2024 was an ominous year for the future of Earth. Climate scientists anticipate that it will be the first year in which the average planetary temperature was 1.5 degrees Celsius higher than pre-industrial levels, a critical threshold established in 2015 during the Paris climate accord. Meanwhile a 2023 study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found humans brought about as many extinctions over the previous five centuries that if our species had never existed, it would have taken 18,000 years for that same number of genera to have gone extinct on their own.
The good news for humanity is that people have the power to stop these mass extinctions and stave off the worst consequences of climate change. The bad news for our species is that we are not doing any of those things; in fact, we are led by science-denying politicians like Donald Trump in the United States, Vladimir Putin in Russia, Viktor Orbán in Hungary and Javier Milei in Argentina.
