BANGOR DAILY NEWS • June 3, 2024
Interviewing 100 climate scientists is a crash course in coping strategies. Most of are suffering from quiet desperation, because they know what’s going to happen and they can’t seem to change it. Yet after all those interviews I have come away with some hope for the future. We’re still in the deepest trouble imaginable. But it has got a bit better: five years ago everybody was still pretending that we were going to fix all this just by cutting our greenhouse gas emissions. It was a complete fantasy. The lost time hasn’t been entirely wasted. Solar and wind power have grown faster than anybody dared hope 10 years ago. There are about a dozen feedbacks. The good news is that there are promising ideas for how to hold it down, because they will probably be needed. It will be a long, hard slog, but we are not yet doomed. ~ Gwynne Dyer