Confronting climate failure in a summer of steaming oceans and devastated villages

Humanity is faced with the greatest failure in its long existence. What can we do about it?

The Nepal glacier debris inundation arrives at the Gyirong Port on the Nepal-China border August 26. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Editor’s note: I’ve been floored by the onrushing climate disasters taking place across our rapidly heating planet this summer. It’s been the longest time between posts since I started this site, and this is one of the longer posts I’ve made, in both respects much longer than I like. But events have driven me to make a complete statement on climate, the broader context in which it is set, and what we can do now. It’s taken some time. I hope you can set aside 20 or so minutes to read it. You will find my insights on what we can do towards the end.

p.s. Due to the length of this post, it may not fully appear in everyone’s email. I urge you to open the full piece.

Oceans hottest ever - Nepalese villages inundated

On August 22, the surface of the world’s oceans averaged 70°Fahrenheit, hottest in recorded history and probably in 125,000 years.

This came in what may be the hottest summer on record. By August 5 the emerging record El Nino cooked Pacific Ocean temperatures beyond the peak reached by the monster 1997-98 El Nino. Berkeley Earth climate scientist Zeke Hausfather described the rise as “nothing short of astonishing.” This El Nino is tracking at the high end of projections with months of heating ahead, promising climate chaos around the globe.

Climate scientist James Hansen sets the context. “The ongoing El Nino is already the strongest in the modern record. However, increasing global climate anomalies, poleward shifting of climate zones, increased rainfall extremes, more rapid flash droughts and fires, and marine heat waves are a result of accelerating human-made global warming. The abnormal El Nino strength is itself likely human-driven.”

Then on August 26, a glacier and mountainside in the Langtang Valley of Nepal crashed into the river below during the area’s fourth hottest summer on record after several days of record August heat. The season’s monsoon rains were around 50% above normal, melting the glacier surface and probably infiltrating down to the bedrock lubricating the slide. It spawned a blackened torrent of water, boulders, mud and debris that thundered miles downstream shredding villages and likely killing thousands.

“It would be a hell of a coincidence if global warming wasn’t at least partially to blame,” said Berkeley Earth Chief Scientist Robert Rohde.

University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann was even more definitive. “The torrent was the direct result of warming-induced glacial collapse, which dumped millions of tons of rock, unleashing a high-velocity wave of mud and debris.”

He wrote, “The glacial collapse and deluge in Nepal and Tibet was not a freak weather event; it was the structural failure of a mountain itself, nature’s latest commentary on the deadly consequences of human-caused planetary warming. And it was the exclamation point on a summer of extremes, illustrating with a sole unnatural disaster the apocalyptic future that lies in store if we fail to take dramatic climate action.”

Buried under the muck

It’s been a hellacious summer. Wildfires and plumes of smoke swept the world under repeated heat domes and long-term droughts. They deeply cut into European agriculture while drying out rivers vital for commerce. Nuclear plants deprived of cooling water shut down in Hungary and Romania. In North America smoke from record fire seasons in Canada and Oregon choked people to the Atlantic coast. Long-term western U.S. drought drained its two largest dam reservoirs, Lakes Mead and Powell on the Colorado River, to record lows. Flooding spread across many U.S. states, as well as Germany, France, Indonesia and West Africa.

At the close of meteorological summer ending September 1, I’m boiling like the oceans with rage and disgust at how far short our climate efforts have fallen. And I feel like a Nepalese village buried under the muck, overwhelmed by the inundation of bad news. It’s been damned hard digging myself out to get at my writing table. But I’ve had to sit back and reflect on where we stand as a climate movement and a species. And work through my own emotions, which are hitting their own critical threshold. This summer pushed me over the line.

I’ve been in the climate fight for decades. I’ve worked to grow two climate groups into substantial forces. My name is on two books and dozens of papers on climate change solutions. I’ve contributed to several major solutions research efforts and helped organize tables aimed at building consensus on climate policies. I’ve locked myself to a tripod blocking an oil train with its climate-twisting cargo. I’ve been everywhere from governor’s offices to county jail holding tanks. I helped stage the first climate civil disobedience necessity defense in U.S. history for that oil train action, arguing we broke the law to avert a greater harm.

And after all that, after this summer, I recall that Ken Kesey put out a serialized novel called Spit In the Ocean, based on a variety of poker with many wild cards. I wonder if everything I’ve done amounts to spitting in the rising seas while climate chaos holds the winning wild card. I feel a deep sense of failure. Not so much personal failure or even of the movement in which I have participated since the 1990s. Staring us in the face is the greatest failure in the existence of our species and our ancestors since they walked out onto an African savannah opened by climate drying some 3 to 4 million years ago. University of Washington neurophysiologist William Calvin theorizes that abrupt climate shifts over millennia caused diebacks that sorted out our ancestors. Those with the biggest brains survived. These gave us mastery of tools and fire that enabled genus Homo to eventually dominate the planet. Now, in our greatest irony, our immense powers have set us on the road to yet another abrupt climate disruption, consumed in the fires of a rapidly heating planet.

Some years ago, I was conversing with a major environmental leader who has made phenomenal contributions to the cause of the planet. “You know,” he said, thinking about the long-term human future, “species that overshoot their habitat tend to have their numbers reduced.” I fear we are on that road. In 2025, a group of actuaries from University of Exeter published a risk-based analysis of likely heating impacts. They set out potential worst-case scenarios of 2 billion people facing early death if temperatures rise by 2° C by 2050 and 4 billion with 3°C by 2050. Among causes would be social conflict, billions forced to migrate by unbearable heat and thirst, food production collapse, and triggering of tipping points where heating feeds more heating. That number is gaining a lot of play lately because Extinction Rebellion founder Roger Hallam has started a new group, 4 Billion Dead. But depicting these numbers as predictions has come under some criticism. The report emphasizes they are only scenarios against which to measure risks. Nonetheless, when experts whose profession is to assess risk assign even an outer boundary possibility to such scenarios, it should give us pause.

Humanity’s greatest risk - Triggering climate tipping points

Humanity is increasing climate-heating gases at the fastest rate in the geological record, the whole history of the planet as far as we can understand it. The result is the most rapid heating we can detect. What took centuries now occurs in decades. The growing risk is that we will set off a cascade of tipping points that drive the climate into chaos, potentially realizing something like those Exeter scenarios. This graphic depicts them:

A master tipping point is the AMOC, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, the place in the North Atlantic where warm currents coming from the south sink to the depths, weighed down by their salt content. That opens space drawing the current north. But meltwater from a warming Greenland has been diluting the saltiness and slowing the sinking with knock-on effects reaching back into the entire oceanic circulation. A study published in April found a 90% probability the AMOC will slow 51% by 2100, putting it on a path to eventual shutdown. Impacts could extend to Antarctica and the Pacific. African and Indian monsoons could weaken. This might be happening already with slowing. Shutdown threatens to dry out Amazonia and the African Sahel. It would cool and dry Europe, elevate U.S. east coast sea levels, and pile up heat in southern latitudes.

“I have personally researched this for 35 years,” says Stefan Rahmstorf, one of the world’s leading scientific experts on the AMOC. “For the first 30 years we considered this a low likelihood event. I would have said a 5 percent chance of occurring. It’s more like 50/50 now. I would even say more likely than not.”

A recent study from Utrecht University offers perhaps the first ray of daylight in the otherwise grim picture. It showed that the AMOC could collapse at as little as 2° C heating. But if the rate of heating is slowed, the current might remain stable even at 5° C heating.

The Utrecht study brings home the most important message of this piece. Everything depends on the rate of change. Given time to adjust, the Atlantic Ocean can potentially fend off AMOC collapse even under extreme heating. This message applies across the range of climate impacts. We must slow the rate of climate heating as much as possible to avert the worst impacts. That is most important project humanity now faces. It is why, contemplating tipping points dangers some years ago, I revised my climate mission to leaving a planet with which our kids can cope.

Unfortunately, the world is still tracking at a higher rate, heating around 0.3°C per decade. We are bumping up against the 1.5°C target set by the 2015 Paris Climate Summit. A new report from the United Nations Environment Program admits we have blown the 1.5°C goal. The best we can expect is to peak at 1.8-2° C. The report holds out hope that humanity can bring temperatures back down with strong action.

“There are no good outcomes if we remain above 1.5°C. Across the globe, extreme heatwaves are already proving that climate impacts will strike faster, hit harder, and last longer, costing more lives and causing deeper disruption,” said Inger Andersen, executive director of UNEP. “Now is the time we must double down on climate action. We can and must get on the right path by cutting greenhouse gas emissions, strengthening resilience and adaptation, and ensuring exceedance of 1.5°C is as small and short as possible.”

But overshooting 1.5° escalates risks of setting off tipping points, as this graphic from the Global Tipping Points 2025 report shows. The range between 1.5-2°C is crucial. Nearing the low end danger signs are already showing. Coral reefs have already tipped over. Glacier loss from West Antarctica is increasing. The North Atlantic subpolar gyre is destabilizing for the same reasons as the AMOC and could collapse faster. Risk to mountain glaciers gained a bold underscore in Nepal. The Amazon rainforest may be tipping from carbon soaker to emitter. Earth is crossing critical thresholds beyond which dangers radically increase. That’s one reason 1.5°C was targeted in the first place.

Science Daily’s report on the Utrecht study offers a caution on overshoot strategies that might well apply to the range of tipping points. “Much of current climate policy, including the Paris Agreement, focuses on limiting the eventual peak in global temperature. Some strategies involve so-called overshoot pathways . . . The new findings suggest that the path taken toward a given temperature may matter alongside the temperature itself. The faster global warming occurs, the less time the Atlantic Ocean has to adjust, potentially increasing the vulnerability of one of the planet’s most important circulation systems.”

I know people who have made seminal contributions to the cause of the climate and the Earth who have looked at this picture and thrown up their hands in despair. But I’m not there yet. I know that every tenth of a degree could spell the difference between worst-case scenarios and more survivable outcomes. I helped bring a child into the world 30 years ago to the day I am writing this. So I have a direct investment in future generations. But even if I didn’t I could not accept even the remote possibility of billions dying if I could possibly do anything about it.

Digging ourselves out of the hole

Humanity has dug itself into a hole. The first step to dig ourselves out is - much as an alcoholic or drug addict must admit their addiction to start the recovery process - to acknowledge the depth of our civilizational failure. If generations now living are to gain redemption in the eyes of generations to come, we must confess we have missed the mark, understand why, and do everything in our power to level up, knowing we are leaving them the legacy of a damaged planet and a future wrought with uncertainty.

This is not to say no progress has been made. In the past few years, solar, wind, batteries and electric vehicles have become cost-competitive alternatives to fossil fuels. In the first half of 2025, solar and wind additions exceeded world electricity demand growth for the first time. Low-carbon technologies are a substantial reason why China, source of around 90% of climate pollution growth over the past decade, peaked in April 2024. In the first quarter of 2026 its emissions declined for the first time. Solar with battery storage has cut use of California gas peaker plants. A global climate pollution peak may be on arrival.

In terms of creating sustainable materials chains for new technologies, electric mining equipment is eliminating diesel. Recycling of batteries, solar panels and wind turbines is making mining less necessary. New battery chemistries are replacing such troublesome materials as lithium, cobalt and nickel. Renewables land use has been critiqued, often for good reason. But studies show benefits from shading farm fields with solar panels. One projected increased production capable of feeding 2.1 billion people. A Chinese study even showed benefits to some desert ecosystems. But these findings need to be taken with caution since desert solar installations can harm many species.

To see some daylight in these trends is not hopium. New technologies are a necessary part of any solution. But so far they’ve only covered a portion of energy growth. We’ve barely moved the needle on the global primary energy share supplied by fossil fuels. It stubbornly hovers above 80%. We’ve hardly begun to swear off our addiction.

Though climate pollution growth has decelerated, it was still at a record level in 2025. Forty billion more tonnes of heat-trapping carbon were dumped into the atmosphere. The bathtub is still filling. In July atmospheric CO2 hit 427.87 parts per million, an increase of 1.25 ppm in the last year, around a 50% increase since humanity began mass fossil fuel burning around 1750. (In 1989, the first year I wrote about global warming, we were already at 353 ppm, now seen as the minimum to restore climate stability.) We are crossing into unknown territory where we risk triggering tipping points. So I resonate with skeptical voices who say that we cannot bolt wind turbines, solar panels, batteries and EVs onto the existing system and expect to avert climate catastrophe. The problem is lodged in the basic programming language of the economic system with its demand for endless growth.

Digging down to the deeper roots

In exploring why are we are failing as a civilization, we have to dig down to the roots. One of the deepest critiques comes under the rather awkward heading of degrowth, the proposition that accelerating consumption is putting inordinate stress on ecosystems so we must begin to pull back. The problem is not climate alone, but as Stockholm Resilience Center puts it, exceeding the planetary boundaries defining a safe operating space for humanity. We’re rapidly rolling past them, 3 by 2009, 4 by 2015, 6 by 2023 and 7 by 2025. The following graphic shows the 2025 status.

Degrowth expresses a negative and is widely regarded as politically untenable. It is also a misnomer as it really is not about less in all regards. In return for lower rates of physical consumption, it envisions vast increases in social services, education, leisure time, community connection, and overall quality of life, all of which people desire. Jason Hickel, perhaps the world’s most prominent advocate of degrowth, often uses the more apt term ecological socialism. Yes, it’s the big bad S word, target of Cold War propaganda that continues to this day, ignoring the fact that vast parts of our economy are in fact socialist. Social Security and Medicare, publicly owned electrical and water utilities, farm subsidies, to name a few. And under the barrage of an unbridled and oligopolistic capitalism making life increasingly unaffordable, socialism is actually more favored by younger generations bearing the brunt. Even a few politicians will wear the label. So let us use the term ecological socialism to describe the positive direction we want to seek. Or at least hold it in the quiver of terms we use to describe a positive future that is in fact sustainable. A positive is so much more attractive than a negative.

Yet I wonder if we’re culturally and politically capable of achieving such ends. Can we dig ourselves out of the hole we’ve made for ourselves? Can we even comprehend the scope of what we’re confronting? I’ve used the term “we” broadly in this piece to express a general human reality. But here I must get more specific, focusing on the “we” I know best, that of the western countries, particularly my own United States. While Asia is rapidly catching up, we still hold the greatest collective responsibility for climate pollution. The U.S. alone accounts for nearly a quarter of fossil fuel CO2 emissions since 1750, while North America and Europe account for 57%.

Gallup in April put the number of U.S. of Americans who worry a great deal about global warming at 44%, a near high level. The Yale Program on Climate Communication finds somewhat higher levels, 64% who are “somewhat worried” including 29% who are “very worried.” Yet there’s a huge disconnect. People are buying more pickups and SUVs. Some car companies are ending production of sedans. House sizes are growing larger. Aviation continues to expand. We go on living and enjoying our lives as if nothing is happening, at least nothing that will affect us immediately. Mass culture seems largely about diversion and distraction. Though the popularity of superhero movies perhaps indicates we know something is amiss and are subconsciously looking for someone to save us.

Some people more aware of what’s coming down the pike seek to “ruggedize” their lives and move to safer places. “Climate refuges” such as western North Carolina inundated by Hurricane Helene. Or Duluth, Minnesota recently choked by Canadian wildfire smoke that gave it some of the worst air in the world. Or Vermont, both drowned by floods and suffocated by smokes in recent years. Some project the collapse of cities but do not seem to consider that this would create Mad Max countrysides. If you have food when people are starving you may need guns as well. And rural areas are as subject to storms, floods, droughts, and wildfires as cities. There is no safe place in a climate-disrupted world.

The problem with politics as usual

The only way to avert catastrophic scenarios is to join together in collective action and political movement. And that gets to the nub of the problem. I believe the climate movement has failed to fully comprehend the lock forces arrayed against us have on the political system. To put it bluntly, the power of corporations, especially the fossil fuel industry, and special interests invested in business as usual.

In 2014, Martin Gillens of Princeton and Benjamin Page of Northwestern University published a study of 1,779 U.S. policy issues from 1981-2002. They found “ . . . it makes very little difference what the general public thinks. The probability of policy change is nearly the same . . . whether a tiny minority or a large majority of average citizens favor a proposed policy change.”

When there is low support for a policy proposal, only one in five among the top 10% of income earners, which the authors say is a good proxy for the top 2%, it has only an 18% chance of being adopted. With support of four in five, the chance of adoption is 45%. The figures for low and high support among interest groups are similar, 16% versus 45%

Write Gillens and Page, “The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens and average citizens have little or no independent influence.”

Did we ever have a chance?

They add that their research this “provides strong support” that the U.S. system is one of economic elite domination rather than majority rule. In other words, we in the U.S. live in an oligarchy rather than a democracy. It hardly comes as a surprise, and explains a whole lot across a range of issues from health care to Gaza.

The upcoming November midterm elections and the 2028 presidential election are critically important. We need to restore some balance to the three branches of government, continually trampled by Trump and his corporate gangsters. Polls indicating a Democratic blowout stir great optimism. The Republican Party truly deserves to be bound and cast into the outer darkness for its complicity in Trump’s rampant law-breaking. As well because of the almost uniform denial of the climate crisis by Republican politicians.

But political realities underscored by Gillens and Page tell us we can’t count on a Democratic Capitol Hill and White House to fully rise to the climate crisis. Substantial Democratic congressional majorities in the first Obama term were not enough to pass a climate policy. I was up close and personal with that debacle, observing the inadequacy of the climate bill, its many gyrations, and its ultimate demise. Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act did offer substantial support for clean energy technologies (and some not so clean) but set no carbon limits and in the end only narrowly passed. It proved vulnerable to gutting by Trump. The Democratic Party has climate champions, but also many politicians sold to corporate interests. Climate hushing pushed by party consultants is another bad sign.

It’s going to take a whole lot more than Democratic victories. Minimally, I believe the climate movement should create groups based in congressional districts and states that are purely devoted to watchdogging the climate performance of individual representatives and senators, and dogging them relentlessly to support measures that meet the challenge. It should do the same for major media outlets, continually calling out where they fail to connect climate disruption to weather extremes and disasters.

Assuming 2029 will bring a Democratic congress and presidency, restoration of policies favoring renewables and EVs can be expected. But the climate trajectory virtually assures it will not be enough. It strains credulity to believe systemic change, the kind that draws us back within those planetary boundaries, will emerge from the political system as it is presently constituted. Not with the power that special interests have within it. We must think it more deeply.

The need for disruption

Here I arrive at the most difficult point. A very particular “we,” those 2% sitting at the top of the oligarchic system, are directly responsible for our civilizational failure. The broader “we” is mostly locked out. We’re being taken to planetary hell by a narrow, mostly self-interested sliver of the population and members of the professional-managerial 10% that directly serve them. Most of us go along because we feel we have no other choice. Even those of us who are aware and alarmed are largely wrapped up in day-to-day issues of survival. Something truly mass is required.

Civil resistance scholar Erica Chenoweth published an often quoted study based on 323 popular uprisings from 1900-2006. She found when at least 3.5% of a population participates in resistance they always win. Chenoweth notes such participation reflects a far broader consensus in society. That percentage might seem small. But in the U.S. it would mean 12 million people, compared to the 8-9 million who showed up for the most recent No Kings Day. Brought to my local level, it would take the sustained engagement of around 30,000 Seattleites. Even in my notably politically rambunctious city that would be a huge challenge.

Successful civil resistance entails more than showing up at one-day demonstrations. It requires campaigns that build over time, backed by organization and strategic leadership. They must include disruptive actions such as civil disobedience and general strikes. To dislodge the power of economic elites, it’s going to take disruptive action. Chenoweth notes that such mass resistance actually spurs defections among elites who don’t want to be left out.

Such a movement is going to have to extend beyond climate and other ecological challenges. It will have to connect to the conditions of people’s lives, to the increasingly difficult challenges of survival ranging from housing, food and energy costs to medical expenses. It will have to bring together a broad front of social and ecological movements, the often discussed movement of movements, with a vision for systemic change. That is where we can bring the issues of climate and planetary boundaries home in ways people can understand and connect to their daily lives. Ultimately, this movement will have to address who holds the economic levers in society, what an economy is for, and who benefits.

We can begin to shape that movement at the grassroots, in the communities where we live. That is what much of this site deals with under its theme, “Building the Future in Place.” It is meant as a response to the challenges communities will face with multiple crises coming down the pike. I wrote a two-part scenario for how a community accomplishes this beginning here. It centers on organizing to build community-based institutions in at least six areas:

• Public Banking

• Social and Community Housing

• Community Energy Cooperatives

• Sustainable Materials

• Local Food Systems

• Worker Cooperatives.

A civilization failing in so many ways is going to bring increasing ruptures and crises. We can see them piling on. Economic and financial turmoil looms. AI seems on the verge of going out of control. Nobody really can predict its impacts on jobs. Wars rage and more are threatened. The same economic elite that is steering the world toward climate catastrophe is behind these other emerging crises, and for the same reason. Self-interested pursuit of wealth and power trumping all other objectives.

In my gut I sense big breakdowns coming. A lot of other people do too. There seems to be a general foreboding about the future, and for many good reasons. In the foreground of my own awareness, triggering those climate feedbacks is the most serious and long-term threat short of a nuclear war, itself not out of the question. A system that has come to this point is bleeding credibility. That provides fertile ground for raising questions about who rules it and why, then getting to that 3.5%.

The most profound moral question humanity has ever faced

Bill Calvin theorized it was abrupt climate disruptions that drove our evolution, giving us these big brains capable of mastering the planet. The question is – Can we master ourselves? Will we plunge into catastrophes that might eventuate in collapse and dieback, realizing outcomes resembling those Exeter worst cases? Or will we slow down climate change enough to give the planet and coming generations time to catch a break and adjust to changes that are inevitably coming? Are we going to leave a world with which our children and theirs can cope?

These are political and economic questions. But above all they embody the most profound moral question in the long existence of our species. Can our next evolution be one of solidarity with our fellow human beings and the other species with whom we share this planet, rather than through the brute realities of collapse and dieback? Will we learn the most profound lesson taught by all of humanity’s great wisdom paths, that of compassion for each other and those who are to come?

All those questions are in vast uncertainty. I’ve lined out my best sense of the answers, by no means sure they will be nearly enough. But I’m not going to quit. I may be floored by events as I have been these past weeks, but I’m always going to get up and try again. There’s too much at stake. May this be encouragement for you to do the same.

Would you buy me a coffee?

“And after all this will you give me a smile?,” sung The Clash in London Calling. Or maybe would you pluck down $5 to buy The Raven a coffee, or a few fivers or buy several? Paid subscribers come and go, and to be honest I’ve lost a few lately. The most common reasons given are auto renew, which I admit can be irritating as hell but that’s how Substack works, and price. I get that. People are struggling nowadays and it’s hard to commit to a $60 annual subscription or even the $6 monthly charge. I would love it if you would and help me rebuild my subscriber base. But the coffee buying option lets you make a one-time donation for modest amounts, easier for many folks. Either way, I hugely appreciate whatever support you can throw my way. It takes a lot of work to put out articles like this, and it heartens me every time someone values it with a bit of cash. Of course, please like, restack, and share freely. I keep these posts free just so you can do that.