A very thorough article.
Change is universal.
But we are getting a clearer map of climate change, and however intimidating it looks, that new world must be made navigable — through action to limit the damage and adaptation to defend what can’t be stopped. At four degrees, the impacts of warming appeared overwhelming, but at two degrees, the impacts would not be the whole of our human fate, only the landscape on which a new future will be built.
Normalization is a form of adaptation, too, however cruel and unfortunate a form it may appear in theory or ahead of time. Indeed, already we can say a given heat wave was made 30 times more likely by climate change, or that it was a few degrees hotter than it would have been without climate change, and both would be true. We’ll be able to talk about the contributions of warming to disasters that buckle whole nations, as the recent monsoon flooding in Pakistan has, or about the human contributions to such vulnerability. And as we do today, we will often reach for the past when trying to judge the present, reckoning with how the world got where it is and who was responsible and whether the result of the fight against warming counts as progress or failure or both. History is our handiest counterfactual, however poor a standard it sets for a world that could have been much better still. “We’ve come a long way, and we’ve still got a long way to go,” says Hayhoe, the Canadian scientist, comparing the world’s progress to a long hike. “We’re halfway there. Look at the great view behind you. We actually made it up halfway, and it was a hard slog. So take a breather, pat yourself on the back, but then look up — that’s where we have to go. So let’s keep on going.”
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/202 ... world.html