100%. "we'd all benefit from greater circumspection regarding range of what's possible in the Earth System" Huge need for circumspection, imagination and better decision-making under profound uncertainty.

Daniel Swain@weatherwest.bsky.social · 3w ago

I suspect this is likely also true of other types of highly extreme events, but there our datasets are even less adequate to fully quantify. In general, I think we'd all benefit from greater circumspection regarding range of what's possible in the Earth System (climate change context or otherwise).

Our skies are full of the ghosts of forests, right now.

Where We Aren't: "The one thing these narratives all have in common is that they will not come true; even the inventions they imagined are physically realized, they will not mean what they meant in these stories. The Future will not come to be." www.alexsteffen.com/where_we_arent

OMG, it's happening! Today is the official publication date of my new book, The Earth Said Remember Me: How to Revive Our Memories and Restore the Planet

My next Personal Climate Strategy: The Basics class is this Thursday. Better decision-making the face of climate discontinuity is a skill you can learn Also, links! open.substack.com/pub/alexstef...

Planning for a wild world, rain gardens, rolling furnaces, housing as tool, and even weirder weather.

The next Personal Climate Strategy: The Basics is this Thursday, July 16. Save $50 when you register before July 15th. Also, four great links.

open.substack.com

Norway was robbed.

Climate chaos is coming for us. Some places face bigger risks than others, but no matter where we live, we're gonna struggle to adapt to events like nothing we've seen before. I'm a climate futurist. Let me level with you about what this means. 🧵 (Img:OldMarshallJailHotel)

I'll be teaching the next Personal Climate Strategy: The Basics class next Thursday the 16th. If you're not sure how to plan your life in a hotter, more chaotic world, here's one place to get started. alexsteffen.substack.com/p/the-basics...

The Basics of Navigating Climate Chaos

How to plan your next steps, when you’ve stopped believing that “normal” is coming back.

alexsteffen.substack.com

"Building a lot more housing will solve multiple problems" has been the core YIMBY argument since the mid-2000s. A good update. "Housing inequality, not income inequality, primarily determines how much wealth inequality there is in most Western countries." worksinprogress.co/issue/the-ho...

The housing theory of everything - Works in Progress Magazine

Western housing shortages drive inequality, climate change, low productivity growth, obesity, and even falling fertility rates.

worksinprogress.co

This is some excellent climate reporting. You should read this. Well done, @eroston.bsky.social www.bloomberg.com/graphics/202...

Extreme Heat Stuns Even Climate Scientists Who Saw It Coming

Record-breaking heat waves are even stunning scientists monitoring the acceleration of climate change.

bloomberg.com

Year after year, we'll be seeing our weather made chaotic, the systems we depend rendered brittle, our homes threatened and the capacities for change in our communities tested by urgent problems — and often depleted. This is not the future. We're seeing it happen all around us, now.

Alex Steffen@alexsteffen.bsky.social · 2mo ago

We about to see a smoky summer. Worth reading the whole thread. And this is just the US. Canada is facing extremes as well.

Where California's emissions come from. This ought to be painted on the walls of the State Capitol and of every city hall in California. It's the cars, dude. (And extracting and refining the oil that goes in the cars.)

Pedestrian deaths increased 72 percent just between 2009 and 2024, and more than 7,000 people are still dying each year because we aren’t doing enough to change the way we design our roads. Learn more in @smartgrowthusa.bsky.social's Dangerous by Design 2026: buff.ly/f6Oxf3w

A new study estimates five Americans die ~every hour~ from toxic car pollution: www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Five Americans die every hour from toxic vehicle emissions, study finds

Research suggests 41,800 premature US deaths in 2024 were attributable to road pollution

theguardian.com

A few years ago, I calculated the heat emitted by cars in New York City as patio heaters, to give people an idea of scale in a measure they could understand. Every day there are 157,000 patio heater equivalents running around New York. Turn them off! www.treehugger.com/cars-add-hea...

Cars Add a Lot of Heat to Our Cities—It's Time to Ban Them

Learn how cars are worsening the heat wave and why it's time to reassess their place in cities.

treehugger.com

How-Sen Chong@how-sen.com · last mo.

Cars are one of the reasons why cities get so much hotter. An average gasoline car can produce 3.9 MJ of waste heat for *every kilometre* it drives. That’s enough to raise the temperature of a 665 sqft apartment twenty degrees centigrade.

Yes it’s climate change, stop asking

Climate foresight — how we understand and strategize for a future increasingly defined by climate crisis — is in upheaval. What's next? I've spent the last few years developing a set of theses that I find useful and compelling. I'm offering a briefing 6/26. alexsteffen.substack.com/p/the-new-cl...

THE NEW CLIMATE FORESIGHT

Strategy in an age of accelerating discontinuity: a briefing. Friday June 26th.

alexsteffen.substack.com

Piece I won't write, but should: we're now used to understanding climate science and committing to decarbonization as prerequisites for limiting the scale of the crisis, but we're now seeing that they're prerequisites for responding at scale to the discontinuous impacts the crisis has unleashed. 1/

None of this is an accident. This didn't just happen. It took serious lobbying planning, funding and ongoing management to create the disaster in which we now find ourselves. alexsteffen.substack.com/p/we-now-liv...

We now live in a world of planned disasters.

What kind of future is being planned for the place you call home?

alexsteffen.substack.com

Alex Steffen@alexsteffen.bsky.social · last mo.

People who wonder if "discontinuity" isn't overstating the magnitude of the climate crisis would do well to actually check the weather. 1-in-7000-year heat wave. And that's just one of a flood of historically unprecedented climate events this month, observed in a vast array of places and systems.

The New Climate Foresight — a briefing. Tomorrow! alexsteffen.substack.com/p/the-future...

A one-in-7,000-year heat wave. In other words, families in Western Europe could easily have lived there since a couple thousand years before the building of Stonehenge, and never lived through days as hot as these. alexsteffen.substack.com/p/this-is-no...

THIS IS NOT YOUR GRANDPARENTS' HEAT

Or your great³⁵⁰-grandparents' heat, either.

alexsteffen.substack.com

I got so riled up I newslettered. alexsteffen.substack.com/p/this-is-no...

THIS IS NOT YOUR GRANDPARENTS' HEAT

Or your great³⁵⁰-grandparents' heat, either.

alexsteffen.substack.com

If you're at a bus stop, waiting for the orderly transition express, I have some bad news for you. It ain't comin'. We're in for a hard slog on hot pavement, all the way down discontinuity avenue. Try to stick to the shade — and remember to hydrate!

Grantham Research Institute at LSE@granthamlse.bsky.social · last mo.

We regret that our event on Extreme Heat: Improving governance and strengthening action around the world has been cancelled due to the red extreme heat warning issued by the UK Met Office. Our apologies to everyone who was planning to attend the event.

None of this is an accident. This didn't just happen. It took serious lobbying planning, funding and ongoing management to create the disaster in which we now find ourselves. alexsteffen.substack.com/p/we-now-liv...

We now live in a world of planned disasters.

What kind of future is being planned for the place you call home?

alexsteffen.substack.com

Alex Steffen@alexsteffen.bsky.social · last mo.

People who wonder if "discontinuity" isn't overstating the magnitude of the climate crisis would do well to actually check the weather. 1-in-7000-year heat wave. And that's just one of a flood of historically unprecedented climate events this month, observed in a vast array of places and systems.

In case you're wondering what the European heat wave is telling us, it's telling us that the five-decade struggle to limit global heating to a manageable level has failed. alexsteffen.substack.com/p/welcome-to...

Welcome to the future we fought for five decades to avoid.

Massive climate discontinuity means we no longer live in a world that can solve its most pressing problems in an orderly way.

alexsteffen.substack.com

People who wonder if "discontinuity" isn't overstating the magnitude of the climate crisis would do well to actually check the weather. 1-in-7000-year heat wave. And that's just one of a flood of historically unprecedented climate events this month, observed in a vast array of places and systems.

Piece I won't write, but should: we're now used to understanding climate science and committing to decarbonization as prerequisites for limiting the scale of the crisis, but we're now seeing that they're prerequisites for responding at scale to the discontinuous impacts the crisis has unleashed. 1/

It's not that things are stable — far f-ing from it — it's that all the most likely futures flowing from this massive instability don't map to our outdated cultural tropes of apocalypse. That should unsettle us more, not less, as we lack imaginings of utterly discontinuous but ongoing futures.

Just a reminder that the narrative trope of sentient robots evolving and deserving human rights is so old it predates sound in movies. It is very tired. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.U.R.

R.U.R. - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Note that just the abandoned cropland is about 2x the wind and solar needed to decarbonize the US.