A personal reckoning with David Wallace-Wells, then and now
I pulled up the old episode again this week. The Doctor’s Farmacy conversation with David Wallace-Wells — recorded in July 2019 — sat in my browser like a letter I had written to myself and forgotten to open. Back then, his book The Uninhabitable Earth was fresh on shelves, the New York Times had called it the most terrifying book they had ever read, and the warning he carried into Mark Hyman’s studio was simple and devastating: half of all the damage burning fossil fuels has ever done to this planet had happened in just the previous 30 years. Speed. Scope. Severity. Those were his three words. I remember writing them down.
I sat with that video again on a humid morning in May 2026, and I have to be honest with you — I had to pause it twice. Not because it was outdated. Because it wasn’t.
Because almost everything he warned us about has either arrived, accelerated, or been institutionally betrayed.
Then: What He Told Us in 2019
In that 2019 conversation, Wallace-Wells laid it out the way a coroner lays out evidence. The damage was not slow. The damage was not distant. The damage was a stampede already trampling the present. He talked about food shortages. Refugee emergencies. Cascading systems failures. He reminded us — and this is the historical fact I keep returning to — that of the five mass extinctions Earth has endured, all but the one that killed the dinosaurs involved a climate destabilized by greenhouse gases. The most violent of them, the Permian extinction 250 million years ago, was unleashed when CO₂ heated the planet by roughly 5°C and triggered methane release. It ended with all but a sliver of life on Earth gone.
He was not being theatrical. He was reading us our own family history.
And he told us we still had time. Not unlimited time. But time.
Now: May 2026 — What the Earth Has Said Back
Let me tell you what has happened in the years since I first watched that episode.
Three years in a row — 2023, 2024, and 2025 — were the three hottest years ever recorded. We crossed 1.5°C above pre-industrial temperatures, at least temporarily. The World Meteorological Organization now projects every year between 2025 and 2029 will sit somewhere between 1.2°C and 1.9°C above that pre-industrial baseline, with a 70% chance the five-year average breaches 1.5°C entirely.
Atmospheric CO₂ has reached 152% of its 1750 level. The oceans, which have been quietly absorbing about 90% of the excess heat we keep dumping into the system, now hold the warmest surface temperatures in the modern record. Sea level rise has reached its highest point in the satellite era. The Conejeres Glacier in Colombia has been officially declared extinct. Every glacier in Venezuela is now gone or on its deathbed.
And in October 2025, 160 scientists from 23 countries — led by Professor Tim Lenton at the University of Exeter — published the Global Tipping Points Report and confirmed what so many of us already felt in our bones: Earth has crossed its first major climate tipping point. Warm-water coral reefs — those rainforests of the sea that sustain a quarter of all marine life and feed roughly a billion human beings — are in irreversible decline. Between 2023 and 2025 the world saw the largest coral bleaching event ever recorded, damaging 84% of reefs across 83 countries. As Steve Smith, one of the lead authors, put it: tipping points are no longer a future risk. They are our new reality.
Read that again. New reality.
Other tipping points are queued up behind the reefs like dominoes waiting for a breath of wind: the West Antarctic ice sheet, the Greenland ice sheet, abrupt permafrost thaw, Amazon rainforest dieback. The Dartington Declaration, endorsed by over 640 scientists and 585 additional signatories in 2025, now argues that 1.5°C is not safe. They are pushing the world to aim for 1°C. We are already past 1.4°C.
And Then There Is What We Are Doing About It
Here is where my voice has to harden, because the planet is being heated and the truth-telling machinery is being dismantled at the same time.
In February 2026 the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency formally rescinded the Endangerment Finding — the legal foundation that allowed the federal government to regulate greenhouse gases at all. Six days earlier, the U.S. Federal Judicial Center had quietly removed the climate science chapter from the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence — the document federal judges rely on in cases involving science. The United States has withdrawn from the IPCC and from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. On April 27, 2026, the President fired all 22 members of the National Science Board. Twenty-four states are now suing.
This is not a coincidence of headlines. This is a coordinated deletion of the country’s ability to see what is happening to it.
David Wallace-Wells himself said this past December, looking back on the year, that the top climate story of 2025 was not a fire or a flood — it was an administration. A deliberate, organized turning away from climate consciousness.
I want to say this plainly, in my own voice, because I owe it to you and to my grandchildren and to the children I will never meet: deleting the chapter does not delete the climate. Firing the scientists does not unfire the forests. Rescinding the finding does not rescind the physics. The atmosphere is not negotiating with anyone.
What’s Different About Wallace-Wells Now
There is one thing that has changed, and it matters. Wallace-Wells has said in recent interviews that if he were writing The Uninhabitable Earth today, he would no longer open it with the line “It is worse, much worse, than you think.” He has rewritten his own framework to allow more room for hope. Not because the danger has shrunk — it hasn’t — but because the solutions have grown.
In 2025, for the first time in history, wind and solar generated more electricity in the European Union (30%) than fossil fuels (29%). Fourteen of the EU’s 27 countries now generate more electricity from clean sources than dirty ones. The Global Tipping Points Report identified positive tipping points too — moments when adoption of clean technology, regenerative agriculture, and community-led action snowball faster than collapse.
There is a domino effect in the destruction. There is also a domino effect in the healing.
This is the knife’s edge we live on right now. Both dominoes are falling. The question — the only question that matters — is which line of dominoes we add our weight to.
What I Felt Pressing Play Again
I will not pretend to you that I was calm watching that 2019 episode again. I was not. There is a particular grief in hearing a warning delivered clearly, in good faith, by a person of sound mind, and realizing that the world received it and shrugged. There is a particular kind of rage at watching governments treat the scientific record like an inconvenient receipt.
But underneath the grief and the rage, there is something I have been calling Adaptive Resiliency — a discipline more than a feeling. The discipline of refusing both the comfort of denial and the seduction of despair. The discipline of staying in the dialogue. The discipline of building the community, the systems, the soil, and the social fabric that can hold us when the bigger institutions cannot or will not.
Wallace-Wells was right in 2019. He is right now. The crisis is fast, it is everywhere, and it is severe. But we are also not standing at the door of a sealed tomb. We are standing at the door of a choice — repeated, daily, collectively — between two futures that are both still possible and neither of which is the past.
The climate we had before industrialization is gone. We do not get it back. What we get instead is the chance to decide what kind of climate, what kind of communities, what kind of humans we become on the other side of this passage.
A Note Before Sunday
I told some of you earlier this week that I would be sharing this Sunday, between 6 and 8 a.m., a set of ideas I have been refining for months — concrete practices for individuals, families, and small communities who want to move from awareness into Adaptive Resiliency in motion. Tools for the heart, the household, and the network. Tools that fold AI, dialogue, cooperation, and nature-based wisdom into one practical morning rhythm you can actually live.
I am not going to spoil any of it here. I will only say this: if you have been waiting for a sign that it is time to stop scrolling and start belonging to this work — this is the sign. Bring coffee. Bring a notebook. Bring whoever you love.
I will see you Sunday, between 6 and 8 a.m.
The Earth has already said what it needs to say. The rest is on us.
— Tito
empowerment & inner transformation... 
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