The first 75% of most of his books are among my favorite recent books.

I've never enjoyed an ending.

You're right that people are unwilling to make the basic changes that are obviously needed. But we only know precisely that those changes would work to fight against climate change because we are able to say with certainty that those behaviors are contributing factors.

Any suggested actions have to have some level of scientific credibility to be taken seriously. Without it, they are easily dismissed by claiming that the planet is too complex to know if our actions will make a difference.

That, purely by coincidence, I'm sure, has been the exact argument used against making any changes, and against the fact that warming was happening in the first place, and against tobaccos cancer risk, and any other public policy proposal that goes against the interest of those profiting from the status quo.

Anybody capable of that, would either no longer be sitting on the fence, or are highly unlikely to be reading this article.

Also, the basic premise of your comment assumes that the effects on the monthly temperature can be cleanly broken down categorically into "fossil fuel related" and "El Nino related", which presupposes that a stronger and more frequent El Nino events are unrelated to the burning of fossil fuels.

The facts the human impact on climate change are overwhelming, both in their abundance and scope of impact. Pretending that they don't exist, or treating them as a tangential issue to be put aside so as to appeal to a skeptical and/or ignorant minority, serves no purpose other than to undercut the facts.

I'm going to use this example for years.

I avoided reading up on it too deeply, because it seemed to be much bigger than I was expecting, and I didn't believe they'd get something that big through congressional gridlock.

I basically assumed there were some poison pills baked in, and nothing much would come of it.

It's weird.

I used to be considered a Digital Native.

Now I feel like an outsider on the internet.

I'm a Sysadmin with some networking certs, and the linkedin messages have started coming in more frequently, and stating (quite good) salaries up front.

So it certainly does not seem like are 100,000 unemployed sysadmins in the job market currently.

It only takes one person to decide to launch a missile. And very few to execute on that decision.

And what an individual, or a country, wants can change.

Just because nobody had any desire to attack Ukraine with nuclear weapons at the outset, it does not mean that they will not decide to later.

Consider the fact that Putin likely thought he could get away with annexing Ukraine with little international backlash, just like the last half-dozen times he's invaded and annexed parts of other countries.

Now he is the sole leader of a country that is being completely cut off from the global economy, and made a pariah in the entire western world. The national currency, and nearly all international relations are nearly shattered.

The situation is very different than it was, and things are likely starting to look desperate.

I don't expect a large-scale use of nuclear weapons, but I would absolutely not write off the possibility of their use altogether.

You didn't have to call me out like that.

And my Elo in chess has skyrocketed, while my job performance has stayed flat.