Climate change and response

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Historical trends and events

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2021. Countries Fail the Climate Change Challenge—Again. “A code red for humanity.” That’s how UN Secretary General António Guterres’ described the UN report released in August that concluded that humanity faces catastrophic climate change unless the emission of heat-trapping gases is slashed. But one didn’t need to read the 4,000-page report to know that. Extreme weather dominated the news in 2021, as it has for much of the past decade. Record drought wracked the American southwest. Record flooding devastated Belgium and western Germany. Epic wildfires tore through Greece. Late season monsoons ravaged India and Nepal. Climate optimists could find some developments to cheer in 2021. President Biden committed the United States to rejoining the Paris Climate Agreement on his first day in office. China agreed in September to discontinue financing coal-fired power plants overseas, and Iceland opened a facility to take carbon dioxide out of the air. At the COP-26 meeting in Glasgow in November countries pledged to
2022 Climate Change Intensifies. Forty years ago, when scientists first warned of a possible climate catastrophe, it was a problem for the future. Two thousand twenty-two showed that that perilous future has arrived. Once rare extreme weather events became commonplace. Europe experienced record heat waves that burned forests and dried up rivers. Pakistan endured a similarly brutal heat wave that was followed by epic monsoons that left as much as one-third of the country under water. The U.S. southwest endured a record drought that shrank reservoirs like Lake Mead and diminished crops yields. On the other side of the country, Hurricane Ian wreaked havoc on Florida. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of the United Nations warned in April that the effects of climate change will soon become irreversible. There were a few bright spots in the climate change debate. In August, the U.S. Congress passed, and President Joe Biden signed into law, the Inflation Reduction Act, which has been heralded as the mos

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