Climate Collapse & The Absence of Normal

I don't know if you've looked outside lately, or on your phone, or the TV, but things are bad. If what you happen to be looking at isn't on fire, it's probably flooding. If it's neither of those, it's probably a data center, and that data center is baking under a heat dome.

I'm not going to make this a laundry list of things that are currently awful on Planet Earth. France was baked by a heatwave, is on fire, and what isn't on fire is–as in the joke above–flooded. Spain is thoroughly on fire. Saying there was flooding in China is a bit silly–it's a big country–but there was severe flooding. Another heat dome has descended over the United States, and I feel like I can still smell the benzene and formaldehyde of the Canadian wildfires.

While I am going to talk about a few things in more detail, what I really want to say with this letter is something I've hinted at before; this is it, folks. This is life. It's not that this is the new normal–there is no such thing as normal, anymore. Climate change is not just global warming and weather getting worse–it is the injection of instability into everything, and that instability increasing exponentially. We might fall back into a brief "good old days" of 2025, but that is likely to be from the influence of a La Niña, quite temporary, and accompanied by the kind of polar vortices we saw last year. Again; there is no normal, and I think more importantly there will be fewer and fewer days during which you might catch your breath. If it's not hot, it's cold, if it's not raining, there's a drought, and maybe things are on fire. If you get lucky and get a middle-of-the-road, under-wet-bulb temperature kind of day, the sky is apocalypse orange from a wildfire the next state over.

For Example

I wouldn't even say that 2026 in Ohio has been all that awful; we had jarring shifts in temperature earlier in the year, but is has nevertheless been one thing after the other. We had a hot prelude to spring, then a cool and wet proper spring, and a hot early summer. This hampered farmers and gardeners, delaying planting considerably. I lost around two weeks of the season to this, though I would expect to get it back in October thanks to El Niño heat–but that's not for certain.

Heat followed that hampered spring immediately, and that was difficult to garden through–I'm sure there were farmers and gardeners across the region that had to hold off or work at night to do so safely, and plant thirst of course was high during that time. Imagine being in one of the numerous (most) states that are under drought conditions right now, just to add another thorn to the year, and you've got low water, stressed plants, and a stressed farmer–who, you'll recall, probably couldn't afford all the fertilizer or fuel they needed for the growing season to begin with thanks to Trump's war on Iran.

About as quickly as we were done with the heat, the smoke came. Next it will be the bone weevils, then the fire and blood rain, then Jesus with a sword for a tongue. You get my drift. Feeding the planet is hard work generally speaking, and constant struggles with weather makes it harder. I type this from the comfort of an air conditioned office; you might be a roofer, bless you, and you know that work doesn't need any help from a 450 AQI.

Now imagine facing all this in a shitty tent while under Israeli bombardment. The heat that has threatened Europe all summer is descending on Gaza, where it is humid and most every structure in the region has been destroyed by the IOF. The only shelter are tents that seal in heat and humidity, making them unusable. This is the sort of heat, mind, that kills people. Israel has created an environment in which this is assured–that is, of course, the goal. And remember, we pay for this. We pay for their bombs, their bullets, the aftercare their soldiers receive after gunning down families looking for food. Remember that this is a genocide, and that the world is permitting it.

A Few Specific Bad Things

Life is hard and getting harder, is what I'm saying. And the only change in that is going to be the speed with which it gets harder. That speed is getting sped by specific mechanisms that we're familiar, but there are a couple in particular with unnerving developments.

The Thwaites Glacier is about to lose its ice shelf–a buttressing, massive, floating ice wall that holds the glacier proper from flowing slowly into the sea. We knew this was coming, but recent measurements point to this happening in 2026. Losing the ice shelf is not quite so dramatic as saying that the dam has collapsed, but it's not far off from that; Thwaites is roughly the size of Florida, so saying a dam has collapsed but a body of ice the size of Florida is slowly flowing into the ocean is not all that comforting. The collapse of Thwaites–not it's ice shelf, nor its complete melt–would add two feet to sea level across the globe, flooding coastal cities. A complete disintegration of the glacier raises sea levels by a gobsmacking ten feet.

This glut of freshwater, of course, doesn't just raise sea levels. It also disrupts the ocean currents that circulate around the globe, currents which provide some semblance of thermo-equilibrium and currents upon which ocean ecosystems profoundly rely. The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC to its friends, is one of these currents and frequent guest of the letter. AMOC is weakening thanks to climate change, and the fallout of its collapse cannot be overstated. As the planet heats up, the loss of AMOC will dramatically shift monsoon seasons for the hottest regions of the planet, likely threatening hundreds of thousands–if not millions–of lives through hunger. The Super El Niño may create a one-off catastrophe that is among the worst we've ever seen, but the collapse of AMOC is, effectively, forever.

We're entering an era which strains the definition of preparedness–can one actively attempting to keep their home from catching fire be said to be preparing by hitting their house with a garden hose as flames lap at the eaves?–but we have got to do what we can while there is still some semblance of the world as we know it. Build traction now, talk to people now, learn every damn skill you can now, because tomorrow your life might be upended entirely. You've seen the quote by now:

"Climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer to where you live until you're the one recording."