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Hey Amy, I got a couple questions for you about where things stand. Here on Planet Earth.

Oh boy, this sounds easy.

You are a leading climate journalist. You stay up to speed on the science. You follow the chorus of analysts and observers who size up that science and debate what it means.

So question number one. How screwed are we? Is it too late? Just time to resign ourselves to ecological collapse and therefore the end of civilization as we know it.

No, no, no, nope, no.

So in other words, it sounds like what you're telling me is no.

Yeah, that's right. I think we really need to embrace sort of a happy medium or maybe not so much happy as gritty between what climate Twitter has deemed the dooms and the folks peddling hope.

So for a really long time, the climate movement, including climate scientists, did actually a pretty bad job of just being real with people about how dire the situation was and is.

I remember actually a few years ago when David Wallace Wells wrote the magazine piece that became his book, The Uninhabitable Earth.

A lot of folks in climate world went kind of nuts about how he was going to send folks into a panicked paralysis. He was giving them this worst case scenario and it was going to end any kind of will to live or do anything at all about climate.

And what that book presents really is the worst case scenario, warming of three or four or five or more degrees Celsius that would trigger wide scale ecosystem collapse.

What most scientists seem to be saying now is that we're on track for about two and a half degrees of warming.

Right, which is really not great. We've already lost species and we will lose more part of the reason that scientists kind of had this 1.5 degree goal for so long was to stop some of that ecosystem collapse and loss.

We're already seeing an unstable climate and it will get worse.

See, level has already risen and Miami Beach will absolutely be underwater in about 30 years. So sugar coating it for people doesn't really help.

And at the same time, encouraging folks to just sort of take their ball and go home, pat down the hatches and wait for collapse.

Well, we're not quite there yet. And frankly, that feels like a really entitled response and the response of what I would call a bad ancestor. You know, the Doomer Camp is perhaps unsurprisingly overwhelmingly white male and rich.

You don't say, but given what you've just said about the changes coming adaptation is something we do need to do, right? Yeah, for a really long time, there was this sort of debate reaching about mitigation or adaptation.

Like we need to either reduce emissions or adapt to a changing climate and a lot of people saw adaptation as a sort of giving up on emissions reductions. But I think that's kind of dumb.

You know, we obviously need to do both because the other important thing for folks to understand is that a lot of global warming is already baked in kind of no matter what we do.

Unless there's a giant breakthrough in negative emissions technology, this thing of pulling carbon out of the air, because that's just how CO2 works.

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