We’re eight weeks into the new decade, and, so far, we’ve had the warmest January ever recorded. (Indeed, researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said that 2020 is more than ninety-eight percent likely to be one of the five warmest years ever measured, with a nearly forty-nine-per-cent chance to set a new annual record.) We’ve seen the highest temperature ever measured on the Antarctic continent, and also record swarms of locusts descending on the Horn of Africa, a plague which scientists assure us will “become more frequent and severe under climate change.” I’m calling this new newsletter—and welcome aboard—The Climate Crisis because this is what a crisis looks like. I’ve been at this beat for so long that when I first started writing for The New Yorker on this topic, in the nineteen-eighties, we called […]