thirty-four times as powerfuclass="underline" Environmental Protection Agency, “Greenhouse Gas Emissions: Understanding Global Warming Potentials,” www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/understanding-global-warming-potentials.
climate scientists call “feedbacks”: For a good overview, see Lee R. Kump and Michael E. Mann, Dire Predictions: The Visual Guide to the Findings of the IPCC, 2nd ed. (New York: DK, 2015).
human-triggered avalanches: Melanie J. Froude and David N. Petley, “Global Fatal Landslide Occurrence from 2004 to 2016,” Natural Hazards and Earth Systems Sciences 18 (2018): pp. 2161–81, https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-18-2161-2018.
a whole new kind: Bob Berwyn, “Destructive Flood Risk in U.S. West Could Triple If Climate Change Left Unchecked,” Inside Climate News (August 6, 2018), https://insideclimatenews.org/news/06082018/global-warming-climate-change-floods-california-oroville-dam-scientists.
500,000 poor Latinos: Ellen Wulfhorst, “Overlooked U.S. Border Shantytowns Face Threat of Gathering Storms,” Reuters, June 11, 2018, https://af.reuters.com/article/commoditiesNews/idAFL2N1SO2FZ.
countries with lower GDPs: Andrew D. King and Luke J. Harrington, “The Inequality of Climate Change from 1.5°C to 2°C of Global Warming,” Geophysical Research Letters 45, no. 10 (May 2018): pp. 5030–33, https://doi.org/10.1029/2018GL078430.
trees may simply turn brown: Andrea Thompson, “Drought and Climate Change Could Throw Fall Colors Off Schedule,” Scientific American, November 1, 2016.
coffee plants of Latin America: Pablo Imbach et al., “Coupling of Pollination Services and Coffee Suitability Under Climate Change,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114, no. 39 (September 2017): pp. 10438–42, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1617940114. The paper was summarized by Yale’s E360 this way: “Latin America could lose up to 90 percent of its coffee-growing land by 2050.”
half of the world’s vertebrate animals: WWF, “Living Planet Report 2018,” Aiming Higher (Gland, Switz.: 2018), p. 18, https://wwf.panda.org/knowledge_hub/all_publications/living_planet_report_2018.
the flying insect population declined: Caspar Hallman et al., “More Than 75 Percent Decline over 27 Years in Total Flying Insect Biomass in Protected Areas,” PLOS One 12, no. 10 (October 2017), https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0185809.
delicate dance of flowers and their pollinators: Damian Carrington, “Climate Change Is Disrupting Flower Pollination, Research Shows,” The Guardian, November 6, 2014.
migration patterns of cod: Bob Berwyn, “Fish Species Forecast to Migrate Hundreds of Miles Northward as U.S. Waters Warm,” Inside Climate News, May 16, 2018, https://insideclimatenews.org/news/16052018/fish-species-climate-change-migration-pacific-northwest-alaska-atlantic-gulf-maine-cod-pollock.
hibernation patterns of black bears: Kendra Pierre-Louis, “As Winter Warms, Bears Can’t Sleep, and They’re Getting into Trouble,” The New York Times, May 4, 2018.
whole new class of hybrid species: Moises Velaquez-Manoff, “Should You Fear the Pizzly Bear?” The New York Times Magazine, August 14, 2014.
desertification of the entire Mediterranean: Joel Guiot and Wolfgang Cramer, “Climate Change: The 2015 Paris Agreement Thresholds and Mediterranean Basin Ecosystems,” Science 354, no. 6311 (October 2016): pp. 463–68, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aah5015. According to Guiot and Cramer’s calculations, even staying below two degrees of warming would mean much of the region would become, technically at least, desert.
dust from the Sahara: “Sahara Desert Dust Cloud Blankets Greece in Orange Haze,” Sky News, March 26, 2018, https://news.sky.com/story/sahara-desert-dust-cloud-blankets-greece-in-orange-haze-11305011.
for the Nile to be dramatically drained: “How Climate Change Might Affect the Nile,” The Economist, August 3, 2017.
the Rio Sand: Tom Yulsman, “Drought Turns the Rio Grande into the ‘Rio Sand,’ ” Discover, July 15, 2013.
Eight hundred million in South Asia: Muthukumara Mani et al., “South Asia’s Hotspots: Impacts of Temperature and Precipitation Changes on Living Standards,” World Bank (Washington, D.C., June 2018), p. xi, https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/28723/9781464811555.pdf?sequence=5&isAllowed=y.
fossil capitalism: Andreas Malm, Fossil Capitaclass="underline" The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (London: Verso, 2016).
about one percentage point of GDP: Solomon Hsiang et al., “Estimating Economic Damage from Climate Change in the United States,” Science 356, no. 6345 (June 2017): pp. 1362–69, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aal4369.
$20 trillion richer: Marshall Burke et al., “Large Potential Reduction in Economic Damages Under UN Mitigation Targets,” Nature 557 (May 2018): pp. 549–53, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-018-0071-9.
$551 trillion in damages: R. Warren et al., “Risks Associated with Global Warming of 1.5 or 2C,” Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, May 2018, www.tyndall.ac.uk/sites/default/files/publications/briefing_note_risks_warren_r1-1.pdf.
total worldwide wealth is today: According to Credit Suisse’s Global Wealth Report 2017, total global wealth that year was $280 trillion.
has not topped 5 percent globally: According to the World Bank, the last time was 1976, when global growth was at 5.355 percent. World Bank, “GDP Growth (Annual %),” https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG.
“steady-state economics”: The term was popularized by Herbert Daly, whose anthology Toward a Steady-State Economy (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman, 1973) established a contrarian perspective on the history of economic growth that is especially incisive in an age of climate change. (“The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment, not the reverse.”)
150 million more people: Drew Shindell et al., “Quantified, Localized Health Benefits of Accelerated Carbon Dioxide Emissions Reductions,” Nature Climate Change 8 (March 2018): pp. 291–95, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-018-0108-y.
IPCC raised the stakes: IPCC, Global Warming of 1.5°C: An IPCC Special Report on the Impacts of Global Warming of 1.5°C Above Pre-Industrial Levels and Related Global Greenhouse Gas Emission Pathways, in the Context of Strengthening the Global Response to the Threat of Climate Change, Sustainable Development, and Efforts to Eradicate Poverty (Incheon, Korea, 2018), www.ipcc.ch/report/sr15.
seven million deaths: This is from the World Health Organization’s 2014 assessment, in which air pollution was named as the single biggest health risk in the world: WHO, “Public Health, Environmental and Social Determinants of Health (PHE),” www.who.int/phe/health_topics/outdoorair/databases/en.
whether it’s responsible to have children: For a useful summary of this suddenly pervasive query among Western liberals and a fairly thorough counterargument, see Connor Kilpatrick, “It’s Okay to Have Children,” Jacobin, August 22, 2018.