The Earth is heating up very quickly, and the things we needed to deal with climate change, we did not do. Governments have talked, held conferences, made commitments and set targets. Some progress has certainly been made. But not enough, not nearly enough.
In Paris in 2015, nearly every nation on Earth agreed to hold warming well below 2°C and try to limit it to 1.5°C. A decade later, the world is still heading toward roughly 2.5°C or more under current trajectories, and 2024 became the first calendar year to average more than 1.5°C above preindustrial temperatures. We must continue trying to reduce emissions. But we also need to confront an uncomfortable reality: a substantially hotter world is no longer a distant possibility. It is the world we now need to prepare for.
I wish I was wrong, but I think we need to begin with the assumption that the Earth is going to become a much more unfriendly place in which to live. Elon Musk wants humans to live on Mars. I fear we will find ourselves living on “Venus” instead.
Most of the climate discussion is still about how to stop the Earth from getting hotter. Of course we must continue trying. But since we cannot count on governments to solve this in time, we also need to ask a much more immediate question and one that can be answered on a personal basis:
How are individual human beings going to live on a much hotter planet? My answer is something I call personal climate. Before explaining what I mean, consider the problem.
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