Prepare for a ‘Gray Swan’ Climate
Black swans are the unexpected outliers, the rare and unpredictable events that defy our usual expectations and profoundly impact our world. They are the surprises that no one sees coming, the game-changers that reshape the landscape of the possible.
of succeeding, according to a recent study based on current emissions trends, are one in 20. If by some miracle we are able to limit warming to two degrees, we will only have to negotiate the extinction of the world’s tropical reefs, sea-level rise of several meters and the abandonment of the Persian Gulf. The climate scientist James Hansen has cal
... See moreAndrew Boyd • I Want a Better Catastrophe: Navigating the Climate Crisis with Grief, Hope, and Gallows Humor
If industry prevails and we stick with a business-as-usual scenario — and pretty much all data indicates this is what we are doing — we’ll blow through our carbon budget in less than seven years.9 Global temperature rise will continue on its trajectory of 3°C10 increase or worse by the end of the century, and, in environmentalist Bill McKibben’s wo
... See moreAndrew Boyd • I Want a Better Catastrophe: Navigating the Climate Crisis with Grief, Hope, and Gallows Humor
entailed, nor any of the other five mass extinction events. The sixth one, however, is happening while I am on the scene. I am participating in it by occasionally flying back to New York maybe once a year to see my family. I’m implicated in it. I’m vulnerable to it. It affects me in a way that the previous five extinction events don’t. But from the
... See more