The Godzilla El Niño

This global weather phenomenon could help make 2027 the hottest year on record. Our friends at The Gray Area explore what the upcoming El Niño season could reveal about the future of our climate. Guests: Sean Illing, host of The Gray Area; David Wallace-Wells, New York Times climate writer For show transcripts, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unxtranscripts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ For more, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unexplainable⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ And please email us! ⁠⁠⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠⁠⁠ We read every email. Support Unexplainable (and get ad-free episodes) by becoming a Vox Member today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/members⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Thank you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Support for the show comes from Google Gemini. You know that moment when curiosity strikes? You're exploring a new city with the family and a sculpture catches your daughter's eye. What is that? Who made it? With Gemini, you can snap a picture and get a fully interactive breakdown of its history, architecture, and even hidden secrets. Gemini is built for moments like that. Whether you're learning something new, solving a problem, or looking for your next favorite thing, Google Gemini is here to help. Download Gemini, Google's AI app, or visit gemini.google.com to learn more.

• 0:39Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.

• 1:06Speaker 02

  Welcome to Weather Scope. The biggest news this season, undoubtedly, the huge mass of warm Pacific water known as El Nino.

• 1:13Speaker 03

  You might have heard, but El Nino is back.

• 1:16Speaker 04

  I am El Nino.

• 1:19Speaker 03

  When I hear the words El Nino, my mind immediately goes to one very specific place.

• 1:25Speaker 04

  But those of you who don't habla español, El Nino is Spanish for the Nino.

• 1:36Speaker 03

  Chris Farley, in one of my favorite old SNL sketches, playing the actual El Nino somehow, has this kind of crazy wrestling getup on with his shirt wide open, gusting in the wind.

• 1:49Speaker 04

  I challenge any of you punk ass tropical storms to a no holds barred cage match because El Nino is coming for you, and it ain't gonna be pretty.

• 2:02Speaker 03

  Sadly, El Nino is not a legendary comedian standing in a storm dressed like a wrestler. But to be honest, it is kind of a mystery. Somehow, this warm patch of water in the Pacific influences rain and weather and even famines all over the world. And scientists still aren't sure exactly how it works. So today on the show, as we head into what might be the strongest El Nino ever measured, which could make 2027 the hottest year ever measured, we wanted to feature a great episode from our friends over at The Gray Area. Host Sean Eling talks with New York Times climate reporter David Wallace Wells about

• 2:43Speaker 03

  the potentially dramatic impacts of the coming El Nino and whether next year might be a preview of what life is like going forward. Here's Sean and David.

• 2:54Speaker 05

  David Wallace Wells, welcome to the show.

• 2:57Speaker 06

  Thanks for having me. Good to be here.

• 2:59Speaker 05

  Just about everybody has heard the term El Nino, but I think most of us, myself included for the most part until very recently, don't really know what it is. So let's just start there. What is an El Nino?

• 3:13Speaker 06

  It's a climatic event that happens irregularly, but pretty often, usually about every three or four years, sometimes as infrequently as every seven, in which you get a burst of warmer than normal temperatures in the coastal Pacific, off the coast of South America. And then that has a lot of amazingly global consequences in ways that I think are not intuitive to most normies who don't know all about the details of climate science, and in particular, this genre of climate science called teleconnections, where scientists have identified relationships between, you know, certain weather events in different

• 3:55Speaker 06

  parts of the world, even if they can't always identify exactly what about one weather event is driving another weather event, they can see in the record that they happen together and that there's some kind of connection for them. And so in this case, you see, across the Western US, you tend to see a lot more rain. You tend to see a lot less rain across Brazil and the Amazon. You see disruption to the monsoon season in South Asia. You see, you know, a similar disruption to rain across the, across the Sahel and Sub-Saharan Africa, and you see a kind of a suppression typically of hurricane activity in the Caribbean,

• 4:37Speaker 06

  which is all to say, it's a disruption, it's a global disruption to the basic normal patterns that we come to depend on. But the disruption isn't all in one direction. At the global level, it makes things hotter. And the one that we're seeing this year forming now, maybe a record-setting one that drives global temperatures up more than basically anything we've ever seen before. But beyond the global temperature, the impacts that we see in some cases push climate in one direction and in other places in another direction. And I think the best way to think about it is just like, we shook up the whole planet's climate system and we see a lot more disorder than we see in non-El Nino years.

• 5:15Speaker 05

  How is it that warming in one part of the Pacific scrambles weather patterns across the world? I mean, it's very butterfly effecty, but is there a fairly simple causal explanation here?

• 5:26Speaker 06

  As best I understand, the answer is no. And I mean, this is an area of science that is still evolving.

• 5:34Speaker 05

  Great.

• 5:34Speaker 06

  Climate scientists are trying to figure out how it is the case that something that happens in one part of the world affects other parts of the world. And it's just a reminder, as I think climate kind of always reminds us, that this system is quite mysterious and complex. There is an enormous amount about this system that is still deeply mysterious to us and which I think in many people should inspire some, some amount of kind of awe and mystery.

• 6:03Speaker 05

  What is particularly scary about this El Nino? Why do scientists seem to be alarmed?

• 6:11Speaker 06

  Well, there are a few different components to it. The first is that we are going to experience it at a much higher baseline of global average temperature than anyone that's ever been experienced before. And that can sound a little like a quotidian observation. It is the case, given that we are warming the planet quite rapidly, that just about every year is warmer than just about every year that came before. And so any unusual event is going to happen in an unprecedented climate, set of climate conditions. But I do think it's worth emphasizing that fact, maybe because we've normalized it so much that, you know, we don't raise our eyes or raise our eyebrows when we see that we're setting new records for global average temperature.

• 6:53Speaker 06

  And that means that novel events like an El Nino are happening on top of that baseline. But another reason why scientists are concerned is because it is a super El Nino. Some of them are even calling it a Godzilla El Nino, which is to say, you know, the temperature levels that we're going to see, the boost that we're going to see because of this event, may be bigger than any similar event ever observed before in modern history. And that's particularly alarming because some of the events in that period in the late 19th century had absolutely catastrophic global impacts. The El Ninos in particular of the late 1870s were among the most produced, perhaps the

• 7:38Speaker 06

  most human suffering that the modern world has ever experienced. We're talking about famines that killed tens of millions of people all around the world, from Africa to South Asia to China. And I don't want to suggest that this El Nino is capable of producing that kind of suffering, just, you know, obviously 2026 is a different world than 1878. But it gives you a good framework with which to understand how these kinds of, you know, how the consequences of an El Nino may filter through our political world. If, you know, over the next year, we see significant crop failures in multiple parts of the world, which is maybe even more possible because there's a kind of fertilizer shortage

• 8:21Speaker 06

  as a result of the war in Iran, you know, we probably will be able to respond to that such that 10 or 50 million people don't die. But there will be considerable political disarray that results, you know, bread riots, political protests, civil unrest, perhaps in multiple parts of the world. And I'm not saying that's inevitable because of this El Nino. A lot of it is unknown, but I think it reminds us that a huge amount of even what we take for granted as stable features of modern life in the 21st century are nevertheless subject on some level to disturbance and, you know, perturbation by the climate system. And this climate system this year is winding up to really give us quite a wallop.

• 9:05Speaker 05

  David, it definitely does not inspire confidence that researchers are using terms like Godzilla El Nino and super duper El Nino. That's, does not sound awesome. I mean, when will this thing officially arrive? When will we actually start to feel this thing?

• 9:26Speaker 06

  The basic structure is that it arrives at the end of the calendar year, reaches a peak early in the winter of next year, and then dissipates over the following nine months or 12 months. So we're talking about something that we're going to start to notice at a global level, say, November, December of this year, and see in a peak in the, in the winter, spring of next year. But there are already effects, which is why we're able to see it coming.

• 9:54Speaker 05

  How unevenly will the effects of this be distributed in this country, for instance, right? Who will see more rain? Who will see more droughts? Who will feel this thing the most regionally?

• 10:06Speaker 06

  Well, different people are going to be hit by different effects. So, you know, I mentioned earlier, the risk of a really serious hurricane is actually considerably lower in an El Nino year than in a normal year. And that means, you know, for plenty of people living on the coast in, you know, the Gulf Coast or Florida, they may be relieved and

• 10:24Speaker 05

  That's all I know about El Ninos.

• 10:27Speaker 06

  In California, they're likely to have really significant rainfall events, some, you know, raising the possibility of these atmospheric river events that we've seen more and more of over the last decade. And on some level, that seems reassuring because at the moment, the American West as a whole is quite starved for water. And as a result, we are really worried this year about a quite bad fire season in the United States and particularly the American West. And it may well be that we do have a really bad fire season in which many, you know, much of the forests of the West goes up in smoke. And then immediately afterward, there's a period in which we have really intense rainfall, and that can produce landslides and mudslides at local level, but also at a kind of regional

• 11:12Speaker 06

  level. In 2018, we had a similar dynamic. It wasn't powered by El Nino, but the horrible wildfires in California gave way to a really intense period of rain, and there were mudslides, lethal mudslides in Santa Barbara, where a number of people were killed. Now, exactly where this stuff falls geographically is a bit chancy. Like, we don't know whether Los Angeles is going to have a more intense experience of El Nino than San Diego, for instance. That's, you know, a lot of this is climate, but a lot of this is weather, and a lot of that is left up to chance. But as always with climate disasters, it's the most vulnerable who bear the brunt of

• 11:55Speaker 06

  the impact, and the relatively privileged who are able to protect themselves from it. That's not an absolute rule, but in general, the people who are exposed to climate disaster are the people who are exposed to all of the ravages of the modern world, which is to say, you know, poorer, browner, less educated. And in that sense, I think we can expect El Nino to arrive as a grotesque, as a sort of nightmare of our social pathologies.

• 12:23Speaker 05

  The last super El Nino was, I think, 2015, 2016. Just for scale, you know, how bad was that one? And how much worse might this one be compared to that?

• 12:35Speaker 06

  Yeah, well, the easiest way to measure it is to say that it set all of these global temperature records and produced a ton of heat waves. And this one is on track to be larger. It's on track to be larger than every El Nino on record, going back to the ones in the 1880s and 1970s. So exactly how that will affect, have particular effects on, you know, crops and heat waves and droughts in particular parts of the world, you know, a lot of this is rolling the dice. But we are looking at a more intense El Nino on top of a considerably higher global average

• 13:15Speaker 06

  temperature baseline in a world that is remarkably exposed still, all of these decades after we stopped worrying, started worrying about warming, remarkably exposed still to the ravages of climate impacts. And on that point, I mean, you know, I don't want to dwell too much on the experience or the example of the LA fires from last year, but I do think it's really illustrative. And I think it just reminds us that, you know, yes, climate has differential impacts. Yes, it does punish the poor and poorly resourced more than those who can do something to protect themselves. But wealth itself is not a perfect buffer.

• 13:52Speaker 06

  It often, you know, teaches us diluted lessons about how safe and protected we are. And in the case of Los Angeles, I think it meant a lot of people didn't believe that any disaster of that scale was possible in their own lives. And they sort of assumed, based on the, you know, the social bubble in which they lived, that they were perfectly protected. And we may tell ourselves, living in little privileged bubbles, that we are safe. And in any given year, most of us will be, and most of our lives will be normal. But privilege is not a perfect protection against these impacts.

• 14:36Speaker 05

  Next year, 2027, could be a preview of what normal, what everyday life will be like in a decade or so. Talk about that.

• 14:47Speaker 06

  So here we are in 2026, and the global average temperature is about 1.5 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial average. And it doesn't sound like very much on any given day, that kind of effect is basically imperceptible to the average person, but it is a global average, and it hides a lot of extremes. It is also right about what we agreed we would try to limit warming to in the Paris Agreement in 2015. We said we would definitely keep warming below two degrees, and we would do everything we could to keep warming close to 1.5 degrees Celsius. And that came about because after a longer period in which climate scientists and climate

• 15:31Speaker 06

  policy people were talking about two degrees as a good target, there was emerging science and emerging political sense among the world's most vulnerable countries that two degrees wasn't enough, that 1.5 degrees was itself going to be quite difficult to manage, but anything north of that was going to be quite catastrophic. And when we signed that agreement just 10 years ago, we were not yet north of one degree of warming. And we are now, in the long-term average, somewhere about 1.3 or 1.4, and in a single year, at 1.5. And we are heading quite rapidly, not just past the goal that we set for ourselves as

• 16:16Speaker 06

  a more ambitious goal, 1.5 degrees, but towards that less ambitious goal, two degrees, which, again, many of the world's most vulnerable countries rose up in protest about saying, this is not acceptable for us. And now it seems, practically speaking, inevitable, we're heading towards a future that we defined as unacceptable. And when I say that, I don't just mean that the scientists at the IPCC defined as unacceptable. I mean that when they published their research into the difference between these two levels, 1.5 degrees and two degrees Celsius warming, that report was the event that gave us the

• 16:56Speaker 06

  huge global climate awakening in late 2018, 2019 into 2020. It's the reason that we know who Greta Thunberg is. It's the reason we heard of Extinction Rebellion and Sunrise. It's the reason we started talking about a Green New Deal and a Green Deal in Europe, all of that. And all the talk that presidents and prime ministers, all the lip service they paid to climate change at Davos and at the UN in the years that followed, and all of the similar talk that we heard from the world's corporate leaders, all the CEOs and plutocrats, all of that came out of a report that was basically saying, we need to limit warming below two degrees. That fear, that panic, that sense of urgency, and that sense of, you know, this must be

• 17:40Speaker 06

  a top priority, a top political and social priority for the world, all of that was the result of a scientific report documenting how bad things would be at two degrees. And we now know that we will be heading north of two degrees. So the things that terrified us into action not that long ago, six, eight years ago, are now our inevitable future.

• 18:05Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up require compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.

• 19:19Speaker 05

  Is it your belief that 2027 will be a real no bullshit test of how much climate disruption we can effectively manage at this stage?

• 19:32Speaker 06

  I think it's going to be a test on that score, which we will fail. And the question is, what impact that makes socially and politically?

• 19:44Speaker 06

  We are already seeing every year in countless ways how poorly we prepared we are for the climate present. But most of the time, it isn't producing the kind of political response and social response that I would like to see. And I worry that the basic pattern is going to continue to be that going forward, even into a much warmer future, where rather than changing course on the mitigation side, yes, but also more profoundly perhaps on the adaptation side, rather than changing course and designing a much more responsive and resilient future, we will just find ourselves

• 20:22Speaker 06

  defining more and more suffering as acceptable and normal as a, as sort of the cost of going about our daily lives without being too preoccupied by the course of climate change.

• 20:38Speaker 05

  Yeah, I would say a decade ago, a lot of people, myself included, I guess, really did believe that extreme weather would eventually force climate action.

• 20:53Speaker 05

  Can we just say by now that that theory has failed? Or that at least anything short of near apocalyptic will not spur climate action? Is that where you are?

• 21:03Speaker 06

  What I would say is that, you know, people are complicated and populations are complicated and politics is complicated. We have seen a number of disasters of a scale that would have been completely unthinkable to previous generations over the course of this generation. And, you know, I think of this story going back to Katrina, which was an eye opening event more than 20 years ago now, and seemed for a time to mark a high point in American climate concern, helped discredit the presidency of George W. Bush, gave us, you know, an

• 21:44Speaker 06

  upsurge of climate urgency and, you know, the election of Barack Obama, who, when he accepted the nomination or won the nomination for the Democratic, Democratic nomination for president, said that this would be the moment that we looked back on as the moment that the seas slowed their rise and the planet began to heal. There was a lot of, you know, an upsurge of concern then. We've seen a bunch of climate disasters just in the United States since then. Again and again, there's this, there's a period of intense national focus and then a kind of a withdrawing from the story of climate change. But I think that that narrative that we keep getting knocked back on our heels by

• 22:27Speaker 06

  climate disasters and then forget about them entirely is also too simplistic because whatever you think, looking out at the climate landscape today and looking at headlines and watching cable news and listening to politicians, you might think that everybody had moved on from climate and was no longer worried about it. The truth is that when you look into the survey data, we're basically at the highest point for climate anxiety that we've ever been. There were a couple of points during Donald Trump's first term where, you know, the respondents in the surveys might be one point higher than we are today, but, you know, those points aside, we are more, Americans are more concerned about climate change than they were in the aftermath of Katrina. They're more worried than they were at any point in the George W. Bush presidency. They're more worried than they were at any point in the Barack Obama presidency and

• 23:12Speaker 06

  they're more worried at any point than they were in the Joe Biden presidency. So we have a interesting political story here, just in America, where we're kind of telling ourselves that the country has moved on from climate and has maybe judged the Democratic Party to have made a miscalculation in prioritizing climate during the Biden years. But in fact, at the level of individual people, how they feel about their lives, the lives of their communities and the future of their country, they are just about, if not more worried about climate impacts than they've ever been before. But our elite discourse and our elite policymaking has some, somehow decided to treat those anxieties as irrelevant.

• 23:55Speaker 05

  The question is not, are they worried? The question is, are they worried enough to actually sacrifice anything in order to make headway against?

• 24:05Speaker 06

  I mean, I would, I would, I think that, I think that that's an important.

• 24:07Speaker 05

  I'm not saying they're not, I'm just posing the question.

• 24:09Speaker 06

  I'm, I would, I would say a couple of things about it. The first is that, you know, you often hear from people who think we needn't worry as much about climate changes as Democratic politicians say did in the period 2018 to 2023. You often hear from those people that most Americans are not willing to pay, say $10 a month or whatever to like, take action on climate. You know, in some ways, I feel like that's, it's a kind of a way of weaponizing American entitlement against one particular set of policy crusades. But the other thing I would say is that, you know, this to some degree has been true

• 24:53Speaker 06

  for a number of years, but is becoming even more true and in the future will become even, even, even more true.

• 25:00Speaker 06

  It's not the case that we need to shoulder burdens in any meaningful sense to take action on the mitigation side or on the adaptation side. You know, what's called the levelized cost of electricity, which is a somewhat misleading measure of how expensive electricity is, but has been the sort of industry standard for a generation. Solar power is dramatically cheaper than any fossil fuel alternative that's ever been produced. Now, it's misleading, that measure is misleading because it only accounts for the marginal cost of electricity and not the overall cost of a system of electricity. And because you get more solar when the sun's shining and get more wind power when the

• 25:44Speaker 06

  wind's blowing, you need to, you know, build out around that to have a reliable supply of electricity. But according to some new reports that have just been published over the last month or so, because batteries have now made this incredibly dramatic improvement in their cost, like solar did a decade ago and like wind has done, you can now use batteries, very cheap batteries, to even out the distribution of solar and wind power. And that means that the overall cost, according to this recent research, of renewable power is now lower than any alternative system. And we know that those price declines are going to continue for renewables and we know that they will not decline for fossil fuels.

• 26:27Speaker 06

  So to the extent that we're talking about power and electricity, we know that this bargain, this, you know, this calculation is a more rapid transition, better for us or worse for us, worse for us. We know that going forward, it will be a better deal to do more renewables and not do fossil. And the world sees that. I'm not like a, you know, an economic determinist. I think that politics plays a huge role here, as does culture and, and, you know, other social cues. But when you look around, you know, let's say the United States right now, in the United States, we have a president in the White House who is remarkably opposed to renewable energy. He has done an awful lot to try to kneecap the development and rollout of renewables in America.

• 27:11Speaker 06

  And yet last year, when he returned to office, more than 90% of all the new energy infrastructure built in America was green. What that means is that for every unit of new fossil fuel infrastructure we are building, we built nine times as much green energy. This year is, the share is going to be even bigger. It's expected to be 93%, which is about what it is around the world entirely. And with the Iran war too, we see many countries around the world looking at the logic of their dependence on fossil fuels and thinking, why would I continue to depend on?

• 27:50Speaker 06

  International actors who may be malevolent or may just be indifferent, but are not, you know, they're not domestic, they're international, they have their own interests. Why would I depend on them to import a power source and depend on them in such a way that I need it continuously supplied to my country at prices that they determine, not me, when I can just do a one-time importation of green energy infrastructure and then start to collect the dividends in the form of sun and wind, which never stop and are domestically controlled. And so you've seen in the wake of the Iran war, a huge number of countries all around the world, and I think most importantly around the developing world, who've made huge investment in policy recalibrations to promote a more rapid renewable build-out.

• 28:34Speaker 06

  So I think we're in a place now where, you know, if you're talking about this as a race, if you're talking about this as a contest, it seems obvious that the green stuff is winning. The problem, which we could talk about, is that it's not winning nearly fast enough to avoid some of these quite scary climate outcomes. So

• 28:51Speaker 05

  I mean, you just mentioned the Trump presidency. I mean, I don't, you know, how much a problem, how much of a problem is that, that we have this administration at this moment, heading into 2027, which for all the reasons you've laid out, could be not just the hottest year on record, but maybe the hottest year on record by a significant margin.

• 29:13Speaker 06

  I think it, you know, there, there are so many reasons why I'm not happy that Donald Trump is the president. Disaster response is one of them. I mean, I think that the way that the response to Hurricane Helene was politicized and the way that FEMA has been reorganized in the aftermath is quite bad. It means that we are much more vulnerable to natural disasters in the US than we would have been otherwise.

• 29:35Speaker 05

  Do we know how much more vulnerable? Do we really know? Will we know until something bad happens and we have to respond?

• 29:41Speaker 06

  Well, I mean, they're trying to, you know, push disaster response, the responsibility for disaster response onto the states who simply don't have the budget to, to respond to anything like these disasters like we've seen over the last few years. It's, you know, anytime we push any responsibility onto the states, there's an enormous problem because they all are required by law to balance their budgets. They can't have, you know, they can't go into debt because there's a particular crisis. I mean, we'll see what happens. It may well be the case that the federal government swoops in with a lot of money that they wouldn't have otherwise or didn't expect to allocate, as they have, for instance, to bail out the American farmers from, you know, a lot of impacts from tariffs to, to weather events

• 30:25Speaker 06

  over the last couple of years. We'll see. But the way that the Trump administration seems to want to deal with natural disasters is basically to ask the states to deal with it themselves, which I think is truly a recipe for disaster if it, if it comes to pass. But there's also, you know, beyond that, what Trump is doing in the world, trying to, you know, restore a sense that fossil fuels are at the heart of the modern economy and of geopolitics. His stated purpose in toppling the leader of Venezuela was, you know, to get control of their oil. And, you know, obviously, the war in Iran has enormous fossil fuel implications, but and its implications for the green transition are, if anything,

• 31:09Speaker 06

  positive because it has taught so many countries around the world not to depend on the supply of fossil fuels, given that this is the third fossil fuel shock since 2020. And we've had many more going back in decades before. Nevertheless, I think there's something quite corrosive and damaging about the basic, the basic model of human interaction that Donald Trump works with and which he is trying to impose on the world in which nations owe no, nothing to one another. And the only law that they need to abide is the law of their own self-interest as they understand it.

• 31:49Speaker 05

  Well, there's certainly no solution to any of this that doesn't involve cooperation at every level. And the institutions and the structures that facilitated cooperation across nation-state lines are in much worse shape than they were before.

• 32:06Speaker 06

  You know, five or six years ago, I might have said that that would, that spelled doom for our ability to take control of this system, this trajectory, that was still a relevant consideration. The developments of the last few years have made me think that, in fact, we may have really miscalibrated and miscalculated there. When I think about what happened in Pakistan in 2022, when in response to an energy crisis produced by Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the country basically just started buying so many Chinese solar panels that they effectively doubled capacity. Now, that's astonishing. It's not entirely good because it means that many people are now no longer on the Pakistani

• 32:49Speaker 06

  grid, which means that the grid itself is probably getting less revenue than it should have. And the people who are poor and unable to afford their own solar panels are probably getting less reliable electricity as a result. But nevertheless, you know, huge climate win, not produced even through policy, and certainly not produced because there was a major handout from the global north to the global south, but just because individuals with some amount of cash to burn took measures into their own hands and decarbonized their own lives. We're now seeing that in many other sectors and economies all across the developing world, from Nepal, where 76% of cars sold last year were EVs, to, you know, across Sub-Saharan Africa, we're seeing remarkably rapid uptake of, of solar panels and solar

• 33:32Speaker 06

  power. Now it looks like many of those places are moving even more rapidly than the countries in the global north, despite being resource-strapped. On the flip side of that, I do think that, you know, many of these places are still incredibly vulnerable in terms of adaptation. And there may be considerably more that we need to do to help them on that front.

• 34:39Speaker 05

  How confident are you in our ability to adapt? Because that's really what the question is here, right? A lot of these changes, they're already priced in. So it comes down to how well or how poorly we will be able to adapt to a world that is going to get hotter and more volatile.

• 34:58Speaker 06

  The true answer is that I don't know. And I would say, one of the things that's happened to me over the last few years, as I've watched this story unfold and documented it and reflected on it, is that I've felt humbled in a lot of different directions and have realized how much more we should be placing uncertainty about the future at the heart of how we think about these challenges. We will be seeing many more heat waves. We will be seeing much more fire. We will be seeing much more flooding. And in general, much more suffering than we needed to see if we had taken action earlier.

• 35:39Speaker 06

  But I think that in the, in the big picture, that, you know, most of that is going to be manageable, navigable to us as humans. But I don't feel extremely confident in that because the challenges are so long that I can't possibly, and so large that I can't possibly wrap my head around even the scale of the challenge, let alone what would be required to accommodate those impacts without huge disturbance. And that's leaving aside the possibility that if we end up on the emissions trajectory that tells us now to

• 36:22Speaker 06

  expect two and a half degrees, the climate system may surprise us, as Jim Henson is warning us, and end up at three and a half or four degrees, or maybe even north of that. In which case, a lot of the suppositions that we've carried forward are going to be proven quite foolish. And I think it is the case, as climate deniers often say, that climate alarmists, of whom I am one, do often talk about the future in deterministic terms and don't allow for human adaptation, which will happen. But I also think in telling

• 37:05Speaker 06

  those stories, they profoundly misunderstand how complex and challenging adaptation really is, and how inevitably, even in a basically optimal ideal outcome, we're going to be dealing with an imperfect response to an incredibly turbulent future.

• 37:24Speaker 05

  Well, David, I, I, I have the same feeling at the end of this conversation that I had at the end of our last one, which is to say, I feel smarter because I know more, but I do not feel more optimistic about tomorrow. But I don't bring you here to pepper me with bullshit. I ask you on the show to, to tell me the, the truth, so far as you know it. And that is what you always do, but oof.

• 37:54Speaker 05

  It's tough. It's tough.

• 37:55Speaker 06

  It's a messy, it's a messy world out there.

• 37:57Speaker 05

  Any good, do you have any good news that we can, we can dip out of here with?

• 38:01Speaker 06

  Oh, I mean,

• 38:02Speaker 05

  Could be about anything.

• 38:03Speaker 06

  The world is full of good news. And now I'm like, I'm a famous, I can be, I could be the famous, the famous optimist, David Ross. I mean, just on climate stuff, the green transition is proceeding at a breakneck pace that's much faster than even its biggest boosters said was possible 10 or 15 years ago. And really even faster than most people expected five or 10 years ago. The fact of this, of this battery revolution, changing the economic calculus for renewables is really profound. It means that we can probably in large parts of the world do a hundred percent of the time renewable power, which many people said was going to be completely impossible.

• 38:44Speaker 06

  And even before we get there, we are dealing with already in sun rich parts of the world, free electricity in the middle of the day. In Australia, they've literally passed a law promising Australian citizens that for several hours every day, they will be guaranteed free electricity. Now that doesn't help a factory that needs to run 24 hours a day. But in many other cases, you can imagine, you know, designing your small business and its activity around absolutely free, 100% free electricity. That's just on, you know, that's just on, on the, on the green transition side of power. When you think about the EV rollout that we're seeing all around the world, you never

• 39:25Speaker 06

  have to go to a gas station ever again, because you just charge up at your house. Whenever we electrify anything, it gets dramatically more efficient. You know, we're cleaning up air pollution, we're past air pollution, which is a much larger threat to human flourishing in, on any conceivable timescale than climate changes. Today, somewhere between five and 10 million people are dying every year from air pollution, but we're past the peak of that, we're drawing that down. There is a lot going on. There are a lot, there's a lot of progress that is really wonderful and worth celebrating. And so I don't want to give a sense overall that for all of my political despair and for all of my, what I would call my climate realism, that that means that we are all doomed in some meaningful way. We're living in an incredibly messy world.

• 40:09Speaker 06

  We have imposed on ourselves and our future much more suffering and difficulty than we needed to, because climate change will be that disruptive. But that challenge is a political one, it's a social one, it's a technological one. And while we are not pursuing each of those paths optimally, in my view, we also shouldn't assume that we will absolutely fail that each of those tests like we're getting a zero. We're going to be muddling through and the future that we live in as a result will have a lot of bad stuff in it and a lot of good stuff in it, which is of course, human nature, human history. One hopes along the way, we will wake up a little bit more, not just on climate, but

• 40:52Speaker 06

  on politics and many of these other questions of governance and social organization. And my, my hope, when I'm feeling optimistic, is that these stories are playing out on long enough timelines that we can count on at least the opportunity to make progress on those fronts, to take control of our climate system, of our economic system, of our political system in ways that have eluded us in the past.

• 41:19Speaker 05

  I, I asked for good news as a, almost like a throwaway question. And my God, that was incredible. That was amazing. David, I know you got to go. As always, a pleasure. Thank you for coming in and making me smarter.

• 41:32Speaker 06

  Thanks for having me. Great to talk as always, and I hope we cross paths again soon.

• 41:43Speaker 05

  All right. I hope you enjoyed this episode. David is so smart and such a good science communicator. And man, do we need more of those. As always, we want to know what you think. So drop us a line at the gray area at vox.com or you can leave us a message on our voicemail line at 1-800-214-5749. Please also rate, review, subscribe to the podcast. It helps us grow this lovely show. This episode was produced by Thor Newrider and Beth Morrissey, who also runs the show. Engineered by Shannon Mahoney and Christian Ayala. Fact checked by Sarah Schweppe and Emma Munger wrote our theme music. Our executive producer is Miranda Kennedy.

• 42:29Speaker 05

  The Gray Area comes out on Mondays and Fridays. Find it wherever you listen to podcasts. If you watch podcasts while you listen, you can do that too. Go to youtube.com/vox for video versions of The Gray Area.

• 42:42Speaker 05

  The show is part of Vox. Support Vox's journalism by joining our membership program today. Go to vox.com/members to sign up. And if you decide to sign up because of this show, let us know.

• 43:09Speaker 07

  Your heart can tell you a lot about your health. Apple Watch Series 12 measures your heart rate every five seconds with the most accurate heart rate sensing in wearable. So your vitals app, now with heart rate variability, can tell you when something is off and your readiness score can let you know when to rest and when to push. Hear the story in every heartbeat with Apple Watch Series 12. The features described are for wellness purposes only and not for medical use. iPhone 11 or later required. Based on Apple conducted study of heart rate accuracy, August 2026. Visit apple.com slash apple watch series 12.

• 43:39Speaker 08

  Everyone's got a hard question about AI. Your job, your kids, where it's going. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way, because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai/spotify and keep thinking. That's claude.ai/spotify.