This article discusses the ups and downs of 2018’s climate change good and troubling news; it’s a year-end climate change reality check.
The annual December COP meetings often prompt just such status reports. For a litany of the bad news, see this New York Times December 28 editorial: “Trump Imperils the Planet.” For similarly direct summaries that note also some progress underway on other fronts, check these two pieces: Jeff Goodell’s “The Truth about these Climate Change Numbers” (Rolling Stone) and Steven Mufson’s “‘A Kind of Dark Realism’: Why the Climate Change Problem Is Starting to Look too Big to Solve” (Washington Post). Mufson’s title is a fair summary of these reporters’ well-researched views, but as Goodell wrote, “The moral of this story is not that all hope is lost. It’s that more dramatic action is needed to get off fossil fuels, and it is needed now.”