Press Poodle Lamentations

Karen Tumulty wishes us not to hold her shittiness against her.

Yes, we want plutocracy

we just had the wrong plutocrat

(pay wall)

Opinion
I’m sorry I said nice things about Glenn Youngkin

I’d like to take this opportunity to retract the nice things I said about Glenn Youngkin a few months ago.

In July, I wrote a column when reports began to surface that Virginia’s Republican governor, a fresh and sunny political newcomer with proven bipartisan appeal, was already thinking about running for president.

At the time, I expressed hope that Youngkin — or someone like him — would seek the GOP nomination in 2024. His stunning 2021 victory in blue-ish Virginia showed that there might still be room in the Republican Party for a different model of politician, one who could run as a unifying alternative to Donald Trump’s venomous brand.

Optimist that I am, I still hope that a tribune of sanity will emerge in the Republican Party. But the everydad in the fleece vest probably isn’t that guy. When a situation this week called for expressing a modicum of human decency, Youngkin — who frequently talks about his religious values — showed he could rival the former president at diving for the gutter.

As news was breaking Friday about the horrific attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul, by an intruder in their San Francisco home, Youngkin happened to be campaigning in Stafford, Va., for Yesli Vega, the Republican running in a very tight race against Democratic Rep. Abigail Spanberger.

“Speaker Pelosi’s husband, they had a break-in last night in their house, and he was assaulted. There’s no room for violence anywhere,” Youngkin said.

Alas, he didn’t stop there.

“But we’re going to send her back to be with him in California,” the governor said. As the crowd cheered, Youngkin doubled down: “That’s what we’re going to go do. That’s what we’re going to go do.”

Set aside the fact that his joke, if that’s what you can call it, showed a lack of understanding of basic civics and geography. Pelosi is in Washington because she has been elected for the past 35 years by the voters of California. This has nothing to do with anybody in Virginia.

What made Youngkin’s riff not only tasteless but also dangerous is that he was not referring to some random act of “violence anywhere.” The attack on Paul Pelosi was a direct product of the toxic political culture — a culture that the governor was helping to cultivate for what he apparently sees as a political opportunity.

Evidence now indicates that the assailant who beat Pelosi with a hammer, sending the 82-year-old to the hospital with a skull fracture and serious injuries to his arm and hands, had broken into the Pelosi home because he was looking for the speaker herself. Nancy Pelosi has been demonized for years by Republicans, including in countless GOP campaign ads. The attacker’s reported shouts of “Where is Nancy?” were a chilling echo of the Jan. 6, 2021, rioters’ cries as they tried to hunt her down in the corridors of the Capitol.

Being a jerk about Pelosi is not the only Youngkin action of late that betrays who he really is and what he is willing to do in service of his ambition. During his campaign for governor, he managed a tricky balancing act on the election denialism that has gripped his party. He promised to put “election integrity” at the top of his priorities in office — indulging the lie that fraud is rampant — but also acknowledged Joe Biden’s 2020 victory and called the Jan. 6 insurrection “a real blight on our democracy.” And, notably, he kept Trump at a distance.

But more recently, Youngkin is being seen with the worst people in his party. A little over a week ago, he stumped in Arizona for GOP gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake, one of the loudest of those 2020 deniers and someone who has refused to say whether she will accept the results of this year’s election. He called her “awesome,” and she declared him a “total rock star.”

Asked on CNN about his plans to campaign with Lake, Youngkin replied: “I think that the Republican Party has to be a party where we are not shunning people and excluding them, because we don’t agree on everything.” In other words, Youngkin thinks it’s fine to undermine democracy in the cause of lower taxes and school choice.

The governor remains popular in Virginia, with a recent poll showing his approval at 55 percent and most of his constituents saying the state is moving in the right direction. But the commonwealth limits its governors to one consecutive term, which means, come 2024, he will be looking for a new job.

Youngkin may still have some room for redemption, though it is shrinking. He could start by apologizing for his crude joke. So far, all we’ve heard is a statement from his office condemning the violence against the speaker’s husband and saying the governor “wishes him a full recovery and is keeping the Pelosi family in his prayers.” Meanwhile, his turn toward full-bore Trumpism is likely to be for naught. There are plenty of others, including the original, who do it better — and at less cost to their own integrity.

GOTV

Never forget how deeply Republicans hate our traditions of democratic self-government.

Their project is to tear it all down and replace with a corporate plutocracy.

Duty To Warn

#UNTRUTH- Mini-Film from DSI Vid on Vimeo.

Overheard - On The Pelosi Thing

Right Wing Media:

Democrat women want the right to kill their babies right after they're born. Sometimes, Democrats kill babies and drink their blood. Democrats are evil, and Nancy Pelosi is their queen.

Also Right Wing Media:

OMG, it's awful, isn't it? We have absolutely no idea why someone would do this.

(pay wall)

The San Francisco Bay area man arrested in the attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband filled a blog a week before the incident with delusional thoughts, including that an invisible fairy attacked an acquaintance and sometimes appeared to him in the form of a bird, according to online writings under his name.

David DePape, 42, also published hundreds of blog posts in recent months sharing memes in support of fringe commentators and far-right personalities. Many of the posts were filled with screeds against Jews, Black people, Democrats, the media and transgender people.

During October, DePape published over 100 posts. While each loads, a reader briefly glimpses an image of a person wearing a giant inflatable unicorn costume, superimposed against a night sky. The photos and videos that followed were often dark and disturbing.

He published a drawing of the Devil kneeling and asking a caricature of a Jewish person to teach him the arts of “lying, deception, cheating and incitement.” Several contain lifelike images of rotting human flesh and blood, including a zombified Bill Gates and Hillary Clinton. Others depict headless bodies against bleak, dystopian landscapes.

Before those writings were removed Saturday, The Washington Post reviewed them, as well as gory photos, illustrations and videos on a website that DePape registered under his name in early August and that his daughter confirmed was his. Notably, the voluminous writings do not mention Pelosi. Police say DePape broke into the home Pelosi shares with her husband early Friday, yelled “Where is Nancy?” and attacked 82-year-old Paul Pelosi with a hammer.

Pelosi remained hospitalized Saturday, recovering from surgery to repair a skull fracture and serious injuries to his right arm and hand, according to the speaker’s office. San Francisco’s police chief and district attorney provided no update, but on Friday local, state and federal authorities said they were working together to investigate DePape’s motive.

A woman who identified DePape as her “father” said Friday that she was stunned by his arrest even though he was, she said, abusive to other members of the family. “I love my father,” Inti Gonzalez wrote in a statement posted to her website and later removed. “He did genuinely try to be a good person but the monster in him was always too strong for him to be safe to be around.”

“This attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband came as a shock to me,” wrote Gonzalez, who is 21, according to her website. “I didn’t see this coming and there was no sign of the possibility from his end.” Gonzalez wrote she followed her father’s writing online but was not aware of the website he registered in August.

Hold it just a goddamned fuckin' minute, lady - "the monster in him" made you feel it was unsafe to hang out with him, but you didn't think he might pull some shit like this?

Reached by The Post before she issued the statement, Gonzalez declined to comment about DePape.

DePape grew up in British Columbia, a relative told CNN. He briefly drew public attention nearly a decade ago in San Francisco when he participated in a demonstration against a city ordinance banning public nudity. The protest was led by Gonzalez’s mother, Gypsy Taub, an outspoken nudity activist.

Videos posted on YouTube show that DePape was among a group of protesters marching through San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood for the 2013 demonstration.

On his blog, DePape wrote bitterly in recent months of his relationship with Taub, who also promoted debunked conspiracy theories on her own blog, including that 9/11 was an “inside job.” He accused Taub of manipulating her children to turn them against him.

Taub is serving a sentence for felony stalking and attempted child abduction, after prosecutors said she became fixated with a 14-year-old boy and attempted to kidnap him. She could not be reached for comment. Gonzalez told The Post that she had spoken with Taub and that Taub would be making a statement upon her release. She is eligible for parole in January.

Four days before the Pelosi attack, DePape posted on his website what he presented as a 2021 email to Gonzalez. In it, he told her he struggled with the urge to end his life as his relationship with Taub and her children was falling apart. “I was extremely suicidal, Mentally I would beg you guys daily to let me kill myself,” he wrote in the email. DePape cut off contact with Taub and her children after he was he was kicked out of their home and living in a car, according to his online account. He does not say when those events occurred.

The domain frenlyfrens.com was registered Aug. 8 under DePape’s name and to an address in Richmond, Calif., where a neighbor told a Post reporter he lived. The web address uses the phonetic spelling of “friend,” which has become a slang term adopted by many in the far right — a term that is sometimes written as an acronym for Far Right Ethno-Nationalist.

Reddit banned an openly anti-semitic group by the name /r/FrenWorld in 2019, saying it contained postings that glorified or encouraged violence. One cartoon featured repeatedly by members contained pictures of a frog character that has been appropriated by the far right. “Frens, sound the alarms!” one says. “Arm yourselves! The longnose is coming, the longnose is coming.”

Two weeks after registering the site, DePape’s first post was titled “Mary Poppins.” Amid the ongoing feud between Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) and Disney over the company’s criticism of the state’s law known by critics as the “don’t say gay” bill, the violent video depicted a SWAT team firing at Poppins.

Details of DePape’s everyday life in recent months are included in the postings that followed. He played video games at a nearby library and spent hours meditating, according to the writings. In another post, he shared an image of a fantasy miniature salamander he purchased on Etsy. He wrote that he was looking to purchase a fairy house on Etsy but was frustrated that the doors were painted and so could not be used by a fairy. “They have lots of fairy houses but NONE of them are MADE for fairies,” he wrote.

In late August, DePape became engrossed in the decision by Twitter to ban Jordan Peterson for his posts about transgender people. The Canadian psychologist turned conservative podcaster had once said that being transgender was comparable to “satanic ritual abuse.”

DePape published six posts in support of Peterson and then continued with his own caustic takes on transgender people, saying they should not be a protected group. “They were not BORN a freak. They are not INHERENTLY a freak threw no fault of their own. … They are CHOOSING to be FREAKS,” he wrote in one post.

In the last week of September, as the Justice Department filed a motion seeking to compel former Trump adviser Peter Navarro to return government emails, DePape blogged his take: “No evidence of election fraud. Any journalist saying that should be dragged straight out into the street and shot.”

DePape was also active on the message board 4chan, a site notorious for extremist discussion, posting memes and debating other anonymous users about his beliefs, according to his website. In an Oct. 24 post titled “Disinfo Shill Tactics,” he complained that he was a target of law enforcement he described as ‘paid shills’ trying to manipulate the message board. “I would come in and lay out the facts and so all the paid shills would jump on me. To try and suppress it,” he wrote.

That same day, DePape shared images from a construction site where he worked months ago. One highlighted a jackhammer with the number 33 on it, an apparent reference to a conspiracy theory about Freemasons and world control. A co-worker remarked he sounded like the now deceased right-wing radio personality Rush Limbaugh after referring to feminists as “feminazis” during a discussion on feminism, according to the account.

In another post on Oct. 24, four days before the attack on Pelosi, DePape shared images of a wooden birdhouse he said he had purchased for an invisible fairy he communicated with that had begun interfering with his life. “He appears in a form that makes sense in my reality because I can’t see fairies. He’ll do things to let me know its him and he o[f]ten appears as a bird,” he wrote.

Overheard

If one monkey was hoarding bananas,

to the point where other monkeys

were going hungry,

we'd be studying that monkey 

to see what's wrong with him.

When a human does that,

we put him on the cover of Forbes.

Ukraine

Putin's little Ukraine adventure is going so badly, he's now saying it's going so well that he can call off the draft.

That's how the Daddy State operates.

Daddy State Awareness, rule 4

They change the meaning of words to suit their needs:

if it's false but it works in my favor, then it's true

if it's true but it works against me, then it's false

He's calling off the draft because that's been as bad a failure as the invasion's been.

‘If you croak, we’ll say you killed yourself.’

A 20-year-old Moscow conscript went on a hunger strike and refused to wear a uniform or follow orders. Two weeks later, he was discharged and came home.

Anton Gnedovets completed his mandatory army service in the fall of 2021. Since March 2022, he worked as a milling machine operator at the Bauman University, a well-known technology school in Moscow. His employer, Bauman MGTU, is officially registered as a defense industry organization. Gnedovets’s employment there entitled him to a draft deferral under the Russian mobilization law.

On October 3, Anton was at work when he received two notices. One of them was a draft summons. The other was a notice from his employer that certified his eligibility for exemption from the draft. The next morning, he set out for the draft office, planning to present both documents and get his exemption squared away. “I thought they’d rubber-stamp the exemption and send me home,” he says.

The draft office reviewed his documents — and declared that his exemption certificate was fake. Anton was placed on a bus together with the other conscripts, and sent to the army base in Naro-Fominsk. There, all the newly-mobilized soldiers received uniforms.

Late at night, the mobilized men arrived at the military unit stationed in the village of Selyatino. “The next morning,” Anton recalls, “it began”:

Everybody rise, officers walking around and ordering everyone to change their clothes. I didn’t follow the order, and refused to wear the uniform.

The officers summoned him to the headquarters and began to threaten that they’d “send him to the front line had have him shot.” Apart from that, they didn’t quite know what to do with him. Anton was shown a bed at the far end of the barracks, and told to “lie there and rot.” He declared a hunger strike. The people in charge replied: “If you croak, we’ll say you killed yourself.”

Gnedovets spent about a week in Selyatino. Other conscripts there complained that their military training was “weak,” and that some platoons were getting no instruction at all. They also complained about having to buy their own gear. Then he overheard two officers talking about two other conscripts in the unit, who had cut their veins and died.

THE STORY OF ANOTHER PLATOON

Written off in advance - how an untrained and unarmed ‘platoon’ of new conscripts from Moscow was decimated near Svatove 3 days ago

"I was the first person who began to protest. So, the other guys began to watch me, as if to say, really, is that something you can do. So, the officers began to pressure everyone. With me, they used threats; with others, it was violence. They beat one guy and locked him in a hot drying room for the night."

Sometime after October 10, Gnedovets and around 30 other conscripts, who were all refusing to serve, were moved to another unit in the Moscow area. When they reported to the headquarters, the officers gave them a talk about how it’s time to “stop rebelling and start serving.” Of the 30 protesting men, only four did not give in to pressure.

On October 19, Anton was dismissed from the unit, partly because his mother was actively appealing his mobilization while he was in the barracks. Without waiting for the official transport, his called a taxi, and came home.

Anton Gnedovets was not the only Bauman MGTU employee to be drafted despite his exemption. Denis Ganzhin, a 44-year-old electrician who also worked for the university, was mobilized, regardless of his exemption certificate, and sent to Belarus on October 24.

Here Comes Trouble

Or maybe trouble is here.

Or maybe Elon is just another billionaire megalomaniac, taking this on as a vanity project, and he's mostly doing nothing but blowin' smoke out his ass.

Remember - there are no good billionaires.

(pay wall)

Racist tweets quickly surface after Musk closes Twitter deal

Anonymous Twitter accounts celebrated Musk’s takeover and argued it meant the old rules against bigotry no longer applied

An emboldened cast of anonymous trolls spewed racist slurs and Nazi memes onto Twitter in the hours after billionaire industrialist Elon Musk took over the social network, raising fears that his pledge of unrestricted free speech could fuel a new wave of online hate.

The flood of racist posts was among the most prominent signs of how Twitter had changed in the first hours of Musk’s ownership. But those who were expecting even bigger changes, such as the restoration of former president Donald Trump’s account and the layoff of hundreds if not thousands of Twitter employees, will have to wait longer.

Musk on Friday tweeted that he would make “no major content decisions or account reinstatements” until the convening of a new “moderation council.” He promised that the council would have “widely diverse viewpoints” but offered no other information about who would be on it, how its members would be selected, what authority it would have or whether its views would be binding on the company.

Musk’s social media rival Mark Zuckerberg, chief of Facebook’s parent company, Meta, also turned to an outside group — known as the Oversight Board — to pass judgment on Facebook’s social media moderation actions after years of public criticism of its decisions. But whether Musk has a similar arrangement in mind was unknown.

Paul M. Barrett, the deputy director of New York University’s Center for Business and Human Rights, said such a council under Musk would face even more skepticism because of Musk’s “notoriously erratic and imperious personality.”

“To make an advisory body work, he would have to give it some degree of independence and make it very transparent,” Barrett said. “Frankly, I am not that optimistic, but as the whole Musk-Twitter saga has illustrated, he is full of surprises.”

Musk also did not meet with Twitter’s employees, something that had been widely expected — or, in some cases, dreaded. Rumors of widespread layoffs have roiled Twitter’s workforce since The Washington Post revealed last week that Musk had told potential investors that he foresaw cutting Twitter’s staff by nearly 75 percent. No layoffs were announced Friday, and Twitter workers at its headquarters in downtown San Francisco reported that they heard nothing from senior managers during the day.

Twitter did hear from one major advertiser, however, the auto manufacturer General Motors, which told CNBC that it was temporarily suspending advertising on the platform until the direction of the company under Musk becomes clearer. On Thursday, Musk tried to assuage advertiser worries in a tweeted letter in which he promised that the site would not become a “hellscape” or a “free-for-all” and pledged that the app would remain “warm and welcoming to all.”

The reality of those worries became clear after Musk closed the $44 billion deal, however, becoming Twitter’s owner and firing the chief executive officer, chief financial officer, chief policy officer and general counsel.

Within hours, Musk’s portrayal of himself as a “free speech absolutist” and his fierce criticism of the company’s previous leaders as overly rigid and suppressive seemed to have encouraged a wide range of anonymous Twitter accounts to act as if his takeover meant the old rules against bigotry no longer applied.

“Elon now controls twitter. Unleash the racial slurs. K---S AND N-----S,” said one account, using slurs for Jews and Black people. “I can freely express how much I hate n-----s … now, thank you elon,” another said.

Racial slurs were posted rampantly. One single-word tweet, showing a single racial slur in all capital letters, was retweeted more than 700 times and liked more than 5,000 times. It was tweeted Thursday night and remained online more than 16 hours later.

Search quote tweets for his "the bird is free" post and you'll see what broadly inclusive means to fans of the new ownership. pic.twitter.com/jP9vh64ZDw

— CARP (@WhiteRoseAFA) October 28, 2022

One account, created this month, included a Nazi swastika as its profile picture and retweeted quotes from Musk alongside antisemitic memes. Another tweet, showing a video montage glorifying Nazi Germany with the comment, “I hear that there have been some changes around here,” was liked more than 400 times.

The Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI), a group that analyzes hundreds of millions of messages across social media, said use of the n-word on the app spiked nearly 500 percent over the 12 hours after Musk’s deal was finalized.

By Friday afternoon, misogynistic and anti-LGBTQ messages had become increasingly prominent, including from accounts calling for the harassment and misnaming of transgender people or the use of terms, like “groomer,” to insinuate that they sexually recruit children.

“Almost immediately I noticed an increase in anti-trans harassment, it’s very visible,” said Erin Reed, a trans activist and legislative researcher. “I’m seeing more people in comments with explicit threats, more misgendering, more harmful slurs. I’ve gotten pictures of me getting shot by a shotgun. It’s a pretty scary environment on Twitter right now.”

Some anti-LGBTQ Twitter users began running “tests” of Twitter’s new rules by posting the previous names, known as “dead names,” of prominent trans media figures and by misgendering high-profile trans women.

Some accounts, including that of conservative commentator Matt Walsh, celebrated Musk’s takeover as helping supercharge opposition to “the trans agenda.” The “liberation of Twitter couldn’t have come at a more opportune time,” Walsh tweeted to his more than 1 million followers. “Now we can ramp up our efforts even more.”

The Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ civil rights group, said in a statement Friday that it was “very concerned” about Musk’s ownership. “Twitter has a right, and a responsibility, to keep its platform from being exploited to fuel a dangerous media environment,” the group said. “This isn’t about censorship or discrimination of ideas — it is about what kind of company they want to be and what kind of world they want to shape.”

Some of the Twitter influx was organized on other platforms, including on the anything-goes message board 4chan and the pro-Trump forum TheDonald, where its top posts Friday showed tweets celebrating lies about Trump’s 2020 election loss and memes criticizing transgender people under the headline “When you can’t get banned on Twitter anymore.”

“Cold Meme War, [Twitter] Defenses Down, Fire Away,” another poster said, attaching an image of a soldier with a rifle and a “Make America Great Again” hat.

Alex Goldenberg, NCRI’s lead intelligence analyst, said the swarm of racial slurs organized on anonymous forums such as 4chan was intended “to make as big a mess as possible for Twitter’s new management.”

“Online trolls regularly test the limits of moderation,” Goldenberg said. Rather than a “paradigm change” at the company, he said, the spike could show that these groups “are seeking to give Elon Musk all he can handle.”

Musk’s acquisition and almost-instant firing of Twitter’s top executives was also widely celebrated in Telegram groups devoted to QAnon, the jumble of pro-Trump extremist ideologies and baseless theories. “Sometimes it takes a while, but the good guys win,” one QAnon influencer wrote.

Some Twitter rules, however, still appeared to apply. Stew Peters, a far-right conspiracy theorist and radio host who was banned from Twitter, created a new account Thursday night and posted, “I’m BAAAAAAAAAAACK.” By Friday morning, however, the account had been suspended.

But Musk’s takeover is still fresh. After a right-wing influencer tweeted that he continued to be “shadowbanned, ghostbanned [and] searchbanned” on the platform, Musk tweeted Friday morning that he would “be digging in more today.” (After Musk’s reply, the account tweeted about “liberal tears” and celebrated gaining more than 40,000 followers.)

Musk’s takeover also led some prominent Twitter users associated with Russian and Chinese state-backed media outlets to call for Twitter to remove labels identifying their accounts as propaganda.

Twitter and other social networks have used the labels since the 2016 election to defend against foreign election interference and misinformation.

Margarita Simonyan, the editor in chief of the Russian government-backed broadcaster RT, called for Musk to remove the “shadow ban” from her account and appealed to his stated commitments to “free speech.”

But European regulators reminded Musk on Friday that they’d be closely scrutinizing any changes he made to the platform, 75 percent of whose users live outside the United States. A sweeping new law set to come into force in the European Union would force Twitter and other tech companies to fight misinformation and limit the spread of illegal content. E.U. officials said during a news conference Friday that they will be watching to make sure Twitter complies with these new regulations, known as the Digital Services Act.

“In Europe, the bird will fly by our rules,” Thierry Breton, an E.U. commissioner who has helped oversee tech policy, tweeted Friday, a reference to Twitter’s bird logo. Musk earlier had tweeted that the bird had been uncaged.

Alex Stamos, a former Facebook chief security officer who now leads the Stanford Internet Observatory, said the pitfalls and complexities of online content moderation will quickly become apparent to Musk, whose other business ventures, such as Tesla and SpaceX, could require interaction with foreign governments seeking to gain influence over Twitter’s reach.

With so much “at stake in China,” Stamos tweeted, “what is Musk going to do with these public requests to lift labeling on state propagandists and private asks to stop looking for covert influence campaigns?”

One person who remained noticeably absent from Twitter on Friday was Trump, whose account was indefinitely suspended because of fears of violent incitement after a crowd of his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Musk has said he would end lifetime bans, including Trump’s, on the basis that they weaken Twitter’s role as a platform for free expression. Trump, however, told Fox News on Friday that he would stay on his own company’s smaller Twitter clone, Truth Social, even if he was invited back, adding, “I don’t think Twitter can be successful without me.”

Trump’s Truth Social account has roughly 4 million followers, a small fraction of the 88 million followers he had at his Twitter peak.

New Launch

Old familiar voices, with a new, more issue-specific podcast.

Driftglass & Blue Gal - The Professional Left - No Fair Remembering Stuff

Episode 1

Episode 2

How Great I Art

I got a mention at Crooks & Liars, and my traffic went up a coupla hundred percent.

'Preciate the fuck outa that, guys. Thanks, tengrain.

Today's Trae

"Yeah - uh - we don't really do the whole plan thing - we're more into rage-fueled obfuscation."

Trae Crowder - The Liberal Redneck

Calamity's A-Comin'

• Another 2°C rise in global temperature, and every coral reef in the world will die. Shortly thereafter, the world's food supply will shrink by at least 17%.
• The doomsters who were predicting a 5°C rise are now saying keeping it under 3°C kinda looks like a win.
• Flooding may be the worst of all - while the Mississippi runs dry.

(pay wall)

Beyond Catastrophe
A New Climate Reality Is Coming Into View

By David Wallace-Wells

You can never really see the future, only imagine it, then try to make sense of the new world when it arrives.

Just a few years ago, climate projections for this century looked quite apocalyptic, with most scientists warning that continuing “business as usual” would bring the world four or even five degrees Celsius of warming — a change disruptive enough to call forth not only predictions of food crises and heat stress, state conflict and economic strife, but, from some corners, warnings of civilizational collapse and even a sort of human endgame. (Perhaps you’ve had nightmares about each of these and seen premonitions of them in your newsfeed.)

Now, with the world already 1.2 degrees hotter, scientists believe that warming this century will most likely fall between two or three degrees. (A United Nations report released this week ahead of the COP27 climate conference in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt, confirmed that range.) A little lower is possible, with much more concerted action; a little higher, too, with slower action and bad climate luck. Those numbers may sound abstract, but what they suggest is this: Thanks to astonishing declines in the price of renewables, a truly global political mobilization, a clearer picture of the energy future and serious policy focus from world leaders, we have cut expected warming almost in half in just five years.

For decades, visions of possible climate futures have been anchored by, on the one hand, Pollyanna-like faith that normality would endure, and on the other, millenarian intuitions of an ecological end of days, during which perhaps billions of lives would be devastated or destroyed. More recently, these two stories have been mapped onto climate modeling: Conventional wisdom has dictated that meeting the most ambitious goals of the Paris agreement by limiting warming to 1.5 degrees could allow for some continuing normal, but failing to take rapid action on emissions, and allowing warming above three or even four degrees, spelled doom.

Neither of those futures looks all that likely now, with the most terrifying predictions made improbable by decarbonization and the most hopeful ones practically foreclosed by tragic delay. The window of possible climate futures is narrowing, and as a result, we are getting a clearer sense of what’s to come: a new world, full of disruption but also billions of people, well past climate normal and yet mercifully short of true climate apocalypse.

Over the last several months, I’ve had dozens of conversations — with climate scientists and economists and policymakers, advocates and activists and novelists and philosophers — about that new world and the ways we might conceptualize it. Perhaps the most capacious and galvanizing account is one I heard from Kate Marvel of NASA, a lead chapter author on the fifth National Climate Assessment: “The world will be what we make it.” Personally, I find myself returning to three sets of guideposts, which help map the landscape of possibility.

First, worst-case temperature scenarios that recently seemed plausible now look much less so, which is inarguably good news and, in a time of climate panic and despair, a truly underappreciated sign of genuine and world-shaping progress.

Second, and just as important, the likeliest futures still lie beyond thresholds long thought disastrous, marking a failure of global efforts to limit warming to “safe” levels. Through decades of only minimal action, we have squandered that opportunity. Perhaps even more concerning, the more we are learning about even relatively moderate levels of warming, the harsher and harder to navigate they seem. In a news release accompanying its report, the United Nations predicted that a world more than two degrees warmer would lead to “endless suffering.”

Third, humanity retains an enormous amount of control — over just how hot it will get and how much we will do to protect one another through those assaults and disruptions. Acknowledging that truly apocalyptic warming now looks considerably less likely than it did just a few years ago pulls the future out of the realm of myth and returns it to the plane of history: contested, combative, combining suffering and flourishing — though not in equal measure for every group.

It isn’t easy to process this picture very cleanly, in part because climate action remains an open question, in part because it is so hard to balance the scale of climate transformation against possible human response and in part because we can no longer so casually use those handy narrative anchors of apocalypse and normality. But in narrowing our range of expected climate futures, we’ve traded one set of uncertainties, about temperature rise, for another about politics and other human feedbacks. We know a lot more now about how much warming to expect, which makes it more possible to engineer a response. That response still begins with cutting emissions, but it is no longer reasonable to believe that it can end there. A politics of decarbonization is evolving into a politics beyond decarbonization, incorporating matters of adaptation and finance and justice (among other issues). If the fate of the world and the climate has long appeared to hinge on the project of decarbonization, a clearer path to two or three degrees of warming means that it also now depends on what is built on the other side. Which is to say: It depends on a new and more expansive climate politics.

“We live in a terrible world, and we live in a wonderful world,” Marvel says. “It’s a terrible world that’s more than a degree Celsius warmer. But also a wonderful world in which we have so many ways to generate electricity that are cheaper and more cost-effective and easier to deploy than I would’ve ever imagined. People are writing credible papers in scientific journals making the case that switching rapidly to renewable energy isn’t a net cost; it will be a net financial benefit,” she says with a head-shake of near-disbelief. “If you had told me five years ago that that would be the case, I would’ve thought, wow, that’s a miracle.”

How did it happen? To begin with, the world started to shift away from coal.

In 2014, the energy researcher and podcast producer Justin Ritchie was a Ph.D. student wondering why many climate models were predicting that the 21st century would look like a coal boom. Everyone knew about the decades of coal-powered economic growth in China, but those working closely on the future of energy had already grown somewhat skeptical that the same model would be deployed across the developing world — and even more skeptical that the rich nations of the world would ever return to coal in a sustained way.

But that perspective was nowhere to be seen in the huge set of models, mixing economic and demographic and material assumptions about the trajectory of the future, which climate scientists used to project impacts later this century, including for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (I.P.C.C.). The most conspicuous example was an emissions pathway called RCP8.5, which required at least a fivefold growth of coal use over the course of the 21st century. Because it was the darkest available do-nothing path, RCP8.5 was reflexively called, in the scientific literature and by journalists covering it, “business as usual.” When Ritchie and his doctoral adviser published their research in Energy Economics in 2017, they chose a leading subtitle: “Are Cases of Vastly Expanded Future Coal Combustion Still Plausible?” The world’s current path appears to offer a quite simple answer: no.

Questions about the future course of coal had been circulating for years, often raised by the same people who would point out that projections for renewable energy kept also comically underestimating the growth of wind and solar power. But to a striking degree, broad skepticism about high-end emissions scenarios has come from a small handful of people who read Ritchie’s work and took to Twitter with it: Ritchie’s sometime co-author Roger Pielke Jr., a professor of environmental studies and frequent Republican witness at congressional climate hearings; the outspoken British investor Michael Liebreich, who founded a clean-energy advisory group bought by Michael Bloomberg, and who spent a good deal of 2019 yelling on social media that “RCP8.5 is bollox”; and the more mild-mannered climate scientists Zeke Hausfather and Glen Peters, who together published a 2020 comment in Nature declaring that “the ‘business as usual’ story is misleading.” (I published a piece the previous year picking up the same bread crumbs.)

Adjustments to the input assumptions of energy models are perhaps not the sexiest signs of climate action, but Hausfather estimates that about half of our perceived progress has come from revising these trajectories downward, with the other half coming from technology, markets and public policy.

Let’s take technology first. Among energy nerds, the story is well known, but almost no one outside that insular world appreciates just how drastic and rapid the cost declines of renewable technologies have been — a story almost as astonishing and perhaps as consequential as the invention within weeks and rollout within months of new mRNA vaccines to combat a global pandemic.

Since 2010, the cost of solar power and lithium-battery technology has fallen by more than 85 percent, the cost of wind power by more than 55 percent. The International Energy Agency recently predicted that solar power would become “the cheapest source of electricity in history,” and a report by Carbon Tracker found that 90 percent of the global population lives in places where new renewable power would be cheaper than new dirty power. The price of gas was under $3 per gallon in 2010, which means these decreases are the equivalent of seeing gas-station signs today advertising prices of under 50 cents a gallon.

The markets have taken notice. This year, investment in green energy surpassed that in fossil fuels, despite the scramble for gas and the “return to coal” prompted by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. After a decade of declines, supply-chain issues have nudged up the cost of renewable manufacturing, but overall the trends are clear enough that you can read them without glasses: Globally, there are enough solar-panel factories being built to produce the necessary energy to limit warming to below two degrees, and in the United States, planned solar farms now exceed today’s total worldwide operating capacity. Liebreich has taken to speculating about a “renewable singularity,” beyond which the future of energy is utterly transformed.

The world looks almost as different for politics and policy. Five years ago, almost no one had heard of Greta Thunberg or the Fridays for Future school strikers, Extinction Rebellion or the Sunrise Movement. There wasn’t serious debate about the Green New Deal or the European Green Deal, or even whispers of Fit for 55 or the Inflation Reduction Act or the Chinese promise to peak emissions by 2030. There were climate-change skeptics in some very conspicuous positions of global power. Hardly any country in the world was talking seriously about eliminating emissions, only reducing them, and many weren’t even talking all that seriously about that. Today more than 90 percent of the world’s G.D.P. and over 80 percent of global emissions are now governed by net-zero pledges of various kinds, each promising thorough decarbonization at historically unprecedented speeds.

At this point, they are mostly paper pledges, few of them binding enough in the short term to look like real action plans rather than strategies of smiling delay. And yet it still marks a new era for climate action that a vast majority of world leaders have felt pressed to make them — by the force of protest, public anxiety and voter pressure, and increasingly by the powerful logic of national self-interest. What used to look like a moral burden is now viewed increasingly as an opportunity, so much so that it has become a source of geopolitical rivalry. As prime minister, Boris Johnson talked about making the United Kingdom the “Saudi Arabia of wind power,” and the Inflation Reduction Act was written to supercharge American competitiveness on green energy. China, which is already installing nearly as much renewable capacity as the rest of the world combined, is also manufacturing 85 percent of the world’s solar panels (and selling about half of all electric vehicles purchased worldwide). According to one recent paper on the energy transition published in Joule, a faster decarbonization path could make the world trillions of dollars richer by 2050.

You can’t take these projections to the bank. But they have already put us on a different path. The Stanford scientist Marshall Burke, who has produced some distressing research about the costs of warming — that global G.D.P. could be cut by as much as a quarter, compared with a world without climate change — says he has had to update the slides he uses to teach undergraduates, revising his expectations from just a few years ago. “The problem is a result of human choices, and our progress on it is also the result of human choices,” he says. “And those should be celebrated. It’s not yet sufficient. But it is amazing.”

Matthew Huber of Purdue University, the climate scientist who helped introduce the idea of a temperature and humidity limit to human survival, likewise describes himself as considerably less worried than he used to be, though he believes, drawing on inferences from the deep history of the planet, that a future of two degrees warming is less likely than a world of three. “Some of my colleagues are looking at three degrees and going, oh, my God, this is the worst thing ever — we’re failing!” he says. “And then someone like me is saying, well, I used to think we were heading to five. So three looks like a win.”

A very bruising win. “The good news is we have implemented policies that are significantly bringing down the projected global average temperature change,” says the Canadian atmospheric scientist Katharine Hayhoe, a lead chapter author on several National Climate Assessments and an evangelical Christian who has gained a reputation as a sort of climate whisperer to the center-right. The bad news, she says, is that we have been “systematically underestimating the rate and magnitude of extremes.” Even if temperature rise is limited to two degrees, she says, “the extremes might be what you would have projected for four to five.”

“Things are coming through faster and more severely,” agrees the British economist Nicholas Stern, who led a major 2006 review of climate risk. In green technology, he says, “we hold the growth story of the 21st century in our hands.” But he worries about the future of the Amazon, the melting of carbon-rich permafrost in the northern latitudes and the instability of the ice sheets — each a tipping point that “could start running away from us.” “Each time you get an I.P.C.C. report, it’s still worse than you thought, even though you thought it was very bad,” he says. “The human race doesn’t, as it were, collapse at two degrees, but you probably will see a lot of death, a lot of movement of people, a lot of conflict over space and water.”

“I mean, we’re at not even one and a half now, and a third of Pakistan is underwater, right?” says the Nigerian American philosopher Olufemi O. Taiwo, who has spent much of the last few years writing about climate justice in the context of reparations for slavery and colonialism. “What we’re seeing now at less than two degrees — there’s nothing optimistic about that.”

All of which suggests an entirely different view of the near future, equally true. The world will keep warming, and the impacts will grow more punishing, even if decarbonization accelerates enough to meet the world’s most ambitious goals: nearly halving global emissions by 2030 and getting to net-zero just two decades later. “These dates — 2030, 2050 — they are meaningless,” says Gail Bradbrook, one of the British founders of Extinction Rebellion. “What matters is the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, and there is already way too much. The dates can be excuses to kick the problem into the long grass. But the important thing is that we’re doing harm, right now, and that we should stop absolutely as soon as possible with any activities that are making the situation worse.”

A lot, then, depends on perspective: The climate future looks darker than today but brighter than many expected not that long ago. The world is moving faster to decarbonize than it once seemed responsible to imagine, and yet not nearly fast enough to avert real turbulence. Even the straightest path to two degrees looks tumultuous, with disruptions from the natural world sufficient to call into question many of the social and political continuities that have been taken for granted for generations.

For me, the last few years provide arguments for both buoyant optimism and abject despair. They have made me more mindful of the inescapable challenge of uncertainty when it comes to projecting the future, and the necessity of nevertheless operating within it.

In 2017, I wrote a long and bleak magazine article about worst-case scenarios for the climate, focused on a range of possible futures that began at four degrees Celsius of warming and went up from there. In 2019, I published a book about the disruptions and transformations projected by scientists for lower but still “catastrophic” levels of warming — between two degrees and four. I was called an alarmist, and rightly so — like a growing number of people following the news, I was alarmed.

I am still. How could I not be? How could you not be? In Delhi this spring, there were 78 days when temperatures breached 100 degrees Fahrenheit, a monthslong heat event made 30 times more likely by climate change. Drought across the Northern Hemisphere was made 20 times more likely, resulting in dried-up riverbeds from the Yangtze to the Danube to the Colorado, exposing corpses dumped in Lake Mead and dinosaur footprints in Texas and live World War II munitions in Germany and a “Spanish Stonehenge” in Guadalperal, and baking crops in agricultural regions on multiple continents to the point of at least partial failure. Hundreds died of heat just in Phoenix, more than a thousand each in England and Portugal and Spain.

Monsoon flooding in Pakistan covered a third of the country for weeks, displacing tens of millions of people, destroying the country’s cotton and rice yields and producing conditions ripe for migration, conflict and infectious disease within an already struggling state — a state that has generated in its entire industrial history about the same carbon emissions as the United States belched out this year alone. In the Caribbean and the Pacific, tropical storms grew into intense cyclones in under 36 hours.

In China, there were months of intense heat for which, as one meteorologist memorably put it, “there is nothing in world climatic history which is even minimally comparable.” As it did through the pandemic, China tried to hide most of the disruptions to daily life, but industrial shutdowns meant the rest of the world felt the effects in the supply chains for semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, photovoltaic cells, iPhones and Teslas — all pinched briefly closed by warming of just 1.2 degrees.

What will the world look like at two degrees? There will be extreme weather even more intense and much more frequent. Disruption and upheaval, at some scale, at nearly every level, from the microbial to the geopolitical. Suffering and injustice for hundreds of millions of people, because the benefits of industrial activity have accumulated in parts of the world that will also be spared the worst of its consequences. Innovation, too, including down paths hard to imagine today, and some new prosperity, if less than would have been expected in the absence of warming. Normalization of larger and more costly disasters, and perhaps an exhaustion of empathy in the face of devastation in the global south, leading to the kind of sociopathic distance that enables parlor-game conversations like this one.

At two degrees, in many parts of the world, floods that used to hit once a century would come every single year, and those that came once a century would be beyond all historical experience. Wildfire risk would grow, and wildfire smoke, too. (The number of people exposed to extreme smoke days in the American West has already grown 27-fold in the last decade.) Extreme heat events could grow more than three times more likely, globally, and the effects would be uneven: In India, by the end of the century, there would be 30 times as many severe heat waves as today, according to one estimate. Ninety-three times as many people would be exposed there to dangerous heat.

This is what now counts as progress. Today, at just 1.2 degrees, the planet is already warmer than it has been in the entire history of human civilization, already beyond the range of temperatures that gave rise to everything we have ever known as a species. Passing 1.5 and then two degrees of warming will plot a course through a truly foreign climate, bringing a level of environmental disruption that scientists have called “dangerous” when they are being restrained. Island nations of the world have called it “genocide,” and African diplomats have called it “certain death.” It is that level that the world’s scientists had in mind when they warned, in the latest I.P.C.C. report, published in February, that “any further delay in concerted global action will miss a brief and rapidly closing window to secure a livable future.”

What would we get if that window closes? The temptations of apocalyptic thinking aside, it would nevertheless be a world in which we would still be living — navigating larger and more damaging climate intrusions, and doing so with some yet-to-be-determined mix of success and failure, grief and opportunity.

“The West has always had a problem with millenarianism — the fall, Christianity, all that,” says Tim Sahay, a Mumbai-born climate-policy wonk and co-founder of the new Polycrisis journal. “It’s ineradicable — all we see are the possibilities for doom and gloom.” The challenges are real and large and fall disproportionately on the developing world, he says, but they are not deterministic, or need not be. “We’re riding down the dark mountain,” he says. “That’s scary in ways, of course, but there are also so many possible outcomes. I find it all exciting. What kind of cities will Brazil build? What will Indonesia be?”

In some places, climate rhetoric has begun to soften — or perhaps it is better to say harden, with existential abstractions thickening into something more like high-stakes realism. Mohamed Nasheed, the former president of Maldives who asked, at the Copenhagen climate conference in 2009, “How can you ask my country to go extinct?” has been lately talking in more practical terms. He has raised the need to secure climate finance — support from development banks and institutions of the global north to enable a green transition and local resilience — and theorized about the possible need for debt strikes to extract meaningful relief. He has also encouraged the work of scientists to genetically modify local coral to make it more resilient in the face of warming water.

Mia Mottley, the prime minister of Barbados, is fighting in the weeds with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and trying to get other vulnerable nations to play hardball too. Greta Thunberg, the unyielding face of climate alarm, recently affirmed her support for at least existing nuclear power, and Rupert Read, once the spokesman for Extinction Rebellion, has taken to calling for a “moderate flank” of the climate movement. In the United States, the climate bill that emerged finally into law was not a Green New Deal, a punitive carbon tax or a program of demand reduction but an expansive, incentive-based approach to decarbonizing that included support for nuclear power and even carbon capture, long an anathema to the climate left.

This may look like a growing consensus, which to a certain extent it is. But the world it points to is still a quite unresolved mess. Over the last year, the economic historian Adam Tooze has popularized the word “polycrisis” to describe the cascade of large-scale challenges to the basic stability and continuity of the global order. President Emmanuel Macron of France, who embodies the slim-fit optimism of neoliberalism, has declared the current period of tumult “the end of abundance.” Josep Borrell, the former head of the European Parliament, chose the phrase “radical uncertainty,” later comparing Europe to a “garden” and the rest of the world to a “jungle” and warning that “the jungle could invade the garden.” John Kerry, the American climate envoy, has acknowledged, perhaps inadvertently, that the cost of climate damage in the global south is already in the “trillions” — a number he cited not to illustrate the need for support but to explain why nations in the global north wouldn’t pay. (He added that he refused to feel guilty about it.) The author and activist Bill McKibben worries that although the transition is accelerating to once-unimaginable speeds, it still won’t come fast enough. “The danger is that you have a world that runs on sun and wind but is still an essentially broken planet.” Now the most pressing question is whether it can be fixed — whether we can manage those disruptions and protect the many millions of people who might be hurt by them.

Next month, at the United Nations climate conference in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt, known as COP27, world leaders will take up that question, which often goes by the name “adaptation.” Having engineered global ecological disruption, can we engineer our way out of its path?

The tools are many — in fact, close to infinite. Given that most of the world’s infrastructure was built for climate conditions we have already left behind, protecting ourselves against new conditions would require something like a global construction project: defenses against flooding — both natural, like mangrove and wetland restoration, and more interventionist, like dikes and levees and sea walls and sea gates. We’ll need stronger housing codes; more resilient building materials and more weather-conscious urban planning; heat-resistant rail lines and asphalt and all other kinds of infrastructure; better forecasting and more universal warning systems; less wasteful water management, including across very large agricultural regions like the American West; cooling centers and drought-resistant crops and much more effective investments in emergency response for what Juliette Kayyem, a former official at the Department of Homeland Security, calls our new “age of disasters.”

Damage from storms is increasing, in large part because we keep building and moving right into what is often called the expanding bull’s-eye of extreme weather, with the same distressing pattern observed in boom towns along the Florida coast and in the floodplains of Bangladesh. More and more people are flocking into harm’s way, not all of them out of true ignorance.

Some more sanguine climate observers often point out that even as we put ourselves in the path of extreme weather, deaths from natural disasters are not, in fact, growing — indeed, they have fallen, by an astonishing degree, from as much as an average of 500,000 deaths each year a century ago to about 50,000 deaths each year today (even as climate- and weather-related natural disasters have increased fivefold, according to the World Meteorological Organization).

But whether those mortality trends would continue in a two-degree world is unclear. With Hurricane Ian, for instance, a wealthy and well-prepared corner of the global north just endured its deadliest hurricane since 1935. Most of that drastic drop in disaster mortality happened, in fact, between the 1920s and the 1970s, when such deaths fell to just under 100,000. The declines have been smaller over the last 50 years, as global warming began to destabilize our weather, and even smaller — perhaps even nonexistent, depending on the data set and how you want to look at it — over the last three decades, as temperature rise became more pronounced and warming pushed the world outside the “Goldilocks” climate range that had governed all of human history.

Perhaps this means the world has harvested much of the obvious low-hanging fruit of adaptation. Better meteorology and early warning systems, for instance, which have drastically reduced the death toll of recent monsoons in Bangladesh and hurricanes in Florida, are already in place. The cost of global climate damage has already run into the trillions, and the bill for adaptation in the developing world could reach $300 billion annually by 2030. Galveston, Texas, is undertaking the construction of a $31 billion “Ike Dike” project to protect its harbor; New York City is considering a system of storm-surge gates, priced at $52 billion. In other words, warming is already making adaptation harder and more expensive, and extending the gains achieved last century into the next one may prove difficult or even impossible.

The latest I.P.C.C. report, published in February, emphasized that “progress in adaptation planning and implementation” had been made but also warned that “many initiatives prioritize immediate and near-term climate risk reduction which reduces the opportunity for transformational adaptation,” meaning that resources devoted to repair and retrofitting aren’t being spent on new infrastructure or resettlement. “Hard limits to adaptation have already been reached in some ecosystems,” the I.P.C.C. wrote, adding that “with increasing global warming, losses and damages will increase and additional natural and human systems will reach adaptation limits.”

“For me, what we are witnessing at the present level of warming, it is already challenging the limits to adaptation for humans,” says Fahad Saeed of Climate Analytics. Over the last six months, Saeed, a Pakistani scientist based in Islamabad, has watched the country endure months of extreme heat, crop failures and monsoon flooding that submerged a third of the nation, destroyed a million homes, displaced 30 million people and inflicted damage estimated at $40 billion or above — 11 percent of Pakistan’s 2021 G.D.P. “One can’t believe what would happen at 1.5 degrees,” he says. “Anything beyond that? It would even be more devastating.”

“Two degrees is a lot better than four degrees,” says the climate scientist Michael Oppenheimer, one of those who delivered now-legendary warnings about the risks of warming to the U.S. Senate in 1988. “And one-and-a-half degrees is even better than two degrees. But none of those levels means there’s nothing to do.”

Oppenheimer has spent the last few years increasingly focused on the question of what to do, and how to judge our progress on adaptation. “How good are we today at dealing with the situation where hundred-year floods happen?” he asks. “Not very good.” He argues that we should try to hold ourselves to higher standards than normalizing more than a hundred deaths in a Florida hurricane. Extreme events are arriving now much more quickly, meaning that “the measure of success is no longer just how well you did in preparing for some bad event and then recovering from it. It’s also how quickly you do it.” He mentions the I.P.C.C.’s 2019 report on the oceans, which found that what were once called “hundred-year flood levels” would be reached, in many parts of the world, every single year by 2050. “And so you’ve got to get back in shape before the next one happens, when the next one might happen the same year — in the worst cases, the same month. Eventually, in some places, it happens just with the high tide.”

“You’re not going to just recover the way we think of recovery now,” Oppenheimer says. “You have to either be living in a totally different situation, which accepts something close to perpetual flooding in some places, or you fulfill the dreams some people have about adaptation, where the regularity of life is just totally different. The very structure of infrastructure and manufacturing, it’s all different.”

Talk enough about adaptation, and you drift into technical-seeming matters: Can new dikes be built, or the most vulnerable communities resettled? Can crop lands be moved, and new drought-resistant seeds developed? Can cooling infrastructure offset the risks of new heat extremes, and early warning systems protect human life from natural disaster? How much help can innovation be expected to provide in dealing with environmental challenges never seen before in human history?

But perhaps the more profound questions are about distribution: Who gets those seeds? Who manages to build those dikes? Who is exposed when they fail or go unbuilt? And what is the fate of those most frontally assaulted by warming? The political discourse orbiting these issues is known loosely as “climate justice”: To what extent will climate change harden and deepen already unconscionable levels of global inequality, and to what degree can the countries of the global south engineer and exit from the already oppressive condition that the scholar Farhana Sultana has called “climate coloniality”?

“The big thing politically that’s going to happen on a massive scale is movement,” says Taiwo, the philosopher. “The numbers I’ve seen for displacement — both internal displacement and cross-border displacement at two degrees — are at least in the tens if not the hundreds of millions. And I don’t think we have a political context for what that means.”

The range of estimates is huge, and its size is among the best indicators we have that, however much we know about the climate future, an enormous amount of the complex and cascading effects of warming remains shrouded in the inevitable uncertainty of human response. Indeed, the I.P.C.C. says that, in the near term, migration will most likely be driven more by socioeconomic conditions and governance issues. “There will be, let’s say, socioecological pressure on a scale that is an order of magnitude larger than the scale of what we’re seeing now,” Taiwo says. “Whether that translates into movement within borders and across borders, whether it translates into large-scale adaptation strategies that we don’t have a political context for, whether it translates into simply mass death we don’t have a context for, either, or some mix of those things — it’s anybody’s guess. And I wouldn’t trust a climate model to tell me which of those things, or which mix of those things, is going to happen.”

Taiwo says his mind drifts intuitively toward one scenario. “If the far right wins,” he says, “I see copycat agencies that are much like ICE operating in much of the global north and in some emerging states. I see a gradual integration of domestic policing and, for lack of a better term, border policing — which I think we’re seeing now anyway, a much more openly authoritarian development of those institutions, increasingly operating autonomously. I expect the militaries of nation states to increasingly be wedded to those operations. And I expect that to become ‘government’ for a substantial percentage of the world’s population. I likewise expect that to be a political shift that we do not have a context for.” Unless you’ve studied colonialism, he laughs.

“But maybe there’s another version of what that mix of pressures looks like at two degrees Celsius,” Taiwo says, one that produces more local resilience and sustainability, along with innovation in energy and politics, agriculture and culture. “And partially because of the success of a few of these measures,” he says, “you get markedly lower than predicted displacement numbers.”

For a generation now, climate-vulnerable countries have issued a series of variations on a simple exhortatory theme: For this damage, the rich world must pay. The call has gone by different names, each describing slightly different forms of support: “climate finance,” “loss and damage,” “reparations” and now “debt relief.” In 2009, in Copenhagen, the rich nations of the world formalized a promise to deliver $100 billion annually in climate funding to the global south, a promise that has yet to be fulfilled, even as climate-vulnerable nations have raised their request to $700 billion or more.

“It’s not only about adapting,” says the Kenyan climate activist Elizabeth Wathuti, “because you cannot ask people to adapt to losing their homes — their homes are being washed away, their livestock and their children are being carried away. They’re dying — how would they adapt to that? And crop failure — how would you adapt to that? How would you adapt to starvation? If you have not had a meal in two days, you will not adapt to that.”

“For years and years — decades and decades — people have been begging,” Taiwo says. “The deciding thing will be, what is it that global south countries are prepared to do if these demands aren’t met.”

Sahay, of the Polycrisis journal, offers one answer, describing a world in which climate-exacerbated great power rivalry means that alliances of underdeveloped states could play rich nations against one another, in a sort of spiritual extension of the nonalignment movement, led by Indonesia, in the last decades of the Cold War. Sahay calls the emerging nonalignment alliance built around Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC) a “new bargaining chip,” floating the possibility that a new group of “electro-states” could succeed the last century’s petro-states and aggressively broker access to their own mineral resources. The scholar Thea Riofrancos has similarly imagined a “Lithium OPEC,” and though she doubts it will come entirely to pass, she believes that a harder and more nationalistic resource geopolitics surely will.

“Westerners take it for granted that people in the global south, if they’re badly hit by some climate-change event, will attack fossil fuels,” says the Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh, also the author of several piercing meditations on the injustices of warming. “But that’s a complete fantasy. In the global south, everybody understands that energy access is the difference between poverty and not poverty. Nobody sees fossil fuels as the basic problem. They see the West’s profligate use of fossil fuels as the basic problem.”

“Throughout this whole crisis in Pakistan, have you heard of anyone talking about attacking fossil fuels? No — it’s laughable to even ask. Everything I see being mentioned about Pakistan is about reparations, it’s about global inequality, it’s about historic government injustices. It’s not at all about fossil fuels. This is one of the really big divides between the global south and the global north,” Ghosh says. “If people are going to attack anything — let’s say in Pakistan or India after a heat wave or some other catastrophic event — it won’t be the fossil-fuel infrastructure. It will be the consulates of the rich countries, just as it’s been over many other things in the past.”

“We live in an unimaginable future,” says the writer Rebecca Solnit, who has grown increasingly focused on the political and social challenges of climate change. “Things thought impossible or inconceivable or unlikely not very long ago are accepted norms now.” Today, as a result, “a lot of my hope is just radical uncertainty,” she says. “You see that the world can’t go on as it is — that is true. But it doesn’t mean the world can’t go on. It means that the world will go on, not as it is but in some unimaginably transformed way.”

In 2017, looking back at decades of ineffectual organizing, I didn’t think the political mobilization of the last five years was even possible, and if you had told me then about the radical acceleration of renewable technology to come, I would’ve been more credulous but still surprised. But signs of optimism are not arguments for complacency — quite the opposite, because the new range of expectations is not just a marker of how much has changed over the last five years but of how much might over the next five, the next 25 or the next 50.

Two degrees is not inevitable; both better and worse outcomes are possible. Most recent analyses project paths forward from current policy about half a degree warmer, meaning much more must be done to meet that goal, and even more to keep the world below the two-degree threshold — as was promised under the Paris agreement. (Even the I.P.C.C. scenarios designed to limit warming to that level now predict we’ll trespass it as soon as next decade.) And because decarbonization might stall and the climate may prove more sensitive than expected, temperatures above three degrees, though less likely than they recently seemed, remain possible, too.

Overall emissions have not yet begun to decline, and it’s a long way from peak down to zero, making all these changes to expectations mostly notional, for now — a different set of lines being drawn naïvely on a whiteboard and waiting to be made real. New emissions peaks are expected both this year and next, which means that more damage is being done to the future climate of the planet right now than at any previous point in history. Things will get worse before they even stabilize.

But we are getting a clearer map of climate change, and however intimidating it looks, that new world must be made navigable — through action to limit the damage and adaptation to defend what can’t be stopped. At four degrees, the impacts of warming appeared overwhelming, but at two degrees, the impacts would not be the whole of our human fate, only the landscape on which a new future will be built.

Normalization is a form of adaptation, too, however cruel and unfortunate a form it may appear in theory or ahead of time. Indeed, already we can say a given heat wave was made 30 times more likely by climate change, or that it was a few degrees hotter than it would have been without climate change, and both would be true. We’ll be able to talk about the contributions of warming to disasters that buckle whole nations, as the recent monsoon flooding in Pakistan has, or about the human contributions to such vulnerability. And as we do today, we will often reach for the past when trying to judge the present, reckoning with how the world got where it is and who was responsible and whether the result of the fight against warming counts as progress or failure or both. History is our handiest counterfactual, however poor a standard it sets for a world that could have been much better still. “We’ve come a long way, and we’ve still got a long way to go,” says Hayhoe, the Canadian scientist, comparing the world’s progress to a long hike. “We’re halfway there. Look at the great view behind you. We actually made it up halfway, and it was a hard slog. 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.”