https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/02/opinion/climate-angst.html
This past year was an Omaha year, and we arrived on the 22nd to find that the weather was very mild — almost 50 degrees — and there was no snow. More unusually, there had been no snow for the entire month of December. Aside from some brief and very sparse flurries, it hadn’t snowed in Brooklyn, either, in November or December. I’m an incorrigible heat seeker, and the phrase “wintry mix” fills me with despair. But even so, the lack of cold and ice in 2023 felt unsettling.
One reason is easy to quantify: Last year’s warmer temperatures happened globally, and they’re a reminder that without significant climate change interventions we could have a future in our lifetimes where higher temperatures are the norm. Another reason — a harder one on the psyche but increasingly omnipresent — is the sense that balmy holidays are a preview of something darker: bigger climate extremes, more natural disasters, the specter not of a world where humans suffer through these things and find ways to survive but where we’ve made the planet so uninhabitable that, in the longer run, the planet survives but we don’t.