... That’s how scholars say fascism happens, too—first slowly and then all at once—and that’s what has been keeping us up at night.

But the more I think about it, the more I think maybe democracy happens the same way, too: slowly, and then all at once.

At this country’s most important revolutionary moments, it has seemed as if the country turned on a dime.

In 1763, just after the end of the French and Indian War, American colonists loved that they were part of the British empire. And yet, by 1776, just a little more than a decade later, they had declared independence from that empire and set down the principles that everyone has a right to be treated equally before the law and to have a say in their government.

“Rain bombs” such as Invest 90L are products of our hotter world; warmer air has more room between its molecules for moisture. That water is coming for greater Miami and the 6 million people who live here. This glittering city was built on a drained swamp and sits atop porous limestone; as the sea keeps rising, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration forecasts that South Florida could see almost 11 extra inches of ocean by 2040. Sunny-day flooding, when high tides gurgle up and soak low-lying ground, has increased 400 percent since 1998, with a significant increase after 2006; a major hurricane strike with a significant storm surge could displace up to 1 million people. And with every passing year, the region’s infrastructure seems more ill-equipped to deal with these dangers, despite billions of dollars spent on adaptation.

Thirty years ago, when the dangers of climate change were beginning to be understood but had not yet arrived in force, the creeping catastrophe facing Miami might have been averted. But as atmospheric concentrations of carbon reach levels not seen in 3 million years, politicians promise resilience while ignoring emissions; developers race to build a bounty of luxury condos, never mind the swiftly rising sea. Florida is entering a subtropical state of unreality in which these decisions don’t add up.
...

The state government isn’t exactly ignoring the rising water. Governor Ron DeSantis and his administration have attempted to address the havoc caused by the changing climate with his $1.8 billion Resilient Florida Program, an initiative to help communities adapt to sea-level rise and more intense flooding. But the governor has also signed a bill into law that would make the term climate change largely verboten in state statutes. That same bill effectively boosted the use of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, in Florida by reducing regulations on gas pipelines and increasing protections on gas stoves. In a post on X the day he signed the bill, DeSantis called this “restoring sanity in our approach to energy and rejecting the agenda of the radical green zealots.”

( facepalm )

Climate researchers, for their part, refer to this strategy as “agnostic adaptation”—attempting to deal with the negative effects of climate change while advancing policies that silence discussion or ignore climate change’s causes. On Friday, at a press conference in Hollywood, Florida—which received more than 20 inches of rain—DeSantis repeated his message, emphasizing that “we don’t want our climate policy driven by climate ideology.”

( facepalm )

The Earth’s carbon cycle—which has not witnessed such a rapid increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide in the past 50,000 years—is without ideology. The carbon goes into the atmosphere, and everything that follows follows. In Miami, as the water levels rise, researchers predict that low-lying neighborhoods across the region will lose population. Eventually, Florida’s policies of agnostic adaptation will have to deal with this looming reality, where adaptation is clearly impossible, and retreat is the only option left

In January, the computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton gave a lecture to Are We Doomed?, a course at the University of Chicago. He spoke via Zoom about whether artificial intelligence poses an existential threat. He was cheerful and expansive and apparently certain that everything was going to go terribly wrong, and soon. “I timed my life perfectly,” Hinton, who is seventy-six, told the class. “I was born just after the end of the Second World War. I was a teen-ager before there was AIDS. And now I’m going to die before the end.”

Most of the several dozen students had not been alive for even a day of the twentieth century; they laughed. In advance of Hinton’s talk, they had read about how A.I. could simplify the engineering of synthetic bioweapons and concentrate surveillance power into the hands of the few, and how a rogue A.I. could relentlessly pursue its goals regardless of the intentions of its makers—the whole grim caboodle. Hinton—who was a leader in the development of machine learning and who, since resigning from Google, last year, has become a public authority on A.I. threats—was asked about the efficacy of safeguards on A.I. “My advice is to be seventy-six,” he said. More laughter. A student followed up with a question about what careers he saw being eliminated by A.I. “It’s the first time I’ve seen anything that makes it good to be old,” he replied. He recommended becoming a plumber. “We all think what’s special about us is our intelligence, but it might be the sort of physiology of our bodies . . . is what’s, in the end, the last thing that’s better,” he said.

...

Brown, eighty-six years old, spoke with the energy of someone sixty years his junior who has somehow had conversations with Xi Jinping and is deeply knowledgeable about the trillions of dollars spent on military weapons globally. “We’re in a real pickle,” he said. He brought up Ellsberg, a longtime advocate of nuclear disarmament. Ellsberg, who died last June, thought that the most likely scenario leading to nuclear war was a launch happening by mistake, Brown said. There are numerous examples of close calls. In June, 1980, the NORAD missile-warning displays showed twenty-two hundred Soviet nuclear missiles en route to the United States. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s national-security adviser, was alerted by a late-night phone call. Fighter planes had been sent out to search the skies, and launch keys for the U.S.’s ballistic missiles were removed from their safes. Brzezinski had only minutes to decide whether to advise a retaliatory strike. Then he received another phone call: it was a false alarm, a computer glitch—there were no incoming missiles. In 1983, a Soviet early-warning satellite system reported five incoming American missiles. Stanislav Petrov, who was on duty at the command center, convinced his superiors that it was most likely an error; if the Americans were attacking, they wouldn’t have launched so few missiles. In both instances, only a handful of people stood between nuclear holocaust and the status quo.

...

Nuclear destruction had also been the topic of the first class of the term, when Rachel Bronson, the C.E.O. and president of the Bulletin, was the guest lecturer. In that first class, more than half the students had listed climate change as their foremost concern. By the end of the course, nuclear threats had become more of a concern, and students were speaking about climate change as “a multiplier”—by increasing migration, inequality, and conflict, it could increase the risk of nuclear war.