Are traffic circles better for the environment than four-way stops? Will the oceans be too warm for fish to survive? Is green hydrogen a thing?
Over the past few years, we here at the Climate Office have received hundreds of smart, often very specific, questions from our readers about what they can do in their daily lives to impact climate change. To answer some of these questions, this week we launched Ask NYT Climate, which is dedicated to exploring how climate intersects with your life.
Our first edition is about the perhaps counterintuitive idea that buying things online can actually be better for the planet than driving to a store. And if you have a question you’d like us to answer, send it through the form at the bottom of this page.
To understand how the biggest issues in the climate world intersect with our lives, I also turned to our reporters and asked them two things: “What’s the most common question you hear from readers?” and “What are the biggest questions your sources are trying to answer right now?”
Our warming planet
“When I tell people that I write about science and the natural world, the questions, I think, kind of stop,” Raymond Zhong said. He was just kidding.
He writes about what climate scientists are thinking and researching. But on the key issues of climate change, he pointed out, the science is largely settled.
“Many of the most basic questions people have about climate change were answered by scientists a long time ago,” Zhong said. We know what’s warming the earth: carbon dioxide emissions, mostly from human sources. And we know that stopping global warming requires moving away from fossil fuels.
That said, the question he gets most often is some version of “What can I do?” (These are the kinds of tough questions—what kinds of personal choices matter more than others—that will be the focus of Ask NYT Climate.)
Many of Zhong’s sources in the scientific community explore a somewhat different question: What role have we all played in this year’s heat, and what might that tell us about the future? To answer this, some of them look back to the ancient world.
“The question, broadly speaking, is: Has something deeper changed in the climate system?” Zhong said. We know many of the reasons the planet was so warm last year, but scientists are trying to discern the exact influence of other variables, including El Niño, or aerosols emitted from ship smokestacks, which in a twist can have a cooling effect on the planet.
“Is 2023 the harbinger of something worse? That’s a deep question,” he said, “and it challenges the idea that we’ve already solved all the big questions.”
The scale of the problem
Coral Davenport, who covers climate change policy from Washington, D.C., also says she gets the “What can I do?” I ask a lot. In fact, it’s the most common thing our reporters hear from readers.
Of course, individual actions can be added. For example, food choices have consequences. Earlier, we answered your questions about the climate impact of what we eat.
But Davenport said she often has to remind people of the enormity of climate change. Weaning the global energy system off fossil fuels is a huge undertaking.
“As a problem, as a policy issue,” Davenport said, “it’s arguably the most gigantic problem in the world.”
Climate change, he said, “absolutely cannot be solved unless it is done by giant entities working together. It must be massive and global.” Davenport has recently covered topics such as the Biden administration’s pause on construction of a new natural gas export terminal, Republican attacks on electric vehicles and drilling regulations.
What do Davenport’s sources want to know? Many say they just want to understand what the government’s rules will be. “I hear a lot of frustration,” Davenport said, “from companies that are caught in a regulatory conflict” between Democratic and Republican administrations.
Automakers and electric utilities in particular, he said, tend to complain about climate rules that come and go as the political winds change in Washington. But these changes and these complaints have become more extreme than in the past, he said.
How to protect nature
“One question I have is, ‘Is there hope?’ said Catrin Einhorn, who covers biodiversity, wildlife ecosystems and nature. He has covered topics such as ocean conservation treaties, extinct kestrels, and the decline of the California salmon.
The climate office has written extensively about the hope vs. despair debate in recent years. We are coming off the hottest year on record, but there are growing reasons to believe the world can make significant progress, perhaps quickly. “There are many pathways, outlined by rigorous research. Each has trade-offs,” wrote Somini Sengupta in our interactive climate FAQ, which is based on the questions people ask it.
Many of Einhorn’s sources, meanwhile, focus on quantifying biodiversity loss and finding ways to slow it. Globally, the rate of species extinction is currently at least tens to hundreds of times higher than the average over the past 10 million years. “Climate change is actually an easier problem to solve than biodiversity loss,” Einhorn said. “Biodiversity loss is even more widespread and also harder to measure than greenhouse gas emissions.”
And, she says, her sources are obsessed with the big question of how we can reorient our economy — and a growing population that consumes more and more — in ways that have less of an impact on the natural world.
Three places where change happens
Glaciers are shrinking, coral reefs are in crisis and last year was the warmest on record. Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, have crossed a dangerous new threshold as humans continue to burn fossil fuels. Is progress being made anywhere on climate change?
The short answer is: It’s complicated, but yes.
Uruguay has switched in less than a decade to generate almost all of its electricity from a diverse mix of renewable energy sources.
In China, an electric car that costs just $5,000 is suddenly one of the biggest sellers.
Paris is transforming into a city of bicycles. The proportion of trips made by bicycle within Paris more than doubled between 2020 and 2024; from 5 to 11 percentthanks in part to new bike lanes created during the coronavirus pandemic.
Steps like these, taken in isolation, are not enough to avoid the most serious consequences of climate change – worsening droughts, intensifying storms and human suffering. However, they show how some places bring about significant local changes very quickly. Read more here. — Delger Erdenesanaa