The main purpose of this ongoing blog will be to track planetary extreme, or record temperatures related to climate change. Any reports I see of ETs will be listed below the main topic of the day. I’ll refer to extreme or record temperatures as ETs (not extraterrestrials).😉
Main Topic: A Scientist Reflects on Anger, Hope and Love Concerning the Climate Crisis
Dear Diary. Many of us as scientists are quite analytical with our work, but when it comes to our changing climate we can get emotional. Personally, it burns me that we have had solutions to the problem of carbon emissions since the 1980s, but due to denial, the implementation of these has been way too slow. Yes, as Al Gore has stated in the title of his poignant movie, the real reason behind the climate crisis is an inconvenient truth.
I ask, are we as a species just too lazy to change? Sometimes I feel like throwing something against a wall just to let off steam. Other scientists are running a gamut of emotions when they look at data showing our continued losing of the Climate War.
Here is Kate Marvel’s story from the Washington Post:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2025/06/21/climate-change-anger-hope-kate-marvel
How to feel about climate change? A scientist reflects on anger, hope and love.
Climate scientist Kate Marvel talks to The Washington Post about the complicated mix of emotions people might feel about the changing planet.
June 21, 2025
Rich Legg/iStock)
Kate Marvel is a climate scientist. She spends her days working with climate models, watching temperatures climb, glaciers melt and seas rise — and she has some feelings about it.
Marvel’s new book is called “Human Nature: Nine Ways to Feel About Our Changing Planet,” and it’s organized around emotions. There is anger, grief and fear, of course — but there is also wonder, surprise, hope and love.
Marvel spoke to The Washington Post’s flagship podcast “Post Reports” about the book, why she continues to believe humanity can stop global warming, and why giving up and going to Mars is not the answer.
These excerpts have been edited for length and clarity.
Maggie Penman: This book is structured around feelings, which I think is especially unique for a science book. Why did you want to structure it that way?
Kate Marvel: I was struggling a little bit at first, because I had these feelings, but at the same time I was a scientist and I thought, “Are not scientists supposed to be cold and objective and neutral?” I felt bad that I was feeling things when watching the climate change around me. And then I realized: I can’t be objective because I live on Earth, and everybody and everything that I love is here.
When scientists say we don’t have feelings, that doesn’t make us more credible, that makes us liars. And who is going to believe scientists if we lie about how we feel?
I think if I had imagined a book about feelings related to climate change, I would definitely guess anger, grief, fear. I don’t think I would have guessed wonder, love, pride. Was it harder to write those chapters?
Anger was a very easy chapter for me to write. I feel that very often. And I do feel all of these other things. I feel guilt, I feel sadness, I fear. But the reason I wanted “wonder” to be the first chapter is that climate science really leaves you open to learning beautiful things. The fact that we know that the Earth is changing, that comes from the fact that we know how the Earth works.
Climate change is happening because we’ve changed the composition of the atmosphere, and heat-trapping gases are trapping more heat. But where does that energy come from in the first place? All of our energy is coming from the sun. And when you think about that, the sun is eight light-minutes away. So it takes eight minutes for light to get from the sun’s surface to us. But for that light to get out from the center of the sun where it’s made to the surface, that takes 100,000 years. Walk outside on a summer’s day and the light that you’re feeling was born 100,000 years ago. That makes me feel just a sense of awe and connectedness with this whole universe.
I did get that appreciation from reading that chapter. A lot of it feels a little bit miraculous when you really stop and think about it — even the fact that the Earth is the correct distance from the sun and it has the right amount of water in the atmosphere to sustain life. Those things are sort of a coincidence, right?
I originally trained as an astrophysicist, and it was while doing my PhD and looking at everything in the universe that I realized Earth is the only good planet that we know about.
I fully support my colleagues who study other planets, because if they didn’t study Mars, how would we know how terrible it was? But this notion that we’re all going to pack up and move to another planet, or we’re going to terraform Mars? Let’s try to keep Earth habitable first, right? Because it’s the best. I’m an Earth supremacist, and I’m not sorry.
Climate scientist Kate Marvel speaks at the Up2Us2023 event at the New York Society for Ethical Culture. (Erik McGregor/Sipa USA/Reuters)
But there is a little bit of fatalism from people who sense that climate change is so far gone and inevitable that there’s no point in trying to do better. What would you say to people who feel that way right now?
We understand things in the physical world pretty well. We understand air molecules. We understand water droplets. And the reason we understand these things is they always do what they’re supposed to do. But people aren’t like that. People are really hard to fit into equations. People don’t always act in predictable ways. And that’s something that’s really scary, but also incredibly empowering. The number one reason we don’t know what the future Earth is going to look like is that we don’t know what human beings are going to do. And the future is very much still in our hands.
I think how much scarier this would all be if we didn’t understand what was happening. If this was just an asteroid or something heading toward us that we were completely powerless to prevent. That for me would be cause to give up and try to find some other planet. But that’s not what’s happening. We know exactly what is causing the global temperature to rise. And we’re pretty certain scientifically that global warming will stop, the rise in the Earth’s temperature will cease to rise, when we stop emitting greenhouse gases. That doesn’t mean other changes aren’t already locked in, but basically, when we stop doing this, the warming is going to stop.
We all know the little things we can do. We can ride our bikes to work and not eat meat or whatever. But what about the feeling that individual actions are not changing things fundamentally?
I don’t think it’s true that the needle’s not moving. In the United States, almost regardless of politics, our emissions are falling, because we’ve figured out better ways to do things and the market has figured out cheaper ways to do things.
There is still an enormous role for climate policy, not just at the federal level, but at the state level, at the local level, school boards, condo boards, housing associations, whatever. There’s so many different policy levers that we have. But I just don’t think it’s true that nobody is paying attention and nothing is being done.
There are, if you look globally, probably tens or hundreds of millions of people who are actively engaged in doing things that will help. And so I think it’s appropriate to feel horror and despair sometimes. But there are more empowering ways to feel.
You have a lot of personal stuff in the book, too. In the chapter on love, in particular, you talk about health struggles you’ve had and how you’ve grappled with those. Why did that feel important to include in a book that’s mostly about climate change?
I wanted to talk a little bit about my love for my family and my community and the places that I’ve lived and the planet that I live on. That sort of organically fell out while I was writing. But also there is social science research that says love is the most motivating emotion for us. We can talk about fear, we can talk about all of the terrible things that will happen if we don’t get this under control. We can talk about grief because we will lose things. We can talk about anger, and I think we should. But the number one motivating thing for people is love: love for future generations, love for their community, love for where they live, love for the places that they feel at home in. That’s something that we all feel. And love to me is a more organizing and durable emotion than any of the other ones.
How do you keep hope and stay committed to this work in the face of so much that is challenging about it?
“Do you have any hope?” is kind of the wrong question, because it’s like saying, “Do you have any hope you can clean the bathroom?” I just clean the bathroom.
When I think about how we confront climate change, there’s so much that we have to do. We have to build out renewables. We have to change the way we grow things and eat. There’s all these verbs that we have to do, right? And none of them is “hope.” And so for me, it’s not that I don’t have hope — it’s that that’s not necessarily the most resonant and necessary emotion for me right now. We know what to do, so let’s just get to work.
Here are more “ET’s” recorded from around the planet the last couple of days, their consequences, and some extreme temperature outlooks, as well as any extreme precipitation reports:
Here is More Climate News from Monday:
(As usual, this will be a fluid post in which more information gets added during the day as it crosses my radar, crediting all who have put it on-line. Items will be archived on this site for posterity. In most instances click on the pictures of each tweet to see each article. The most noteworthy items will be listed first.)