I heard about this dynamic—the sort of unintended geoengineering features of air pollution that you describe—was from Jim Hansen. The phrase he uses is the “Faustian bargain”: that we have been cooling the planet by some meaningful amount because of air pollution. He thinks the effect is about one degree of cooling, but I think the conventional wisdom is about a half a degree. The pollution is so dire for our health that we must do something to clean it up, but if we clean it up, it produces considerable additional warming.

The truth is that a lot of these stories are imperfectly characterized as “global”. We may talk about pollution as a Faustian bargain, but the bargain is different in New York than it is in Dhaka, or across the Gangetic Plain or over the north Atlantic Ocean. And I think that’s one of the real lessons about thinking about climate and pollution and ecology through the lens of this issue’s theme, “Airborne”. It puts you in mind of the distribution of effects over time and space and the way that some things can diffuse in certain directions and concentrate in other places. For the most part, we think of climate change as effectively characterized by global temperature rise, and everything else that we project is downstream from that.

Aerosols don’t work like that; they’re not at all a globally distributed phenomenon. The effects are local—both the cooling effects and the pollution effects. That’s not to say that they’re experienced exactly where they’re produced. A few years ago I read a paper that found that the production of aerosols in Europe beginning in the post-war period basically meant that the continent didn’t heat for three decades. On the one hand, that’s a relatively local effect. But it also had this enormous effect on infant mortality outside of Europe. There were many more deaths produced by European pollution in the post-war period outside of Europe than inside of Europe. It affected the South Asian monsoon; it may have been the main cause of the Sahel Drought in the late twentieth century, which ended up killing as many as 100,000 people. The point of that is not to say that these effects were so enormous, although they were. It’s just to say there’s an important lesson in that story about how we understand local causes, distributed effects and the limits of global assessments of damage.

I think the story about where we are in the last few years is similarly illuminating, and a lesson in intellectual humility. On some level, it inspires a kind of childlike wonder to think: we can talk about this climate change system as something like a huge global factory which is producing dark clouds of carbon, cars are belching exhaust, and that stuff goes up into the atmosphere and hangs there at an incredible scale—such a scale that the carbon that we’ve produced through industrialization and put into the atmosphere weighs more than everything we’ve ever built on the surface of the Earth and all of living matter on Earth combined. We’ve produced a complete transformation of our atmosphere through this process, which teaches us that we’re all lives that are erected in fragile ways on this planet. It makes everything seem somehow ricketier, or something.

But beyond all that, there’s this fundamental piece of the puzzle, which is that scientists know very little about cloud formation. There are all these people studying and debating the effects of drawing down sulphur pollution—that “termination shock”, as you called it—in shipping lanes starting in 2020, and how it affects temperatures and cloud formation and all the rest. One of the fascinating things about that is that while those effects are concentrated over the oceans, the impact of ocean warming is not spatially limited; it has effects all around the world. We are just swimming in scientific uncertainty about what will happen when we turn the knobs of the climate in this way or that. If we fall on one side of that bar of uncertainty, we could be heading for one kind of climate story. If we fall on the other range of that uncertainty, we’ll find ourselves in a radically different world. We really don’t know.

Putting aside the human questions—which is to say, putting aside whether we’ll decarbonize, or hit net zero in 2050 or 2070 or 2090—there are these core stepping stones, which we remain remarkably ignorant about, and which will be playing a quite determining role for the entire future of the planet. That (among many others) is just one indication that whenever any of us talks about these things, we should be careful to centre our sense of uncertainty, rather than acting as though we know precisely how the future will unfold. We don’t.

The “termination shock”, often used in relation to the risks of geoengineering, describes the rapid and substantial rise in global temperatures that would follow a sudden cessation of deliberate climate intervention. ↩︎ David Wallace-Wells is a journalist at the New York Times and the author of The Uninhabitable Earth.