Climate Change Community
March 24, 2026
I use profanity in this post, please note this fact.
Earth Is Destabilizing, and Only Together Can We Survive It
A personal note before we begin: I am currently navigating some health and personal challenges that require my full attention, and I sincerely apologize for not being more vocal during this critical time. But please — please — consider reading every one of the 41 blog posts at Climate Change Community (when I reopen it), perhaps one or more each evening. What we are facing requires every mind, every heart, and every willing hand on deck.
Now, let us talk about where we actually stand.
The Planet Is More Out of Balance Than at Any Point in Recorded History
That is not a metaphor. That is not hyperbole. That is the direct conclusion of the United Nations World Meteorological Organization, issued just this week. The WMO declared that Earth’s climate is now “more out of balance than at any time in observed history.” Between 2015 and 2025, humanity lived through the 11 hottest years ever recorded. In 2025 alone, global average temperatures ran approximately 1.43 degrees Celsius above the 1850–1900 pre-industrial baseline — and this was on the heels of 2024, which shattered a 175-year temperature record. The oceans — absorbing roughly 90 percent of all the excess heat humanity has pumped into the atmosphere — are hotter than at any point since modern satellite and buoy measurement began. Glaciers in Colombia have been declared extinct. Every glacier in Venezuela has joined a growing list of ice bodies that have simply ceased to exist.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, in its landmark 2026 Doomsday Clock statement, confirmed that atmospheric carbon dioxide reached 152 percent of 1750 levels — the highest concentration since before modern human civilization. The largest single-year increase in CO2 concentration in the history of modern atmospheric measurement was recorded in 2024: 3.5 parts per million above the year prior. And as emissions keep rising, the natural carbon sinks that once absorbed roughly half of our pollution — the forests and the oceans — are beginning to fail. They are becoming less effective. The planet’s own immune system is weakening.
We need to wake the FUCK up, like NOW! Feel Me!
“We are now tasked with doing something that was manageable before but is now extremely difficult.” — Climate Change Community
Right Now, This Week: A March Heat Wave That Should Not Exist
This is not history. This is happening now. A record-shattering heat dome has descended over the American Southwest in March 2026 — a month when searing triple-digit temperatures have no business existing in the desert. On March 19, 2026, a reading of 43.3 degrees Celsius was recorded in the Arizona desert, obliterating the highest March temperature ever documented. Baseball games in Phoenix were ended early because of the heat.
Climate scientists at World Weather Attribution conducted a rapid analysis and reached a stark conclusion: events as extreme as this week’s heat wave in March would have been virtually impossible without human-caused climate change. The warming from the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas added between 2.6 and 4 additional degrees Celsius to these temperatures. Stanford University climate scientist Chris Field placed this event in a disturbing category of “giant events” — catastrophic heat anomalies that were once freakish rarities but are now arriving with numbing regularity: Siberia in 2020, the Pacific Northwest in 2021 (warmer than Death Valley), Europe and North America and China in 2022, the western Mediterranean in 2023, South Asia in 2023. And now, the American Southwest in March 2026.
As Climate Central’s Chief Meteorologist Bernadette Woods Placky put it, it is “really hard to even keep up with how extreme our extremes are becoming.” The cost is staggering: in the last couple of years, the number of billion-dollar weather disasters in the United States is twice as high as just a decade ago, and nearly four times higher than 30 years ago.
The Earth Itself Is Approaching Irreversible Tipping Points — Some Already Crossed
In February 2026, an international team of scientists published a paper in the journal One Earth that should have been front-page news in every country on Earth. The paper, titled “The Risk of a Hothouse Earth Trajectory,” synthesized findings on 16 Earth system components — ice sheets, permafrost, the Amazon rainforest, ocean circulation systems — and arrived at a chilling conclusion: multiple Earth system components are now showing early signs of destabilization, and some may be closer to irreversible tipping points than our best models had predicted.
What does a tipping point mean? It means the moment when a system becomes self-perpetuating — when change feeds itself and no longer requires our continued push. When the Greenland Ice Sheet melts beyond a certain threshold, it does not simply stop. It melts further on its own, raising sea levels in ways that take centuries to reverse. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet, scientists now warn, may have already crossed such a threshold. The collapse of that one ice sheet alone could eventually raise global sea levels by 3 meters — displacing tens of millions of people in the United States alone, and hundreds of millions worldwide.
The tipping points do not operate in isolation. This is the most terrifying part. Scientists have identified cascading interactions: the melting Greenland ice sheet dumps cold freshwater into the Atlantic, weakening the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation — the great ocean “conveyor belt” that regulates climate across North America and Europe. A weakened AMOC could trigger drought patterns that push the Amazon rainforest past its own breaking point, converting the world’s greatest carbon sink into a carbon source, releasing centuries of stored carbon into the atmosphere and accelerating everything else. A 2021 climate model study found that nearly one-third of three million computer simulations resulted in these domino effects — even when temperature increases were limited to just 2 degrees Celsius. We must think about our children’s future, we cannot do this to them and animal species… what the FUCK is wrong with us?
In October 2025, scientists announced that Earth has already crossed its first confirmed climate tipping point: the widespread death of warm-water coral reefs. Humanity has presided over the irreversible loss of one of the oldest and most biodiverse ecosystems on the planet. And a March 2026 study in Geophysical Research Letters concluded with over 98 percent statistical confidence that global warming accelerated faster between 2015 and 2025 than in any previous decade on record.
“After a million years of oscillating between ice ages and warmer periods, Earth’s climate stabilized more than 11,000 years ago, enabling agriculture and complex societies. We are now moving away from that stability.” — Oregon State University’s William Ripple, One Earth, 2026
The Coming Wave of Climate Refugees — and What It Demands of Our Humanity
Here is the reality that political leaders and pundits are still refusing to speak plainly: we are going to see a marked, dramatic, historically unprecedented increase in climate refugees. Not in some distant future. Now. In our lifetimes. In our children’s childhoods.
We already see it beginning. In 2024 alone, floods in the Congo displaced 350,000 people. A deluge in Rio Grande do Sul displaced over half a million. Today, most of the world’s refugee camps sit in climate hotspots — the regions of the planet most brutally exposed to the effects of what the fucking fossil fuel has done to the atmosphere. The 15 hottest refugee camps on Earth, all in Africa, are projected to face nearly 200 days per year of hazardous heat stress by 2050. People who have already been displaced once are being displaced again — what researchers now call “double displacement.” Floods chase people from camps that were never designed to be permanent homes, to higher ground, where they wait for the water to recede, and then return to do it all again.
Crossing key climate tipping points will, according to research compiled by over 200 scientists, result in large-scale displacement, increased violent conflict, and financial destabilization. This is the world we are walking our children into. Not metaphorically. Literally. The children alive today will be the adults managing the consequences of what we are choosing — and failing to choose — right now.
We need to have an urgent, uncomfortable, adult conversation about what this means for how we treat each other. The instinct, when resources grow scarce and masses of desperate people are moving across borders, is to double down on tribalism — to build walls, to embrace racism and nationalism, to direct rage at the refugee rather than at the systems that created the refugee. This is the fucking trap. This is the path to scavenger societies, to the breakdown of the cooperative institutions that make civilization possible. When 500,000 people need food and water and shelter, the question is not “are they from the right country” — the question is how can we organize, at scale, to provide it. That requires trust. That requires solidarity. That requires us to stop attacking each other.
We Need AI as a Co-Worker, Not a Curiosity
At Climate Change Community, we have been making an argument that many find unconventional, but which the urgency of our moment makes increasingly self-evident: we cannot tackle the Climate and Ecological Emergency with the same tools, the same speed, and the same institutional arrangements that created it. We need a fundamentally different approach. And one of the most powerful resources available to us — right now, at scale, at near-zero marginal cost — is artificial intelligence.
Not AI as a gadget. Not AI as a toy or a distraction. AI as a genuine co-worker and strategic partner in this emergency. The problems we now face are staggeringly complex. How do we redesign food systems to feed climate refugees while reducing agricultural emissions? How do we retrofit entire cities for extreme heat? How do we model the cascading consequences of tipping points fast enough to build policy responses? How do we coordinate across 195 nations with different languages, different priorities, and different levels of vulnerability? These are not problems that human committees meeting quarterly can solve. They require continuous, adaptive, data-driven intelligence operating at a scale and speed no human institution can match alone.
The blog posts at Climate Change Community introduce ideas that may seem unconventional at first — out-of-the-box frameworks that take the genuine scale of this emergency seriously and propose solutions that match it. We call for working from a different direction: not just reducing the harms we cause, but actively designing resilient systems that can absorb shocks, redistribute resources, and protect the most vulnerable. AI can be a partner in that work in ways that are just now becoming possible.
We are not saying AI will save us. We are saying that refusing to use every available tool — out of unfamiliarity, out of ideological discomfort, out of inertia — when children are being walked into disaster zones is no longer acceptable. The time for comfortable incrementalism is over.
The Choice In Front of Us
The United Nations Environment Programme’s “Emissions Gap Report 2025: Off Target” concluded that even if every nation fully implements its current emissions reduction pledges from the Paris Agreement, global temperature will rise by 2.3 to 2.5 degrees Celsius this century. Under current policies, we are headed for 2.8 degrees. Recall that tipping cascades — self-reinforcing, irreversible planetary changes — become significantly more likely above 2 degrees. We are, on current trajectory, heading straight into that zone.
The Doomsday Clock scientists note that renewable energy technologies are now mature and cost-effective. Solar and batteries are cheaper and faster to deploy than gas turbines. In 2025, wind and solar together generated more electricity than fossil fuels in the European Union for the first time in history. The tools of the transition exist. What is missing is the political will to deploy them at the speed and scale the crisis demands — and the social solidarity to ensure the benefits reach the most vulnerable rather than simply enriching those already wealthy.
We are asking you — reader, neighbor, parent, citizen — to consider the stakes with unflinching honesty. The science is unambiguous. The trajectory is visible. The window is not yet fully closed, but it is closing with every passing month that we spend on distraction, denial, and division.
Look at your children. Look at your grandchildren. Look at any child. Ask yourself honestly what world they will inherit if we continue as we are. Then ask yourself what world they might inherit if, right now, this year, we finally chose each other over our grievances.
Either we start working together to withstand this new, stronger force — or we find ourselves managing an increasingly uninhabitable world, not for some future generation, but for people alive today.
“We really need each other now more than ever, and for us to make that difficult will create societies with pockets of scavengers. This is the reality.” — Climate Change Community
Read All Blog Posts at Climate Change Community
There is no perfect moment to act. There is only this one. The emergency is not waiting for us to feel ready. But the community, the ideas, and the tools to meet it are here — if we choose to use them.
Mr. Alvarez, Content Curator — Climate Change Community LLC/.COM
ADDENDUM:
A WARNING TO EVERY PARENT, GRANDPARENT, AUNT, UNCLE, TEACHER, AND NEIGHBOR — THE CHILDREN ARE RUNNING OUT OF TIME
Let me be direct with you. What follows is not meant to paralyze you with fear. It is meant to snap you awake. Because the science is no longer warning us that something might happen — it is documenting, in real time, what is already happening to the world our children will inherit.
This is an emergency. And emergencies demand we stop and pay attention.
The Alarm Is Ringing Right Now
The World Meteorological Organization’s State of the Global Climate 2025 report, released just days ago on March 23, 2026, confirms that the years 2015 through 2025 are the hottest eleven years on record, and that 2025 was the second or third hottest year in 176 years of combined land and ocean records. Let that sink in. Not just a bad stretch. The worst stretch in all of human record-keeping — and it is accelerating.
The WMO stressed that the planet’s climate is now “more out of balance than at any time in observed history,” and 2025 alone registered 1.43°C above the 1850–1900 baseline, setting a new ocean heat record.
For the first time, the WMO has also begun tracking the Earth’s energy imbalance as a core climate indicator. The gap between incoming solar radiation and outgoing heat reached a 65-year high in 2025 — and greenhouse gas concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide are now at their highest levels in at least 800,000 years.
I don’t say these things to scare you. I say them because they are true, and because the fossil fuel industry has spent decades and billions of dollars making sure you either didn’t know or didn’t believe them.
The Ocean Is Drowning in Our Heat — And So Is Our Children’s Future
In 2025, ocean heat content reached its highest level in 66 years of observational records, surpassing the previous record set in 2024. In the last nine years, every single year has marked a new high for ocean heat content. Furthermore, the rate of ocean warming in the last twenty years has more than doubled compared to the period from 1960 to 2005.
As WMO Scientific Officer John Kennedy put it just last week: “The largest fraction of that absorbed energy is going to the oceans — around 90 percent of the excess energy in the climate system. This matters because over three billion people depend on marine and coastal resources for their livelihoods, and nearly 11 percent of the global population live on low-lying coasts directly exposed to coastal hazards.”
Think of who lives on those coasts. Think of the children in coastal communities — in Bangladesh, in Louisiana, in the Pacific Islands, in Miami — who will face the rising ocean not as a distant threat but as the defining fact of their lives.
Meanwhile, nearly 90 percent of the global ocean surface experienced at least one marine heatwave in 2025. Glaciers suffered their most severe mass loss on record over the 2022–2025 period. Arctic sea ice remained at near-record lows. The WMO’s report also notes that oceans have absorbed nearly 29 percent of human-generated CO₂ since 2015, driving ocean acidification to levels likely unprecedented in 26,000 years.
The oceans — which feed billions, regulate our climate, and hold the life-support systems of this planet — are being cooked and acidified simultaneously. This is not a political opinion. This is what happened last year.
What This Means for Every Child You Love
If you have a child, grandchild, niece, nephew, or student in your life, read this carefully.
According to UNICEF, in the decade of 2050 to 2059 — when today’s children will be in the prime of their lives — climate and environmental crises are expected to become far more widespread, with eight times as many children exposed to extreme heatwaves, three times as many exposed to extreme river floods, and nearly twice as many exposed to extreme wildfires, compared to the 2000s.
Eight times. This is not a projection pulled from pessimism. It is built from the physics of a warming world that we are still choosing, right now, to make warmer.
Today, nearly every child on Earth faces at least one climate shock per year, impacting their education, health, and well-being. And their bodies make them uniquely vulnerable: children breathe at a faster rate and eat and drink more for their size during infancy and childhood, while their immune systems and organs are still developing — making them more susceptible to air pollution, dehydration, pneumonia, and asthma.
Extreme events including wildfires, floods, and hurricanes have become a frightening new normal. While extreme weather affects everyone, those who have contributed the least to the crisis — children, those in poverty, and future generations — are the most affected.
This is the deepest moral outrage of the climate emergency: the people least responsible for causing it are paying the heaviest price for it.
The Political Rollback Is Making Everything Worse
Just as the science demands more urgency, political leadership in the United States has moved in the opposite direction. The Trump administration’s agenda — which seeks to systematically repeal targets and policies, decimate funding for climate change mitigation and science — is the most aggressive, comprehensive, and consequential climate policy rollback that the authoritative Climate Action Tracker has ever analyzed.
The administration has proposed and implemented across-the-board halting of carbon dioxide, climate, and environmental data collection, including the iconic Mauna Loa Observatory CO₂ monitoring in Hawaii, NASA’s carbon-monitoring satellites, and the EPA’s greenhouse gas reporting.
Think about what it means to turn off the instruments that measure what is happening to our planet — at the exact moment the planet is telling us something has gone terribly wrong. This is not governance. This is willful blindness passed on to our children as an inheritance.
Meanwhile, none of the last three UN climate summits has emphasized phasing out fossil fuels or monitoring emissions. The UN Environment Programme’s Emissions Gap Report 2025 is subtitled “Off Target.”
We Must Fight This Like the War It Is
Bill McKibben — the founder of 350.org and Third Act, and arguably the most important climate communicator of the last four decades — has long argued that the real enemy is not indifference or inertia, but the fossil fuel industry’s deliberate, well-funded campaign to prevent change. The disinformation campaign orchestrated by the fossil fuel industry, which borrowed its tactics from Big Tobacco, has clouded the judgment of editors, politicians, and citizens since the 1990s — the very decades when action might have averted the worst of what is now unfolding.
James Hansen — the former NASA scientist who famously testified before Congress in 1988 that global warming was real and human-caused — put it plainly alongside McKibben: even though the science was clear and robust, “we were losing the fight. It was all about money and power.”
The original text also mentions Margaret Klein Salamon, founder of the Climate Emergency Fund and author of Facing the Climate Emergency, who has argued powerfully and consistently that we must treat this moment exactly as we would treat a world war — not with incremental policy, not with gentle nudges, but with the full mobilization of resources, public will, and political courage that existential threats demand.
These thinkers are right. We should not be at war with each other across political divides. We should be at war — together — with the forces that have knowingly destabilized the Earth’s climate for profit, and with the political cowardice that has allowed them to continue doing so.
We Are Not Powerless — But We Must Act Now
Scientists have warned that nations need to cut carbon emissions nearly 50 percent by 2030 to keep warming below 1.5°C. The world is now moving into the latter half of the critical decade to do so.
This is not a distant deadline. It is now. The decisions being made in legislatures, boardrooms, and ballot boxes in 2026 will determine whether the children alive today inherit a difficult world — or an unlivable one.
UNICEF’s Prospects for Children: Global Outlook 2026 puts it directly: “The future for children will be shaped by the choices we make in 2026 and the coming years.”
As one 18-year-old climate activist from Italy said: “I am worried about climate change because the future of us young people is in danger. If governments do not act quickly, we will not have a future where we can live in peace with our children.”
And that same research found something worth holding onto: conversations with students involved in climate activism show that their engagement has helped them manage their anxiety about the future and channel it into determination, courage, and optimism — with the understanding that “the best antidote to anxiety and despair is action.”
What You Can Do Today
The scale of this crisis can make us feel small. It isn’t meant to. Here is what is true: every fraction of a degree of warming that is prevented matters. Every child who grows up in a community with clean air, intact ecosystems, and a stable climate matters. And every person who decides that this is worth fighting for — who calls their representative, joins an organization, moves their money out of fossil fuel-financing banks, votes, organizes, and refuses to look away — matters enormously.
Demand that your elected officials treat this as the emergency it is. Support organizations like 350.org, Third Act, the Climate Emergency Fund, the Sunrise Movement, and UNICEF’s climate programs. Talk to the children in your life not to terrify them, but to tell them the truth — and to let them know that the adults around them are not giving up on their future.
Because that future is not lost yet. But the window is closing. And what we do right now — in this year, in this decade — is what history will remember.
The children are watching. And they are counting on us.
Tito
…more to come
empowerment & inner transformation... 
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