Please remember, as I first heard friend of Coyote Gulch Laurna Kaatz say, “Climate Change is water change.” Right now there may or may not be elections this fall, and the results may or may not be heeded, but if elections do occur, please vote for candidates that are serious about the Climate Crisis.
Click the link to read the article on the Technosphere Earth website (James Dyke). Here’s an excerpt:
August 7, 2026
As I write, vast regions of Europe are on fire as heatwave after heatwave pummels the continent. The UK has just experienced its driest July ever. Not a drop of rain has fallen in London for over a month. The situation is so bad that even the otherwise reliably climate-denying Telegraph has published articles that say climate change is real and humans are to blame. Previously, sea level rise inundating small island nations and crop failures in sub-Saharan Africa would barely merit a shrug from this right wing publication. Perhaps seeing Bordeaux’s vineyards go up in smoke was for them the moment when climate change got real. Pray mercy for Merlot, and think of the Chablis – something must be done!
Namely, the rapid phase out fossil fuels, while also making herculean efforts to adapt societies to the hotter and more dangerous world we are entering. This adaptation needs to go well beyond sea walls and AC. I am becoming increasingly concerned that what we regard as tipping points may actually be fracture points; the point at which key institutions and systems break from intense and cumulative stress. It’s this failure of social systems that concerns me just as much as Earth system collapse. They have the potential to amplify initial climate shocks via negative social tipping points. At systemic levels this has the potential to lead to what we call derailment risks – efforts to stop future heating are degraded because of lack of institutional capacity given increasing social, political, and economic disruption. Derailment risks are one of the reasons I am so baffled as to how proponents of solar geoengineering can blithely claim that future societies will be able to continue to operate planetary-scale cooling operations for centuries – but more on that in the future.
I am more than baffled at what some sections of the climate science community have been doing in the midst of this crisis. Over the past few years we have seen the quite astonishing spectacle of this community tying itself up in knots trying to decide what constitutes a worst case scenario when it comes to future heating…
You often hear: another world is possible. Well I am here telling you that another world is inevitable. We either decide to stop burning fossil fuels or the Earth system will stop us. We are well beyond incremental, so-called policy relevant pathways. Think wartime mobilisation, and the command of entire economies. None of the climate scenarios capture this. They are all constrained by what politicians would find palatable, which ultimately is whatever maintains economic growth. This means it is still very much business as usual when it comes to our reckless meddling with the Earth’s climate.
