Dr. Doom on the Hottest Summer (So Far)
June, July, and August of this year were the hottest on record for planet Earth. This Fourth of July is reported as likely the warmest day on Earth in some 125,000 years. The second-hottest was July 3. In the United States, more than 6,500 local heat records were shattered this summer. Based on the unprecedented and relentless milestones, earlier this week, the United Nations Secretary General António Guterres declared that “climate breakdown has begun.”
Scientists have been warning about this possibility for decades. And in recent years, the mounting climate-related disasters—extreme storms, droughts, floods—have pointed toward an accelerating rush into the relative unknown of climate catastrophe.
Action as a citizen is far more powerful than action as a consumer.
But Guterres himself is not a climate scientist (though he did study physics and taught systems theory at university). So we wanted to know: What should we make of this ominous proclamation?
We called up Luke Kemp, who is a research affiliate at the Center for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge and currently a visiting faculty fellow at the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Studies.
Kemp lives in the intellectual world of the unlikely-but-calamitous. While most people are fretting over a change in storm surges along the Eastern Seaboard, he is swimming around in a not-too-distant possible future where the East Coast begins miles farther west.
The scientific community has focused attention on limiting warming to 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius above—and possibly up to 8.6 degrees—by 2100. (It’s worth noting that, save for a dip during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, global emissions are still climbing annually.) Kemp argues that scientists have done a terrible job considering and communicating what these more severe outcomes would mean for us, as a species.
