Our climate change challenge

There’s no escaping the damage we’ve done to our planet. Not when Southern California is being redefined by deadly wildfires, punishing drought and massive whiplash floods and mudslides. Not when a summer heat wave threatens to drive the thermometer up to 119, and the civic conversation turns to the desperate need for cooling centers.

We’ve been warned. Sometimes we heeded. In 2015, almost 200 nations agreed to try to limit global temperature increases to 1.5 degrees Celsius — or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit — above preindustrial levels as part of the Paris climate accord. The United Nations called the agreement a “covenant of hope.”

But June 2024 was the 12th consecutive month in which global warming hit — or climbed higher — than that agreed-upon limit. “At this point, it is really difficult to see a path to keeping warming below 1.5 degrees,” Kristina Dahl, a principal climate scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists, told Times reporter Hayley Smith earlier this year. To do so, Dahl said, would necessitate a more than 40% reduction in global greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, a “pace of emissions reductions that’s really inconsistent with what we see on the planet to date.”

But Dahl’s most important message was this: Keep trying.

In this issue of “Our Climate Change Challenge,” The Times profiles some of the people who are taking her message to heart. Many of them are young — the youth who will be the stewards of Planet Earth in the decades to come. They are organizers and disruptors, optimists and skeptics, some of them sizing up the current political landscape looking for reasons to hope and others demanding — at the top of their lungs — immediate action.

Climate activists approach the task at hand from myriad perspectives: Blockade a senator’s office door. Demand better climate curriculum in our schools. Cut back on plastic use and stop indulging in fast fashion. Acknowledge climate anxiety — climate grief, for some — and fix the individualism that feeds it. Offer someone a seat at the table or hold their feet to the fire.

Their work reminds us there’s still time to seize control of our collective destiny. You can find their stories on this page.

— Alice Short

Buy a print copy of “Our Climate Change Challenge” at shoplatimes.com/climatechange.

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