Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future

by Elizabeth Kolbert

Thanks to this intervention, average global temperatures have, since Watt’s day, risen by 1.1° Celsius (2° Fahrenheit). This has led to a variety of increasingly unhappy consequences. Droughts are growing deeper, storms fiercer, heat waves deadlier. Wildfire season is getting longer and the fires more intense. The rate of sea-level rise is accelerating. A recent study in the journal Nature reported that, since the 1990s, melt off of Antarctica has increased threefold. Another recent study predicted that most atolls will, in another few decades, become uninhabitable; this includes entire nations, like the Maldives and the Marshall Islands. To paraphrase J. R. McNeill paraphrasing Marx, “Men make their own climate, but they do not make it just as they please.”