The Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles, Jan. 9,2024. Photo: Mark Terrill
As Los Angeles burns, news comes that 2024 was the hottest year since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.
Alarmingly, humanity has surpassed the critical 1.5°C (2.7°F) warming threshold—a limit meant to stave off the worst consequences of climate change. The fallout is clear: rising seas, relentless heat waves, severe droughts, catastrophic fires, and violent storms. Currently, atmospheric CO2 levels have reached 410 parts per million—the highest in 3 million years—and continue to rise at an unprecedented pace.
At the heart of this crisis lies human-induced CO2 emissions, fueled by our continued reliance on fossil energy.
A 1.5°C rise may sound modest, but even at this level, irreversible damage has been done: collapsing ecosystems, intensifying weather extremes, emerging diseases, species extinction, and widespread social and economic turmoil.
The UN’s latest IPCC report demands urgent reflection: each additional 0.1°C of warming exacerbates extreme weather, disrupts food systems, and threatens a human population set to exceed 10 billion. Between 2010 and 2019, heat-related deaths worldwide totaled 489,000 (WMO). Factoring in climate-induced malnutrition, disease, and disasters like floods and droughts, that number swells to 4 million.
In short, neither humans nor other species evolved to survive an increasingly uninhabitable planet.
As Guardian columnist George Monbiot reminds us, “With the exception of all-out nuclear war, all the most important problems that confront us are environmental. None of our hopes, none of our dreams, none of our plans and expectations can survive the loss of a habitable planet. And there is scarcely an Earth system that is not now threatened with collapse “ (The Guardian, 28 September 2022).
–rj
Brimmings: up from the well 