If You Want a Glimpse into Our Collective Future, Watch the Nightly News
I record the network news every night. I have always wanted to see what the largest news audiences were being shown every day. I try to watch as little cable news as I can post-election. The network news provides a 30-minute program that reports things that occurred. Cable news spends too much time airing people’s opinions about what should or might happen and its mostly group think.
Eight months into 2025 I would estimate that at least 90% of the nightly newscasts this year have had the lead story or a major story be about climate. Flash floods, record numbers of tornados, tsunamis, massive dust storms, dangerous pollution, and forest or brush fires on multiple continents. The current reality is what people, and the vast majority of scientists have been suggesting would happen since the 1970s. Global warming has consequences. You can see them every night on the network newscasts. Mother Nature, or Earth, is responding to what we have already done to it.
This is just the beginning. In the years ahead it will only be worse. More floods, fires, tornados, dust storms and dangerous air pollution is directly ahead. What the vast majority of climate scientists have now realized is that the climate crisis is happening faster than anyone thought. In the 2015 Climate Accord, it was stated as a goal to keep the Earth from warming 1.5 degrees Celsius by the early 2030s. At that time, the Earth had warmed up 1 degree Celsius from pre-industrial levels.. The thinking at the time was that it was easy for some of the 190 countries that signed the Climate Accord to keep from increasing 50% in 20 years. Well, by 2020 it was 1.2 degrees above pre-industrial levels and the estimate for 2025 is 1.55 degrees Celsius above those pre-industrial levels. So we are already at the place that collectively we said we didn’t want to be in the 2030s.
Why were the scientists so wrong? Well, what is happening right now on Earth has never happened before since modern humanity has been on the planet, so there was no model to predict what would happen. What most of the science community did was to anticipate that global warming and the resultant change in climate would proceed on a linear basis. They were wrong about that. The reality is that it is proceeding on a more geometric progression. The amount of CO2 humanity puts into the atmosphere increases every year. The rate of warming is increasing. The rate of SLR [Sea Level Rise] is increasing. The amount of moisture – the reason for most of the floods – in the atmosphere has increased by 18-20% due to the global warming of the planet.
What do I see on the rest of the nightly newscast? That the Trump Administration seems to be the only place that climate change deniers still exist. It is dumbfounding to me that while the big stories are about how the planet is responding to what we have done to it, they are followed by some nonsense and stupid comments about windmills or solar energy.
This entire Republican/MAGA rejection of the climate crisis is bewildering. To be an administration to support fossil fuels at this time is simply nuts! It is pitting all Americans and all humanity against an ignorant policy position that clearly has no basis in fact. Your children and certainly grandchildren will have to suffer the consequences of this rank stupidity. Even the fossil fuel industry, and the institutions that invest or lend it money, know it’s time is growing short.
[A long-time joke among environmentalists: no one has ever come back from a climate change conference and said “Gee, global warming is happening more slowly than I thought” ]
What we are seeing on the nightly newscasts in 2025 will be a lesser version of what it will be by 2030. By then, most, if not all of any given newscast will be about climate related stories. Air pollution is already killing more people annually than all cancers. There might even be nightly estimates of the number of human deaths due to the climate crisis.
In 2025 these have been the lead stories on the newscasts:
-L.A. fires
-deadly flash floods
-thousands dead due to heat waves on multiple continents
-hundreds of thousands of acres of brush and forest fires globally
-more tornadoes than any year but 2011 and more EF4 or higher ones
All of these stories are the result of global warming and the resultant climate catastrophe we have created.
So, to have the most powerful man in the world talk nonsense about alternative energy and the realities of the climate catastrophe is damaging to all living things.
Many of you probably know that all living things have entered the sixth extinction event since life has existed on Planet Earth. In the past five events, between 73-96% of all living species died. These five previous extinction events happened very gradually, over long periods of time. Each of these averaged 2.8 million years in length. None of these five happened as fast as the current extinction event is occurring. The single most important fact to know about the current extinction event is that it is the first one caused by a single species: humankind.
To quote from Perplexity:
“Modern extinction rates are up to 1,000 – 10,000 times higher than the natural background rate due to human activities such as habitat destruction, climate change and pollution. Scientific debate exists around the exact numbers, but all reputable sources agree current rates far exceed historical norms. In 2025 the estimates are that 24 to 150 species disappear every day. This equals an annual rate of roughly 8,700 to 54,750 species per year, depending on the estimate used”
To make the obvious paraphrase: Trump fiddles while the planet burns.
You can see this reality every night on the news.