The Godzilla El Niño - Unexplainable

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[00:01]
John Finer
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 various 18 plus what's behind Ukraine's Military Shakeup? The Ukrainians have now surpassed the United States military and basically every other military on the planet in terms of doctrine for how to fight and integrate these autonomous systems on the battlefield. And we should be learning from them. I'm John Finer.
[00:45]
Jake Sullivan
And I'm Jake Sullivan and we're the
[00:47]
David Wallace-Wells
hosts of the Long Game, a weekly national security podcast.
[00:51]
Jake Sullivan
This week we're breaking down the dismissal of Ukraine's Defense Minister, the architect of their drone strategy. The episode's out. Search for and follow the Long Game wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Weatherscope.
[01:06]
David Wallace-Wells
The biggest news this season undoubtedly the huge mass of warm Pacific water known as El Nino.
[01:11]
Jake Sullivan
You might have heard, but El Nino is back.
[01:14]
David Wallace-Wells
I am El Nino.
[01:17]
Jake Sullivan
When I hear the words El Nino, my mind immediately goes to one very specific place.
[01:23]
David Wallace-Wells
For those of you who don't habla Espanol, El Nino is Spanish Banish for the Nino.
[01:34]
Jake Sullivan
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.
[01:47]
David Wallace-Wells
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.
[02:01]
Jake Sullivan
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 Elling talks with New York Times climate reporter David Wallace Wells about 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.
[02:52]
John Finer
David Wallace Wells, welcome to the show.
[02:55]
David Wallace-Wells
Thanks for having me. Good to be here.
[02:57]
John Finer
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?
[03:11]
David Wallace-Wells
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 certain weather events in different 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. So in this case, you see across the Western U.S. 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. 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 may be 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.
[05:14]
John Finer
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?
[05:24]
David Wallace-Wells
As best I understand, the answer is no. And I mean, this is an area of science that is still evolving. 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.
[06:01]
John Finer
What is particularly scary about this El Nino? Why do scientists seem to be alarmed?
[06:09]
David Wallace-Wells
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 set of climate conditions. But I do think it's worth emphasizing that fact, maybe because we've normalized it so much that we don't raise our eyes or raise our eyebrows when we see that we're setting new records for global average temperature. 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 most human suffering that the modern world has ever experience. 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 obviously, 2026 is a different world than 1878. But it gives you a good framework with which to understand how these kinds of. How the consequences of an El Nino may filter through our political world. And if 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 as a result of the war in Iran, 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. Bread riots, political protests, civil unrest, perhaps in multiple parts of the world. And I'M not saying that's inevitable because of the Cel 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 perturbation by the climate system. And this climate system this year is winding up to really give us quite a wallop.
[09:03]
John Finer
David, it definitely does not inspire confidence that researchers are using terms like Godzilla, El Nino and Super Duper El Nino. That does not sound awesome. I mean, when will this thing officially arrive? When will we actually start to feel this thing?
[09:24]
David Wallace-Wells
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 winter, spring of next year. But there are already effects, which is why we're able to see it coming.
[09:53]
John Finer
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?
[10:04]
David Wallace-Wells
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 that's where I live.
[10:23]
John Finer
That's all I know about El Ninos
[10:26]
David Wallace-Wells
in California. They're likely to have really significant rainfall events, 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 forest 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 level. In 2018, we had a similar dynamic. It wasn't powered by El Nino, but the horrible wildfires in, 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 chancey. 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 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 or 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.
[12:22]
John Finer
The last super El Nino was, I think, 2015, 2016. Just for scale, how bad was that one and how much worse might this one be compared to that?
[12:34]
David Wallace-Wells
Yeah, well, the easiest way to measure it is to say that it sets 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 1870s. So exactly how that will affect have particular effects on crops and heat waves and droughts in particular parts of the world. 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 temperature baseline in a world that is remarkably exposed still all of these decades after we started worrying about warming, remarkably exposed still to the ravages of climate impacts. And on that point, 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, 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. It often teaches us deluded 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, 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.
[14:35]
John Finer
Next year, 2027 could be a preview of what normal, what everyday life will be like in a decade or so. Talk about that.
[14:46]
David Wallace-Wells
So here we are in 2026 and the global average temperature is about 1.5 degrees Celsius above the pre industrial average. 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 2 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 policy people were talking about 2 degrees as a good target, there was emerging science and emerging political sense among the world's most vulnerable countries. That 2 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 1 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 a more ambitious goal, 1.5 degrees, but towards that less ambitious goal, 2 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 2 degrees Celsius of warming, that report was the event that gave us the 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, and sunrise. That'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 their CEOs and plutocrats, all of that came out of a report that was basically saying we need to limit warming below 2 degrees. That fear, that panic, that sense of urgency and that sense of this must be 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 2 degrees. And we now know that we will be heading north of 2 degrees. So the things that terrified us into action not that long ago, six, eight years ago, are now our inevitable future.
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[19:30]
John Finer
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?
[19:43]
David Wallace-Wells
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. We are already seeing every year in countless ways how poorly 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 defining more and more suffering as acceptable and normal, as sort of the cost of going about our daily lives without being too preoccupied by the course of climate change.
[20:49]
John Finer
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. 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?
[21:14]
David Wallace-Wells
What I would say is that 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 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 an upsurge of climate urgency and the election of Barack Obama, who, when he accepted the nomination or won the nomination for the Democratic, you know, 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 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 points during Donald Trump's first term where the respondents in the surveys might be one point higher than we are today. But those points aside, 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 they're more worried 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?
[24:05]
John Finer
The question is not are they worried? The question is, are they worried enough to actually sacrifice anything in order to make headway against.
[24:16]
David Wallace-Wells
I mean, I would.
[24:16]
Jake Sullivan
I would.
[24:17]
David Wallace-Wells
I think that that's an important.
[24:18]
John Finer
I'm not saying they're not. I'm just posing the question.
[24:20]
Jake Sullivan
I'm.
[24:20]
David Wallace-Wells
I would. I would say a couple things about it. The first is that, you know, you often hear from people who think we needn't worry as much about climate change as. 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 for a number of years, but is becoming even more true and in the future will become even, even, even more true. And 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 wind's blowing, you need to 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 year, 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. So to the extent that we're talking about power and electricity, we know that this bargain, this calculation, is a more rapid transition, better for us or 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 an economic determinist. I think that politics plays a huge role here, as does culture and other social cues. But when you look around, 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. 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 were building, we built nine times as much green energy. This year 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 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 buildout. So I think we're in a place now where, 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.
[29:02]
John Finer
So, 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? This, 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.
[29:23]
David Wallace-Wells
I think it, you know, 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. Do we know how much more vulnerable?
[29:47]
John Finer
Do we really know? Will we know until something bad happens and we have to respond?
[29:52]
David Wallace-Wells
Well, I mean, they're trying to push disaster response, the responsibility for disaster response onto the states who simply don't have the budget to respond to anything like these disasters, like we've seen over the last few years. It's. 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 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 a lot of impacts, from tariffs to weather events 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 comes to pass. But there's also, beyond that, what Trump is doing in the world, trying to 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 to get control of their oil. And obviously, the war in Iran has enormous fossil fuel implications. And its implications for the green transition are, if anything, 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 the decades before Nevertheless, I think there's something quite corrosive and damaging about 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 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.
[31:59]
John Finer
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.
[32:17]
David Wallace-Wells
You know, five or six years ago, I might have said 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 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, 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 across sub Saharan Africa, we're seeing remarkably rapid uptake of solar panels and solar 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 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.
[34:14]
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[35:02]
John Finer
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.
[35:21]
David Wallace-Wells
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. But I think that in the big picture, that 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 expect two and a half degrees, the climate system may surprise us, as Jim Hansen 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 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 with an imperfect response to an incredibly turbulent future.
[37:46]
John Finer
Well, David, 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 tell me the truth. So far as you know, it's. And that is what you always do. But, oof, it's tough.
[38:17]
David Wallace-Wells
It's tough.
[38:20]
John Finer
Do you have any good news that we can, we can dip out of here with?
[38:24]
David Wallace-Wells
Oh, I mean, about anything. The world is full of good news. Now on this, I could be the famous, the famous optimist, David Roswells. I mean, just on climate stuff, the green transition is proceeding at a breakneck pace, 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 100% of the time renewable power, which many people said was going to be completely impossible. 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 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 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. Know, we're cleaning up air pollution. We're past air pollution, which is a much larger threat to human flourishing on any conceivable timescale than climate change is today. Somewhere between 5 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'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 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. 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 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 on politics and many of these other questions of governance and social organization. And 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.
[41:42]
John Finer
I asked for good news as 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.
[41:54]
David Wallace-Wells
Thanks for having me. Great to talk as always and hope you cross paths again soon.
[42:06]
John Finer
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@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 Neurider and Beth Morrissey, who also also runs the show, engineered by Shannon Mahoney and Christian Ayala. Fact Checked by Sarah Schweppe and Emma Munger wrote Artheme Music. Our executive producer is Miranda Kennedy. 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. The show is part of Vox. Support Vox's journalism by joining our membership program today. Go to Vox.commembers to sign up and if you decide to sign up because of this show, let us know.
[43:32]
Odoo Advertiser
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Summary7 min read

Unexplainable (Vox)

Episode: "The Godzilla El Niño"

Date: July 29, 2026

Episode Overview

This episode explores the scientific mysteries and societal threats posed by the upcoming "Godzilla El Niño," a potentially record-shattering climate event. Hosted (via content from Vox’s Gray Area) by John Finer and featuring New York Times climate reporter David Wallace-Wells, the conversation dissects the science behind El Niño, its unpredictable impacts on global weather, and the social, political, and economic consequences that may unfold in 2027 and beyond. The tone is earnest, at times somber, occasionally optimistic, with a focus on candid assessment rather than reassurance.

Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. What is El Niño? (03:11 – 05:13)

Definition: An irregular climate event—typically occurring every 3–7 years—where unusually warm temperatures arise in the coastal Pacific off South America.
Global Consequences: Impacts weather globally through “teleconnections”—correlations in weather events scientists observe between distant regions, even if precise mechanisms remain mysterious.
- More rain in the US West
- Drought in Brazil and the Amazon
- Disrupted monsoons in South Asia
- Suppression of hurricanes in the Caribbean
- “A global disruption to the normal patterns we depend on”
Key Quote:

"It’s a disruption...but the disruption isn’t all in one direction. At the global level, it makes things hotter…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."
—David Wallace-Wells (04:42)

2. Why Is This El Niño Alarming? (06:00 – 09:03)

Higher Baseline: This El Niño is occurring on top of the highest global average temperatures ever recorded—making it more dangerous.
"Super" or "Godzilla" El Niño: The warming may be bigger than any similar event in modern history.
Potential Catastrophes: Historical context—the El Niños of the late 1870s contributed to famines that killed tens of millions worldwide.
- While not predicting a repeat, David stresses the vulnerability of interconnected systems—agriculture, politics, stability.
Key Quote:

"A huge amount of even what we take for granted as stable features of modern life…are nevertheless subject on some level to disturbance and perturbation by the climate system."
—David Wallace-Wells (08:30)

3. Timing and Regional Effects (09:24 – 12:22)

Arrival: Begins late in the calendar year, peaks in early winter next year, and dissipates over 9–12 months.
U.S. Impacts:
- Lower risk of hurricanes (good news for Gulf Coast, Florida)
- Increased rainfall in California (raising landslide and mudslide risks, especially after wildfire seasons)
- Outcomes depend heavily on geography; some effects are random (“a lot of this is left up to chance”)
- Most vulnerable populations—poorer, marginalized communities—will bear the brunt.
Key Quote:

"El Niño [will] arrive as a grotesque, as a sort of nightmare of our social pathologies."
—David Wallace-Wells (11:50)

4. Comparing Past Events and Escalating Risks (12:22 – 14:35)

2015–2016 El Niño: Set global temperature records and caused widespread heatwaves.

"This one is on track to be larger than every El Niño on record."
—David Wallace-Wells (12:40)
Privilege is No Guarantee: Even wealthy communities (e.g., L.A. wildfires) discovered that resources don’t guarantee protection.
- “Wealth itself is not a perfect buffer. It often teaches us deluded lessons about how safe and protected we are.” (13:30)

5. A Preview of the Future: 2027 and Beyond (14:35 – 18:15)

Crossing Boundaries: Earth's global average temp hits 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels—a milestone that was supposed to be a “hard limit.”
Political and Social Implications:
- The Paris Agreement aimed to limit warming to 1.5°C (aspirational) and “definitely below 2°C”; that less ambitious target is now seen as nearly inevitable.
Key Quote:

"We are heading quite rapidly, not just past the goal that we set for ourselves...but towards that less ambitious goal, 2 degrees...Our inevitable future."
—David Wallace-Wells (16:50)

6. Can Climate Disasters Spur Action? (19:29 – 24:19)

Failing the Test: 2027 will test our ability to manage disruption—but likely expose our unpreparedness.
Collective Inertia: Past disasters (from Katrina onward) have triggered temporary urgency but little sustained policy change, despite rising public concern.
Key Quote:

"Americans are more concerned about climate change than they were in the aftermath of Katrina...But our elite discourse...has somehow decided to treat those anxieties as irrelevant."
—David Wallace-Wells (23:20)

7. Is Sacrifice Necessary for Climate Action? (24:05 – 29:01)

Public Willingness: Skepticism about individuals’ willingness to pay for action is common, but increasingly outdated.
Renewables Are Winning: Cost of solar/wind + batteries has plunged. Most new power is now green—even where policy is not supportive.
- "For every unit of new fossil fuel infrastructure...we built nine times as much green energy." (28:05)
- Renewables are outperforming fossil fuels economically, globally.

8. Political Vulnerabilities (29:01 – 31:59)

Trump Administration: The current administration is undermining renewable energy and disaster preparedness by shifting responsibility to under-resourced states, making the country more vulnerable.
Fossil Fuel Geopolitics: Trump’s international strategies (e.g., Venezuela, Iran war) reflect a fossil-centric worldview, even as global shocks drive others toward renewables.

9. Global Adaptation Patterns (32:16 – 35:01)

Surprising Wins: Examples like Pakistan (solar) and Nepal (EVs) show rapid green transitions—even in developing countries—can bypass expectations and policy.
Persistent Vulnerability: However, adaptation in poorer countries still lags, making them more exposed to climate shocks.

10. The (Uncertain) Limits of Adaptation (35:01 – 38:16)

Fundamental Uncertainty:

"The true answer is that I don’t know...We should be placing uncertainty about the future at the heart of how we think."
—David Wallace-Wells (35:20)
Human Ingenuity vs. Systemic Risks: While most near-future impacts will be “manageable,” future warming past 2°C could push us into unpredictable, potentially unmanageable territory.
Adaptation is Complex: Societies can adapt, but responses will inevitably be imperfect and uneven.

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

On Scientific Mystery:

"This system is quite mysterious and complex...a reminder that there is an enormous amount that is still deeply mysterious to us..."
—David Wallace-Wells (05:24)
On the “Godzilla El Niño”:

“Researchers are using terms like Godzilla El Niño and Super Duper El Niño. That does not sound awesome.”
—John Finer (09:03)
On privilege and climate impacts:

“Privilege is not a perfect protection against these impacts.”
—David Wallace-Wells (14:29)
On collective adaptation:

“Rather than changing course...we will just find ourselves defining more and more suffering as acceptable and normal..."
—David Wallace-Wells (20:19)
On green transition optimism:

“Even its biggest boosters said [the green transition] was impossible 10 or 15 years ago, and really even faster than most people expected five or ten years ago.”
—David Wallace-Wells (38:34)

Final Optimistic Notes (38:23 – 41:53)

The global energy and electrification transition is proceeding “at a breakneck pace.”
Battery cost collapse means 100% renewables are economically plausible for vast regions.
Air pollution—an even bigger threat in the present—is declining.
The future is messy—neither utopia nor doom.

"While we are not pursuing each of those paths optimally, in my view, we also shouldn’t assume that we will absolutely fail each of those tests...we’re going to be muddling through."
—David Wallace-Wells (40:43)

Timestamps for Important Segments

03:11 — What is El Niño?
06:00 — Why This El Niño Is Alarming
09:24 — Timing/Regional Effects in the U.S.
12:22 — Comparing to Past Super El Niños
14:35 — 2027: A Glimpse of the Future
19:29 — Will 2027 Force Action?
23:20 — Public Climate Anxiety vs. Political Response
28:05 — Renewables Economics and Adoption
29:01 — Political and Disaster Vulnerabilities
32:16 — Developing World Adaptation
35:01 — Limits and Uncertainty in Adaptation
38:23 — Good News About the Green Transition

Overall Tone and Takeaway

This conversation balances frank warnings about the immediate and structural dangers of the coming El Niño and anthropogenic climate change with a clear-eyed acknowledgment of both scientific uncertainty and unexpected progress, particularly in clean energy. The mood is one of informed urgency, humility before scientific complexity, and realistic—if cautious—optimism about human capacity to adapt and innovate, even as political and social systems lag behind.

If you want an incisive, honest, and up-to-the-minute summary of how a changing climate, politics, and technology will intersect as the world faces its hottest, most turbulent years yet, this episode is essential listening.

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Transcript60 lines

[00:01]
John Finer
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 various 18 plus what's behind Ukraine's Military Shakeup? The Ukrainians have now surpassed the United States military and basically every other military on the planet in terms of doctrine for how to fight and integrate these autonomous systems on the battlefield. And we should be learning from them. I'm John Finer.
[00:45]
Jake Sullivan
And I'm Jake Sullivan and we're the
[00:47]
David Wallace-Wells
hosts of the Long Game, a weekly national security podcast.
[00:51]
Jake Sullivan
This week we're breaking down the dismissal of Ukraine's Defense Minister, the architect of their drone strategy. The episode's out. Search for and follow the Long Game wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Weatherscope.
[01:06]
David Wallace-Wells
The biggest news this season undoubtedly the huge mass of warm Pacific water known as El Nino.
[01:11]
Jake Sullivan
You might have heard, but El Nino is back.
[01:14]
David Wallace-Wells
I am El Nino.
[01:17]
Jake Sullivan
When I hear the words El Nino, my mind immediately goes to one very specific place.
[01:23]
David Wallace-Wells
For those of you who don't habla Espanol, El Nino is Spanish Banish for the Nino.
[01:34]
Jake Sullivan
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.
[01:47]
David Wallace-Wells
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.
[02:01]
Jake Sullivan
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 Elling talks with New York Times climate reporter David Wallace Wells about 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.
[02:52]
John Finer
David Wallace Wells, welcome to the show.
[02:55]
David Wallace-Wells
Thanks for having me. Good to be here.
[02:57]
John Finer
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?
[03:11]
David Wallace-Wells
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 certain weather events in different 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. So in this case, you see across the Western U.S. 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. 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 may be 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.
[05:14]
John Finer
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?
[05:24]
David Wallace-Wells
As best I understand, the answer is no. And I mean, this is an area of science that is still evolving. 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.
[06:01]
John Finer
What is particularly scary about this El Nino? Why do scientists seem to be alarmed?
[06:09]
David Wallace-Wells
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 set of climate conditions. But I do think it's worth emphasizing that fact, maybe because we've normalized it so much that we don't raise our eyes or raise our eyebrows when we see that we're setting new records for global average temperature. 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 most human suffering that the modern world has ever experience. 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 obviously, 2026 is a different world than 1878. But it gives you a good framework with which to understand how these kinds of. How the consequences of an El Nino may filter through our political world. And if 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 as a result of the war in Iran, 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. Bread riots, political protests, civil unrest, perhaps in multiple parts of the world. And I'M not saying that's inevitable because of the Cel 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 perturbation by the climate system. And this climate system this year is winding up to really give us quite a wallop.
[09:03]
John Finer
David, it definitely does not inspire confidence that researchers are using terms like Godzilla, El Nino and Super Duper El Nino. That does not sound awesome. I mean, when will this thing officially arrive? When will we actually start to feel this thing?
[09:24]
David Wallace-Wells
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 winter, spring of next year. But there are already effects, which is why we're able to see it coming.
[09:53]
John Finer
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?
[10:04]
David Wallace-Wells
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 that's where I live.
[10:23]
John Finer
That's all I know about El Ninos
[10:26]
David Wallace-Wells
in California. They're likely to have really significant rainfall events, 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 forest 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 level. In 2018, we had a similar dynamic. It wasn't powered by El Nino, but the horrible wildfires in, 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 chancey. 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 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 or 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.
[12:22]
John Finer
The last super El Nino was, I think, 2015, 2016. Just for scale, how bad was that one and how much worse might this one be compared to that?
[12:34]
David Wallace-Wells
Yeah, well, the easiest way to measure it is to say that it sets 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 1870s. So exactly how that will affect have particular effects on crops and heat waves and droughts in particular parts of the world. 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 temperature baseline in a world that is remarkably exposed still all of these decades after we started worrying about warming, remarkably exposed still to the ravages of climate impacts. And on that point, 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, 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. It often teaches us deluded 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, 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.
[14:35]
John Finer
Next year, 2027 could be a preview of what normal, what everyday life will be like in a decade or so. Talk about that.
[14:46]
David Wallace-Wells
So here we are in 2026 and the global average temperature is about 1.5 degrees Celsius above the pre industrial average. 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 2 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 policy people were talking about 2 degrees as a good target, there was emerging science and emerging political sense among the world's most vulnerable countries. That 2 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 1 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 a more ambitious goal, 1.5 degrees, but towards that less ambitious goal, 2 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 2 degrees Celsius of warming, that report was the event that gave us the 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, and sunrise. That'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 their CEOs and plutocrats, all of that came out of a report that was basically saying we need to limit warming below 2 degrees. That fear, that panic, that sense of urgency and that sense of this must be 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 2 degrees. And we now know that we will be heading north of 2 degrees. So the things that terrified us into action not that long ago, six, eight years ago, are now our inevitable future.
[18:16]
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[18:52]
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[19:30]
John Finer
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?
[19:43]
David Wallace-Wells
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. We are already seeing every year in countless ways how poorly 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 defining more and more suffering as acceptable and normal, as sort of the cost of going about our daily lives without being too preoccupied by the course of climate change.
[20:49]
John Finer
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. 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?
[21:14]
David Wallace-Wells
What I would say is that 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 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 an upsurge of climate urgency and the election of Barack Obama, who, when he accepted the nomination or won the nomination for the Democratic, you know, 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 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 points during Donald Trump's first term where the respondents in the surveys might be one point higher than we are today. But those points aside, 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 they're more worried 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?
[24:05]
John Finer
The question is not are they worried? The question is, are they worried enough to actually sacrifice anything in order to make headway against.
[24:16]
David Wallace-Wells
I mean, I would.
[24:16]
Jake Sullivan
I would.
[24:17]
David Wallace-Wells
I think that that's an important.
[24:18]
John Finer
I'm not saying they're not. I'm just posing the question.
[24:20]
Jake Sullivan
I'm.
[24:20]
David Wallace-Wells
I would. I would say a couple things about it. The first is that, you know, you often hear from people who think we needn't worry as much about climate change as. 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 for a number of years, but is becoming even more true and in the future will become even, even, even more true. And 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 wind's blowing, you need to 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 year, 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. So to the extent that we're talking about power and electricity, we know that this bargain, this calculation, is a more rapid transition, better for us or 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 an economic determinist. I think that politics plays a huge role here, as does culture and other social cues. But when you look around, 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. 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 were building, we built nine times as much green energy. This year 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 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 buildout. So I think we're in a place now where, 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.
[29:02]
John Finer
So, 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? This, 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.
[29:23]
David Wallace-Wells
I think it, you know, 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. Do we know how much more vulnerable?
[29:47]
John Finer
Do we really know? Will we know until something bad happens and we have to respond?
[29:52]
David Wallace-Wells
Well, I mean, they're trying to push disaster response, the responsibility for disaster response onto the states who simply don't have the budget to respond to anything like these disasters, like we've seen over the last few years. It's. 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 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 a lot of impacts, from tariffs to weather events 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 comes to pass. But there's also, beyond that, what Trump is doing in the world, trying to 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 to get control of their oil. And obviously, the war in Iran has enormous fossil fuel implications. And its implications for the green transition are, if anything, 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 the decades before Nevertheless, I think there's something quite corrosive and damaging about 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 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.
[31:59]
John Finer
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.
[32:17]
David Wallace-Wells
You know, five or six years ago, I might have said 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 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, 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 across sub Saharan Africa, we're seeing remarkably rapid uptake of solar panels and solar 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 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.
[34:14]
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[35:02]
John Finer
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.
[35:21]
David Wallace-Wells
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. But I think that in the big picture, that 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 expect two and a half degrees, the climate system may surprise us, as Jim Hansen 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 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 with an imperfect response to an incredibly turbulent future.
[37:46]
John Finer
Well, David, 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 tell me the truth. So far as you know, it's. And that is what you always do. But, oof, it's tough.
[38:17]
David Wallace-Wells
It's tough.
[38:20]
John Finer
Do you have any good news that we can, we can dip out of here with?
[38:24]
David Wallace-Wells
Oh, I mean, about anything. The world is full of good news. Now on this, I could be the famous, the famous optimist, David Roswells. I mean, just on climate stuff, the green transition is proceeding at a breakneck pace, 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 100% of the time renewable power, which many people said was going to be completely impossible. 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 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 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. Know, we're cleaning up air pollution. We're past air pollution, which is a much larger threat to human flourishing on any conceivable timescale than climate change is today. Somewhere between 5 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'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 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. 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 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 on politics and many of these other questions of governance and social organization. And 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.
[41:42]
John Finer
I asked for good news as 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.
[41:54]
David Wallace-Wells
Thanks for having me. Great to talk as always and hope you cross paths again soon.
[42:06]
John Finer
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@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 Neurider and Beth Morrissey, who also also runs the show, engineered by Shannon Mahoney and Christian Ayala. Fact Checked by Sarah Schweppe and Emma Munger wrote Artheme Music. Our executive producer is Miranda Kennedy. 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. The show is part of Vox. Support Vox's journalism by joining our membership program today. Go to Vox.commembers to sign up and if you decide to sign up because of this show, let us know.
[43:32]
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