Post-Election, Post-COP 27, What Now?
By Ted Glick
A major article by climate writer David Wallace-Wells in the New York Times in late October, published just before the start of the United Nations COP 27 climate conference in Egypt, made the case that, in reference to efforts to solve the climate crisis and as summarized at the end of the article by Canadian atmospheric scientist Katharine Hayhoe, “We’ve come a long way, and we’ve still got a long way to go. We’re halfway there. So take a breather, pat yourself on the back, but then look up — that’s where we have to go. So let’s keep on going.”
In all honesty, this was not the viewpoint of a number of the people Wallace-Wells interviewed for this article. Others, and Wallace-Wells himself sometimes, said things like:
-“We have squandered the opportunity to limit warming to ‘safe’ levels.” (Wallace-Wells)
-“Each time you get an IPCC report, it’s still worse than you thought, even though you thought it was very bad.” (Nicholas Stern)
“The danger is that you have a world that runs on sun and wind but is still an essentially broken planet.” (Bill McKibben)
“What we are witnessing at the present level of warming is already challenging the limits of adaptation for humans.” (Fahad Saeed)
Why do Kayhoe, others quoted by Wallace-Wells and WW himself have this “glass half full” point of view?