The Shape of Good Hope

Bill McKibben is organizing Step It Up 2, a national day of climate action. A scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College, McKibben is the author of The End of Nature, the first book for a general audience on climate change, and, most recently, Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future. He serves on Grist's board of directors.

This has been the grimmest week in a long time for those of us following the global-warming crisis -- and the best week, too, for those of us at Step It Up who are organizing to do something about it.

Bad news first: It's not just the wildfires in Southern California. It's not just the epic drought in the Southeast. It's not just the bathtub ring in Lake Mead. It's not just the eight inches of rain deluging poor old New Orleans. Those help to tell us how far global warming has proceeded to date, but they don't tell us what more is to come.

That's the job of science, and here's what science told us this week: things are unraveling. Check out the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences to see what I mean. Natural carbon sinks -- the top few meters of the ocean, for instance -- are turning steadily less efficient as the planet warms. They're not performing as well as they have in the past, and so more carbon is accumulating in the atmosphere instead. The natural system is starting to break down.

Not only that, but human systems are breaking down too. Instead of growing more efficient in our use of fossil fuel, the data indicates those improvements have stopped. Economies are growing fast -- China said this week that its economy would soar 11.5 percent this year -- but only by burning cheap coal in ever-larger amounts.

Taken together, the two trends mean we're moving ever farther away from getting carbon emissions under control. As Dr. Corinne Le Quere of the British Antarctic Survey put it, "Only the most extreme climate models predicted this. We didn't think it would happen until the second half of the century."

Momentum works both ways, though, and some of the news is good. As we move into the home stretch for the big Step It Up rallies on Nov. 3, everything is beginning to click. People are issuing a thousand invitations a day through our invite tool to their senators, congresspeople, and presidential candidates. And the politicians are responding -- the number of confirmed speakers for Nov. 3 has doubled in the last 24 hours. We're on our way to having more national politicians addressing a single issue on a single day than at any time since the great national teach-ins of the Vietnam era.

We don't know, in any given hour, whether to hope or despair. The computer screen shows homes going up in flames -- but it also shows hundreds of emails from organizers who are steadily going about the last-minute tasks of inviting reporters, sending out final email invitations, and calling congressional district offices. The TV blares disaster -- but the phones keep ringing with new allies in new parts of the country seeking new ways to help out.

It feels weird -- but it feels like hope.