Panama's government has failed to follow through with promised aide for Indigenous people, Human Rights Watch says.

UN chief says we are in an "era of global boiling" as July set to be world's warmest month on record.

Last year's record breaking heat, driven by climate change, gives a snapshot of the UK's future weather.

Climate activist carried away by police for blocking traffic at protest near the harbour in Malmo, Sweden.

In the three-plus decades I've been alive, I have never been bitten by a tick. Actually, that may be a lie, and I have no way of knowing for sure. Because even though ticks have harpoonlike mouthparts, even though certain species can latch on for up to two weeks, even though some guzzle enough blood to swell 100 times in weight, their bites are disturbingly discreet. “As a kid, I would have hundreds of ticks on me,” at least several of which would bite, says Adela Oliva Chavez, a tick researcher at Texas A&M University. And yet she would never notice until her aunt would pick them off her skin.

The secret behind tick stealth is tick saliva—a strange, slippery, and multifaceted fluid with no biological peer. It keeps the pests’ bites bizarrely itch- and pain-free, and allows them to feed unimpeded by their hosts’ immunity. As climate change remodels the world, spit is also what’s helping ticks enter new habitats and hosts—bringing with them the many deadly viruses, bacteria, and parasites they so often import.

For all their dependency on blood, ticks almost never eat. In their sometimes-multiyear life span, they may feed only once in each stage: larva, nymph, and adult. Which means, as my colleague Sarah Zhang once wrote, each meal must count for an awful lot. Unlike mosquitoes and other bloodsucking bugs that can get away with a dine and dash, ticks must linger on flesh for days or even weeks—an extended feast that requires them to essentially graft onto the host’s body like a temporary limb.

For the entirety of that process, saliva is key. When a tick first bites, its spit lines the wound with a gluelike substance that cements its mouth in place. Once secure, the tick deploys a fleet of spit-borne compounds that dilate its host’s vessels, while simultaneously battling the bodily compounds that would normally prompt the injury to clot, heal, or tingle with pain or itch. Under most circumstances, such an onslaught of foreign molecules would instantly marshal the body’s immune cavalry. But ticks have workarounds for that too. Their saliva is an anti-inflammatory and an analgesic; it can disable the alarms that cells send to one another, preventing them from coordinating an attack. Spit can even reprogram immune cells so that they never complete their development or receive the cues they need to gather at the scene.

[Read: Climate change enters its blood-sucking phase]

All of these strategies can also ease the way for bacteria, viruses, and parasites that the tick swallows from one host, then deposits into the next. With tick saliva breaching the skin barrier and keeping the immune system in check, all the pathogens have to do is come along for the ride. “Tick saliva is like a luxury vehicle that delivers them to the site of infection and rolls out the red carpet,” says Seemay Chou, the CEO of the biotech start-up Arcadia Science. Studies have shown that multiple pathogens get an infectious boost when chauffeured by spit, spilling more efficiently into the skin of newly bitten hosts. Borrelia burgdorferi, the bacterium that causes Lyme disease, will even slather parts of tick saliva onto itself like a cloak, essentially rendering itself invisible to bodily defense. Ticks’ infectious cargo may even egg each other on: Saravanan Thangamani, at Upstate Medical University, in New York, has found evidence that ticks simultaneously carrying Borrelia and Powassan virus may end up injecting more of the latter into fresh wounds.

Already, ticks spread more pathogens to humans and their livestock than any other insect or arachnid. And the risks ticks pose may only be growing, as warming temperatures and human meddling with wildlife allow them to expand their geographic range and infiltrate new hosts. In North America, lone-star ticks and black-legged ticks have been orchestrating a concerted march north into Canada. At the same time, the percentage of ticks carrying infections is also increasing, Thangamani told me, and for decades now, case counts of Lyme disease and tick-borne encephalitis in several parts of the world have been on a steady rise. As cold seasons shrink, the periods of the year when ticks bite—usually, the warmest months—are expanding too. “Many, many places are getting filled up with ticks,” says Jean Tsao, an entomologist at Michigan State University. “And they’re going to get more.”

It helps that many ticks aren’t picky about whom they carry or bite. Some species, as they push into new places, have picked up new pathogens in the past few years—Bourbon virus, heartland virus—that pose additional threats to us. Many tick species are also relatively indiscriminate about their hosts: Within its lifetime, a single deer tick may “feed very happily on reptiles, avians, and birds,” says Pat Nuttall, a virologist and tick researcher at the University of Oxford. Their spit is intricate enough that it can be tailored to counteract the defenses of each species in turn. Transfer a tick from a rabbit to a human or a dog, Oliva Chavez told me, and it will take notice—and adjust its saliva, quite literally to taste.

Vaccines to combat Lyme and other tick-borne diseases have long been in development. But many researchers think the more efficient tactic is going after the tick itself—a strategy that could, at best, “stop the transmission of several pathogens at once,” says Girish Neelakanta, a tick biologist at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. Anti-tick immunity is possible: Studies have documented guinea pigs, cattle, rabbits, goats, and dogs developing sustained defenses against the arachnids after they’ve been bitten over and over again—even reactions that can help the animals detect a bite immediately, and sweep the pest away.

But spit is a slippery target for bodily defenses to hit. The substance doesn’t just shut down immune responses. It also reformulates itself constantly so that it can keep evading the host’s defenses—as often as every few hours, faster than most of the immune system can keep track. By the time the body has prepped an assault on one salivary ingredient, the tick has almost certainly swapped it out for the next. “It’s a game that the tick is playing, a catch-me-if-you-can kind of thing,” says Sukanya Narasimhan, a tick researcher at Yale. To outcompete the tick’s tricks, Narasimhan thinks it will be key to develop a vaccine that triggers the body to respond to tick bites fast, “as soon as a tick attaches,” she said, ideally by targeting the saliva’s first ingredients.

As ticks continue their takeover, it’s hard not to develop at least some grudging respect for their pluck. Some scientists even think that studying, or perhaps mimicking, their saliva could lead to other breakthroughs. Copycatting the spit’s immunosuppressive tendencies could be useful for the treatment of asthma, or for drugs that assist in organ transplants; imitating its anticoagulant properties could help keep life-threatening clots at bay. Some tick-saliva ingredients have even prompted investigations into their potential as cancer therapy. Ticks, after all, have been studying mammalian bodies for millions of years, all in hopes of subterfuge; under their tutelage, Chou, the Arcadia Science CEO, hopes to learn more about the molecular pathways that drive the urge to itch.

Ticks aren’t invincible, though, and some of the same global changes now easing their entry into new habitats could eventually hinder their progress. Already, they are fleeing parts of the planet that have grown too hot, too humid, too flooded, too razed with wildfires for them or their preferred hosts to survive, including certain inhospitable pockets of the American South. A tick decline could be good for us. But it would also be a symptom of a planetary scourge that has grown worse. Ticks, undoubtedly, “will continue to adapt,” Thangamani told me. And yet they, too, have their limits—further, but not that much further, beyond our own.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

The FIFA Women’s World Cup is about more than just soccer. Here’s a guide to getting into the game.

First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

Colson Whitehead loses the plot. The surprising key to understanding the Barbie film The secret to a good conversation

A Women’s World Cup Guide

I’m not a crier. I didn’t cry watching The Notebook, and even the saddest episodes of my longtime favorite show, Grey’s Anatomy, usually only leave me slightly welling up. But every time I read or listen to something about a player’s journey to the 2023 Women’s World Cup, I absolutely lose it. I’ve never played a game of soccer, but I’ve been following the women’s game since 2015. There’s something about the journey of these women and these teams that transcends sport.

This year’s tournament kicked off on Thursday, with New Zealand’s women’s national team securing their first-ever win in a World Cup game in front of a home crowd of more than 42,000—record attendance for a soccer match, men’s or women’s, in the country. Meanwhile, the U.S. Women’s National Team is facing tough competition as it looks for its third consecutive win. They secured a win against Vietnam in their first match on Friday.   

Even if you don’t typically keep up with women’s soccer—or soccer at all—below are three reasons you should pay attention to the games.

Megan Rapinoe’s goodbye: Rapinoe skyrocketed to national attention for a viral clip in which she refused to go to the Trump White House in 2019, but she was taking public stances long before that, including kneeling in solidarity with Colin Kaepernick and helping lead the national team’s fight for equal pay. As my colleague Franklin Foer wrote in 2019, Rapinoe makes resistance look effortless. Rapinoe, now 38, announced her retirement earlier this month, meaning this World Cup will be your last chance to witness her creative form of play on a global stage. Progress on equal pay: Soccer players at the 2023 Women’s World Cup will earn, on average, 25 cents for every dollar earned by men at their World Cup in 2022, according to a new CNN analysis. In 2019, women’s pay was at less than eight cents per dollar. This very incremental progress comes just over a year after the U.S. Soccer Federation and the U.S. Women’s National Team Players Association signed a new collective-bargaining agreement that stipulates the teams will split World Cup prize money from both the men’s and women’s tournaments (a big disparity remains in the prize amount for each World Cup). The global growth of the game: Around the world, women’s soccer is gaining an unprecedented level of recognition. Other countries, including England, New Zealand, Brazil, and Australia, have signed equal-pay agreements with their men’s and women’s teams. Meanwhile, the 2022 Women’s Euro was the most watched in that tournament’s history. This World Cup, Australia’s opening match against Ireland was originally booked in a much smaller stadium and had to be moved to a bigger venue that seats more than 80,000 people. The game sold out, again.

Below are a few recommendations for what to watch and listen to if you want to further explore the world of women’s soccer.

Listen

Snacks: This podcast from Just Women’s Sports is hosted by Lynn Williams, who is making her World Cup debut on the U.S. team this year, and her friend, the former World Cup champion Sam Mewis. In casual conversations, the two women break down happenings in the National Women’s Soccer League and in the game around the world.

I’d suggest you start with the most recent episode. It features Ali Riley, the American-born captain of the New Zealand women’s national team, who talks about playing host to the World Cup, and discusses how many women’s teams across the globe lack the training and resources provided to the U.S. team.

Watch

Angel City: This three-part docuseries, streaming on Max, takes viewers through the founding of the National Women’s Soccer League’s first majority-women-owned major professional sports team in the U.S. With its inaugural 2022 season, Angel City FC set out to do things differently, prioritizing community engagement, drawing big crowds, and giving players a cut of ticket sales. The team succeeded in some ways but not in others: They didn’t make the playoffs last year, and after a rocky start to their second season, they fired their coach. The documentary also gives you a look at some of the players you’ll see at the World Cup this year, including Japan’s Jun Endo, Canada’s Vanessa Gilles, and New Zealand's Ali Riley.

And, of course, the matches themselves. Here are a few to look out for in the group stage of play:

USA–Netherlands, (July 26, 9 p.m. ET), England–Denmark (July 28, 4:30 a.m. ET), France–Brazil (July 29, 6 a.m. ET), Japan–Spain (July 31, 3 a.m. ET)

In the U.S., the matches will air on Fox. You can also stream the matches on the Fox Sports App and on YouTube TV. Telemundo and Peacock are providing Spanish-language coverage.

The Week Ahead

The 11th season of Futurama premieres Monday (streaming on Hulu). The third book in Richard Russo’s North Bath Trilogy, Somebody’s Fool, features continued father-son tensions and a dead body in an abandoned hotel (on sale Tuesday). Sympathy for the Devil, a psychological thriller starring Nicolas Cage and Joel Kinnaman (in theaters Friday)

Essay

Starz

Porn Set Women Up From the Start

By Sophie Gilbert

Late last year, when the streaming platform formerly known as HBO Max announced the abrupt cancellation of Minx a week before Season 2 finished filming, the news struck me as grimly ironic. Minx, created by Ellen Rapoport, is a buoyant, ’70s-set comedy about the first feminist porn magazine, loosely based on the real-life publications Playgirl and Viva. It’s a sweet, funny, shrewd show that also features plenty of full-frontal male nudity. The effect is hard to categorize; Minx isn’t “raunchy” or “smutty” or “filthy” or even “risqué.” Unlike Euphoria or The Idol, it’s not interested in hollow provocation. And the penises that proliferate on-screen aren’t there to titillate, exactly, although a montage in the first episode brings to mind what the French film theorist Jean-Louis Comolli once described as “the frenzy of the visible.” If anything, the show’s insistent focus on male nudity feels impertinent, as though we’re all participating in a ritual desanctification of dicks. The show’s clever inversion of subject and object makes erotica seem faintly absurd: Here are men’s bodies exposed for us to look at. …

Sexual representation, for women, particularly straight women, has always been a bind—our desires are often informed by the same chauvinistic terrain we’re trying to transcend. Both Minx and Viva make one thing clear: Men have set the parameters of porn since the beginning.

Read the full article.

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The gesture that encapsulates remote-work life I watched Russian television for five days straight. Oppenheimer is more than a creation myth about the atomic bomb. Obsessed with the life that could have been Poem: “The Ferguson Report: An Erasure” An unlikely model for male friendship What’s the matter with Barbie? The secret to Mozart’s lasting appeal Sympathy for the theater kids A raunchy comedy’s subtle wisdom

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Photo Album

A land-art painting that depicts a child drawing, created by the Swiss French artist Saype (Denis Balibouse / Reuters)

Mountainside art in Switzerland, a moon-bound rocket launch in India, and more in our editor’s selection of the week’s best photos.

P.S.

U.S. Soccer actually oversees 27 National Teams, including Extended National Teams with adapted rules of play, such as Deaf Soccer, CP (Para) Soccer, and Power Soccer (electric wheelchair) teams. As I mentioned above, I don’t play soccer, but I am a para athlete, and I know firsthand that many para competitors receive a fraction of the attention (and funding) given to able-bodied competitors. Para sports might look different, but it’s athleticism all the same. Some of these extension teams are new, and it will take time for us to fully integrate para athletes into the lexicon of our sporting culture. The first step is knowing they exist; the second is choosing to pay attention.

— Kate

Katherine Hu and Kelsey Waite contributed to this newsletter.

A series of records on temperature, ocean heat, and Antarctic sea ice are "unprecedented", some scientists say.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

A Trump-Biden rematch is inevitable in 2024, even though polling has shown that most Americans wish it weren’t (and even though the former president is possibly facing a third indictment). But the 2024 field is still quite crowded—and the contenders can tell us a few things about America’s politics and anxieties.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Gary Shteyngart: “I watched Russian television for five days straight.” Being anxious or sad does not make you mentally ill. Climate collapse could happen fast.

A Race for Silver

Today, the long-shot Democratic candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. testified in a hearing organized by Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. If the GOP using a Democratic presidential contender as an empathetic witness in a hearing sounds strange to you, you’re not alone. But the choice makes more sense when you understand how RFK Jr.’s conspiracy-theory-laden platform speaks to many voters, and how scores of right-wingers are promoting his candidacy.

RFK Jr.’s role in today’s hearing underscores his unique place in contemporary American politics, my colleague John Hendrickson, who recently profiled him, told me today. RFK Jr. is not the only 2024 contender who, despite low odds for winning the presidential race itself, has managed to hold on to something of a spotlight—or at least to elicit some fear from the competition. Below is a short guide to some of these candidates.

The first MAGA Democrat has real support.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign was initially written off by some as a stunt. But Kennedy’s support is not a joke, John noted last month: “So far, Kennedy is polling in the double digits against Biden, sometimes as high as 20 percent.”

Kennedy is “tapping into something burrowed deep in the national psyche,” John writes: “Large numbers of Americans don’t merely scoff at experts and institutions; they loathe them … Scroll through social media and count how many times you see the phrase Burn it down.” And Kennedy is promising to do just that. On the campaign trail, he speaks about collusion among state, corporate, media, and pharmaceutical powers. He has said that if elected, he would “gut” agencies like the FDA and order the Justice Department to investigate medical journals for “lying to the public.”

Across the GOP, it’s a race for second place.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis continues to lag far behind Trump in polling because “his basic theory of the campaign is turning out to be wrong,” my colleague Helen Lewis wrote yesterday. “He promised to run as Trump plus an attention span, and instead he is running as Trump minus jokes. The result is ugly enough for the Republican base to recoil.”

DeSantis has long believed that “mainstream journalists are the enemy and should be treated with undisguised contempt,” Helen writes. But his decision earlier this week to sit down for an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper suggests that he finally understands he needs the mainstream media’s support if he hopes to bolster his candidacy.

I called my colleague David A. Graham, who keeps up our 2024 election “cheat sheet,” to see how he’s thinking about the non-Trump GOP contenders right now. “Tim Scott and Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy are all in this interesting place where you could imagine them busting out of the pack to either match or supplant DeSantis as the leading non-Trump contender, but it’s hard right now to imagine any of them mounting a serious challenge to Trump,” David told me. In the end, he said, “it seems like this is all just a vigorous race for silver.”

And the third-party problem is coming into view.

The centrist group No Labels, whose founding chairman is the former Connecticut senator Joe Lieberman, is preparing to back a third-party presidential ticket in 2024—“to the growing alarm of Democrats,” my colleague Russell Berman wrote earlier this week. (So far, the group has refused to discuss who its nominees might be.)

No Label leaders say they’re hoping to protect voters from a rematch between Trump and Biden. “But Democrats and more than a few Republicans fear that such a plan might ensure exactly what Lieberman insists he would hate to see: Trump’s return to the White House,” Russell notes. No Labels says it will decide whether to nominate a ticket in the spring of 2024. The group might be holding out for two unlikely scenarios, Russell explains: that Biden will change his mind about running for reelection, or that “Trump’s legal woes will finally persuade Republican voters to look elsewhere.”

Meanwhile, a long-shot candidate is inspiring outsize fear in the White House. The academic, civil-rights activist, and Green Party candidate Cornel West will probably not win, my colleague Mark Leibovich writes today, but West has Democrats worried all the same. “West inhabits a particular category of Democratic angst, the likes of which only the words Green Party presidential candidate can elicit,” Mark explains; Jill Stein, as you may recall, swept up votes in key battleground states in 2016 that exceeded the margins by which Hillary Clinton lost in those states.

Democrats’ fear of a third-party candidate is not unfounded: As Mark notes, recent polling suggests that in a head-to-head race between Trump and Biden, Trump is more likely to benefit from the addition of a third-party candidate.

We may see the first real test of the GOP contenders next month, at the first Republican debate on August 23; Trump is reportedly considering skipping the event entirely. The Democratic National Committee, for its part, will not be holding primary debates, which is the norm for the party of an incumbent president seeking reelection. As we head into this next phase of the election, the race for silver will intensify. And other surprises could still await.

Related:

The humiliation of Ron DeSantis The long-shot candidate who has the White House worried

Today’s News

Wheat prices rose for a third day after Russia pulled out of a wartime deal that protected the export of Ukrainian grain, a move that could stoke a global food crisis. A planned burning of the Quran in Stockholm led to counterprotests in Iraq and the expulsion of the Swedish ambassador from the country. New York City will pay about $13.7 million to settle a class-action lawsuit arguing that unlawful police tactics violated the rights of protesters demonstrating after George Floyd’s murder.

Evening Read

Richard Kalvar / Magnum

Seriously, What Are You Supposed to Do With Old Clothes?

By Amanda Mull

In February, I ran out of hangers. The occasion was not exactly unforeseen—for at least a year, I had been rearranging the deck chairs on my personal-storage Titanic in an attempt to forestall the inevitable. I loaded two or three tank tops or summer dresses onto a single hanger. I carefully refolded everything in my dresser drawers to max out their capacity. I left the things I wore most frequently on a bedroom chair instead of wedging them into my closet. I didn’t buy anything new unless I absolutely needed it. Eventually, though, I did need some things, and I didn’t have anywhere to put them.

Realizing you’ve exceeded the bounds of your closet is a low-grade domestic humiliation that’s become familiar to many Americans.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Porn set women up from the start. The Zoom wave isn’t going anywhere.

Culture Break

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: FPG / Hulton Archive / Getty.

Read. Paula Marantz Cohen’s new book, Talking Cure, uncovers the secret to a good conversation.

Listen. Marriages aren’t what they used to be. So why can’t we quit weddings? In the latest episode of Radio Atlantic, Hanna Rosin talks with our staff writer Xochitl Gonzalez about her years as a luxury wedding planner.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

If you, like me, are waiting for various loved ones to return to town before joining the Barbie-Oppenheimer fray (or if tickets are sold out), I’d suggest seeing Past Lives, a beautiful film released by A24 still playing in select theaters. My colleague Shirley Li put it perfectly: The movie is an ode to the kind of love that can be both platonic and romantic at the same time; somehow, that gives the film double the resonance and the depth of a classic romantic tale. It’s not overly sentimental, either; the movie is suffused with subtle wit throughout.

— Isabel

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

Ever since some of the earliest projections of climate change were made back in the 1970s, they have been remarkably accurate at predicting the rate at which global temperatures would rise. For decades, climate change has proceeded at roughly the expected pace, says David Armstrong McKay, a climate scientist at the University of Exeter, in England. Its impacts, however, are accelerating—sometimes far faster than expected.

For a while, the consequences weren’t easily seen. They certainly are today. The Southwest is sweltering under a heat dome. Vermont saw a deluge of rain, its second 100-year storm in roughly than a decade. Early July brought the hottest day globally since records began—a milestone surpassed again the following day. “For a long time, we were within the range of normal. And now we’re really not,” Allegra LeGrande, a physical-research scientist at Columbia University, told me. “And it has happened fast enough that people have a memory of it happening.”

In fact, a growing number of climate scientists now believe we may be careening toward so-called tipping points, where incremental steps along the same trajectory could push Earth’s systems into abrupt or irreversible change—leading to transformations that cannot be stopped even if emissions were suddenly halted. “The Earth may have left a ‘safe’ climate state beyond 1°C global warming,” Armstrong McKay and his co-authors concluded in Science last fall. If these thresholds are passed, some of global warming’s effects—like the thaw of permafrost or the loss of the world’s coral reefs—are likely to happen more quickly than expected. On the whole, however, the implications of blowing past these tipping points remain among climate change’s most consequential unknowns: We don’t really know when or how fast things will fall apart.

Some natural systems, if upended, could herald a restructuring of the world. Take the Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica: It’s about the size of Florida, with a protruding ice shelf that impedes the glacier’s flow into the ocean. Although the ice shelf's overall melt is slower than originally predicted, warm water is now eating away at it from below, causing deep cracks. At a certain point, that melt may progress enough to become self-sustaining, which would guarantee the glacier’s eventual collapse. How that plays out will help determine how much sea levels will rise—and thus the future of millions of people.

The fate of the Thwaites Glacier could be independent of other tipping points, such as those affecting mountain-glacier loss in South America, or the West African monsoon. But some tipping points will interact, worsening one another’s effects. When melt from Greenland’s glaciers enters the ocean, for example, it alters an important system of currents called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation. The AMOC is like a conveyor belt, drawing warm water from the tropics north. The water’s salinity increases as it evaporates, which, among other factors, makes it sink and return south along the ocean floor. As more glacial fresh water enters the system, that conveyor belt will weaken. Right now it’s the feeblest it’s been in more than 1,000 years.

[Read: I’ve hit my climate tipping point]

A shutdown of that ocean current could dramatically alter phenomena as varied as global weather patterns and crop yields. Messing with complex systems is chilling precisely because there are so many levers: If the temperature of the sea surface changes, precipitation over the Amazon might too, contributing to its deforestation, which in turn has been linked to snowfall on the Tibetan plateau. We may not even realize when we start passing points of no return—or if we already have. “It’s kind of like stepping into a minefield,” Armstrong McKay said. “We don’t want to find out where these things are by triggering them.”

One grim paper that came out last year, titled “Climate End Game,” mapped out some of the potential catastrophes that could follow a “tipping cascade,” and considered the possibility that “a sudden shift in climate could trigger systems failures that unravel societies across the globe.” Chris Field, the director of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and a contributor to several IPCC reports, warned that “at some point, the impacts of the climate crisis may become so severe that we lose the ability to work together to deliver solutions.”

James Hansen, one of the early voices on climate, says that measures to mitigate the crisis may now, ironically, be contributing to it. He published a working paper this spring suggesting that a reduction in sulfate aerosol particles—or the air pollution associated with burning coal and the global shipping industry—has contributed to warmer temperatures. That’s because these particles cause water droplets to multiply, which brightens clouds and reflects solar heat away from the planet’s surface. Though the paper has not been peer-reviewed, Hansen predicts that environmentally minded policies to reduce these pollutants will likely cause temperatures to rise by 2 degrees Celsius by 2050.

[Read: ‘Things don’t always change in a nice, gradual way’]

Even before the climate gets to that point, we may face a dramatic uptick in climate-related disasters, says William Ripple, a distinguished professor of ecology at Oregon State University and the lead author of a recent commentary on the “risky feedback loops” connecting climate-driven systems. There’s a sense of awe—in the original meaning of inspiring terror or dread—at witnessing such sweeping changes play out across the landscape. “Many scientists knew these things would happen, but we’re taken aback by the severity of the major changes we’re seeing,” Ripple said. Armstrong McKay likened the challenge of being a climate scientist in 2023 to that faced by medical professionals: “You put a certain emotional distance between you and the work in order to do the work effectively,” he said, “that can be difficult to maintain.”

Although it may be too late to avert some changes, others could still be staved off by limiting emissions. LeGrande said she worries that talking about tipping points may encourage people to think that any further action now is futile. In fact, the opposite is true, Ripple said. “Scientifically, everything we do to avoid even a tenth of a degree of temperature increase makes a huge difference.”

Climate change seems to be outstripping political responses, Al Jazeera's John Psaropoulos writes, as fires rage again.