Just a quick note to wish you a Happy New Year and to share a hilarious-slash-heartwarming-slash-troubling-but-also-what-isn’t-troubling-these-days moment from the Anthropocene: I went to an ice rink in Oklahoma City and found people skating around in puddles, making wakes as they sloshed about in the water.
These kids were skating anyway, and seemed to be loving it.
Note the wakes behind the little push-cart things. :)
I’m not sending this to bum you out. Do I wish we weren’t burning fossil fuels and making these freakishly-warm moments more likely: yes. Did I get a little burst of joy watching these families make the most of it anyway: also emphatically yes.
I hope you’re making the most of the holiday season and finding joy where it lives.
In case it’s helpful for you, here are a couple other folks thinking smartly about our humanity in this time of climate grief and tragedy and uncertainty:
Muggy in the West. Frigid in the East. It's impossible to intuit what's normal anymore -- or, more importantly, how abnormal things have become. Weather apps aren't helping.
I’m typing this from Oregon, where it’s been 60-something all week. At atmospheric river has been dumping feet of rain instead of snow, which was the case last December. The result is that parts of Oregon and Washington state have been flooded to the point of large-scale evacuation. Inflatable boats came to the rescue.
I moved here from D.C. last September. Friends there, and in the Northeast, are complaining to me about frigid temps and pesky snow all around.
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“This is the coldest D.C. December I can remember,” a friend said this week.
At a time of runaway climate change — and when many of us move around quite a lot — how is a person expected to intuit what’s “normal” when it comes to the weather?
Short answer: none of this is normal
First off: None of the weather we experience today is “normal.”
All of today’s weather exists in a climate that’s between 1 and 1.5 degrees Celsius warmer than it would be if not for billions of tons of fossil fuel pollution.
That doesn’t mean that humans “cause” every weather event, but it does mean that we’e changed the background conditions in which those events develop. (We also are getting better at identifying our fingerprints on individual weather events. You can search through thesewebsites on “climate attribution” studies for more detail).
But, kinda like “fetch,” those linguistic shifts aren’t happening.
(Sorry, I had to make a late-stage millennial joke at some point…)
How abnormal is critical
Knowing none of this is normal is part of the mind puzzle that is the experience modern weather. More important is knowing how abnormal this moment might actually be. And that is just incredibly difficult to ascertain these days.
Our weather memories are estimated to be two to eight years long.
In a sense, this comes down to our memories of the weather. If we could remember the entire temperature record from the early 1800s (before the Industrial Revolution and all this fossil fuel pollution and warming) til now, we’d be pretty set. We’d know how to play any given day in a long history of changes boiling across many decades.
Our weather memories don’t work like that, of course.
First, we don’t live long enough to feel the full extent of the climate crisis. (This is an obvious point but also a profound one; our storytelling also fails to capture this scale).
Second, our memories of the weather are actually super short.
Research led by Fran Moore found in 2019 that, on average, the memory bank we access when deciding if a given day is “hot” or not is only two to eight years long.
Let me just repeat that the climate crisis is playing out on the order of decades, centuries and millennia. (CO2 pollution creates warming for 1,000 years).
Yet we are unable to feel those changes.
Our weather memories are estimated to be two to eight years long.
This creates profound risks. Moore’s findings have been compared to the (apocryphal) story of the frog in the boiling pot of water. In that tale, the temperature turns up so slowly that the frog fails to notice what’s going on and eventually is boiled alive.
The buildup of CO2 in the atmosphere and the slow rise in global temperatures are like a ringing in our ears. They grow so slowly that we fail to hear.
It’s a semi-apt metaphor for our perception of global warming.
It’s also untrue. A frog jumps out of slowly-heated water.
(I find that point pretty comforting, actually).
The better metaphor, to me, is tinnitus.
The buildup of CO2 in the atmosphere and the slow rise in global temperatures are like a ringing in our ears. They grow so slowly that we fail to hear.
Weather apps don’t do this justice
We of course do have data to tell us what’s happening to the weather.
That data can help us decide whether a given day’s weather is unusual.
Yet that data is both difficult to access and misleading.
If you dig through the Apple Weather app, you can find a comparison to “the Normal Range” for the day’s weather. If you click on “averages” you see more detail.
The result is a comparison that likely underestimates the amount of warming we’re experiencing. Given our goldfish memories of the weather, this is both significant and dangerous. Weather apps could help us feel these changes on a day-to-day basis. That might promote deeper thinking and emotional understanding of what’s happening to the planet as we continue to junk up the atmosphere. Instead we’re left floating through time, unable to feel how much is changing all around us.
It’s a classic example of what Daniel Pauly has termed “shifting baselines.”
I worry about this because if we can’t feel global warming in a day-to-day way, how can we be expected to fix it? Instead, we’re left to guess at what feels normal. And, in my case, I’m left to guess at why this December feels way more like summer.
End notes from the field:
Shout-out to my students at the University of Oregon who presented their environmental journalism in a public showcase in Eugene last week.
I’m genuinely curious if you all think our short “weather memories” are significant when it comes to climate confusion and inaction. Shoot me a note and let me know.
I’ll include some of your thoughts in the next newsletter.
Thank you for reading, and please consider sharing this with a friend!
One of the most wonderful people I've met as a climate journalist died this year. But Shelton Kokeok, like everyone in Shishmaref, lives on through his name
It was 2009 when I first knocked on Shelton Kokeok’s door in his village near the Arctic Circle. I didn’t know who lived inside. I was there for a CNN story on his tiny community, Shishmaref, and its plans to relocate because of the consequences of a warming planet — the thawing permafrost and disappearing sea ice.
Shelton answered the door with a characteristic smile — the kind that made his cheeks bump his bifocals. His blue house sat right at the edge of the Chukchi Sea — on a crumbling bluff that I described at the time as “falling into the water in snowmobile-sized chunks.” Inside, Shelton had hung dozens of photos of family members. Some posed with game animals common in the area: moose, caribou, seal. Others stood for school portraits in front of colorful backdrops. A wooden clock ticked on the wall and chimed the hour. A cassette-deck radio crackled with the weather forecast. The air smelled of seal oil, a tangy staple of the village.
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Shelton was in his mid-60s then. He told me about how much warmer it’d been getting because I asked about that. I asked about the ice. It had been disappearing and thinning, he said. He watched that process, year after year, from his window.
I asked about relocation. The community had voted to relocate because of warming and that was the reason for my visit. That probably would have to happen, Shelton told me, but he didn’t want to leave this home. Already, he had helped his neighbors pull their homes back from the dangerous edge of the coast and toward safety.
That’s why his house was all alone on that bluff.
(The coastline of Alaska is eroding as the permafrost thaws, destabilizing the land. Sea ice that once protected the coast has been retreating for decades).
That’s the kind of guy Shelton was: Helpful, strong, capable, selfless. He told me stories about fending off polar bears and making it through winters of 40-below. About adapting to a world that always seemed to be changing too fast around him.
Today would have been his 81st birthday.
He died earlier this year at the age of 80.
Well, sort of.
No one in Shishmaref really dies. That’s something else he taught me.
Shelton and Clara Kokeok, on my first visit to Shishmaref in 2009. I promise the smile description is accurate despite the scowl here!
In Shish, stories cross generational lines
Over the years, I knocked on the door of Shelton’s blue home manytimes. Whenever I did, he wanted to talk with me not about the ice but about family.
Often about his wife, Clara, who he doted over, cleaned and cooked for, and spoke to in a voice that was soft and kind — reassuring even as she lost her memory and then passed away. They spoke to each other in Inupiaq, the indigenous language that’s still taught at the school in Shishmaref (or Kigiqtaq, as the town is known in that language).
Shelton talked about his kids, too — Frieda, John, Warren and Norman. Especially Norman. We spent hours speaking about the kid nicknamed “Boy.” It was Norman’s photo that sat on his coffee table next to the radio. It was Norman who was his one biological son — the rest he adopted after his brother, who previously was married to Clara, died in a plane crash. Shelton told me their wedding was about love but also about taking care of family. About duty. About a way of remembering. Shelton named his son Norman after his brother, Norman, who died in that plane crash.
His child also would meet a tragic fate.
The younger Norman fell through thinning sea ice on a hunt in 2007.
Norman’s friends couldn’t rescue him.
Shelton and Clara, in 2018, shown with a photo of their son, Norman.
That year, 2007, the ice was at a record low. Shelton blamed global warming for Norman’s death. You couldn’t trust the ice like you used to, he said.
In this chart, you can see just how much the sea ice had declined that year.
At the time, 2007 was a record low for Arctic sea ice. Chart from NSIDC/NASA.
Shelton cried easily talking about Norman. And he spent hours just looking out the window from his little blue house, staring at the sea, thinking about him. After Norman’s death, and especially after Clara’s health started to decline, Shelton’s big smile and satellite-dish ears were rarely seen around this tiny village of about 500.
Little could comfort him except for an important custom.
‘What’s in a name?’ Shishmaref edition
There’s a tradition in Shishmaref that people live on through their names. This isn’t the kind of namesake thing you encounter elsewhere, necessarily. (My middle name is David, after my dad, for example, but that’s different from this way of naming). Traditionally, when someone in Shishmaref dies, the next baby born in the village is named after them. That baby takes on the name and, very often, the traits and mannerisms of the deceased person. It’s almost a form of reincarnation.
After Norman died, at least two Normans were named after him. (They’re now teenagers and I’ve spent lots of time with both of their families. At least one of the Normans wants to become a hunter just like his namesake, despite the risks). Shelton found so much comfort in the existence of these Normans — the fact that they carried on the hunting traditions that he’d taught his own son. I’m told that both of the younger Normans attended Shelton’s funeral. And that a choir sang in Inupiaq.
Shelton Kokeok died of Covid-related illness in February 2025.
The ‘Shelton’ that could live to 2100
Because of how he felt about Norman — past, present and future — I know Shelton would be pleased to learn that there’s at least one child named after him, too.
That child is Shelton’s great-grandson.
The boy was given Shelton’s Inupiaq name, Ugasuk, which the family believes creates an even stronger connection between the generations than an English name could, John Kokeok, Shelton’s son, told me this September when I visited Shishmaref.
Carmen Turner and Carter Kokeok with an ultrasound image of their son, who is named after Shelton.
The baby boy’s name is Wade “Ugasuk” Kokeok. He was born on July 12 to Carter Kokeok and Carmen Turner. Wade, not unlike Shelton, has had a hard time of it so far. Carter told me recently by phone that the boy was born premature at 31 weeks and only was discharged from the hospital in early November, nearly four months after his birth. He’s a fighter like Shelton, though, too. “My papa was a little bit stubborn, and Wade is also kind of stubborn in a way,” he told me. He’s determined to get well.
Carter told me he hopes to bring Wade home to Shishmaref in the not-too-distant future. For now, they are staying in the Seattle area for follow-up appointments.
Can a village be reborn, too?
It’s foreseeable that Wade could live to the year 2100.
I wonder what that world will look like.
Will Shishmaref have to relocate?
So much of the climate crisis exists on timescales that stretch our imagination and understanding. CO2 stays in the atmosphere and oceans, contributing to warming, for 1,000 years. It’s like we’re alive in that future — or at least our pollution is.
I’m fond of saying that climate change is a story that lasts longer than any human lifetime. It’s one reason I think we’ve failed to do more in response to warming. It’s hard for us to feel the changes we’re unleashing in a quotidian sort of way. It’s only when we really stretch our collective memories and stand back that we can see.
Shelton’s story, and Wade’s, help stretch my memory.
In Shish, stories and people do last longer than a lifetime.
We need those stories if we’re going to make sense of what we’re doing to the planet.
There may come a time when Shishmaref, the community, can no longer exist in its precarious location on the Chukchi Sea. (This fall, nearby villages were devastated as remnants of Typhoon Halong caused widespread flooding, wrecking 700 homes and killing at least one person, according to the Associated Press. Some homes floated away with people inside. It’s estimated that hundreds were displaced).
If Shelton can be reborn, I have to wonder if the village can be reborn, too.
Thanks for taking time to read this piece. Give me a shout and let me know what you’d like to see more of as this newsletter gets moving again.
I’m so glad to be reconnecting with this community. Thank you for all the recent feedback. What I heard from you is: Keep writing, we like this! So I’m going to :)
A special thanks to John and Kate Kokeok, as well as Carter Kokeok, for reminiscing with me about Shelton and working with me to keep his story alive.
I’ll be thinking about Wade and wishing him a swift and continued recovery.
And a happy birthday to Shelton. May you rest in peace.
Me at the Paris climate talks… when I still had hair!
It’s been nearly 10 years since the Paris Agreement on climate change — a radiant moment of hope for the world’s efforts to curb fossil fuel pollution.
And, more importantly, about why we must refuse to give up hope.
Some of the activists I spoke with warned against a view of climate action that’s too U.S.-centric and overly warped by the retrograde pull of the Trump Admin. I do think there’s some truth in that framing. And I do think it’s clear how the public feels:
… 89% of the global public surveyed in a 2024 study favored stronger political action on climate change.
“That is a supermajority,” said Mark Hertsgaard, executive director of Covering Climate Now, the group behind a media collaboration called the 89 Percent Project. “And it’s a [super]majority that doesn’t know that it’s a majority. People in that majority think that they’re 29% of the population. They think they’re a minority.”
But even in the United States, positive trends hold: 79% of registered voters surveyed in May 2025 said they support the US being part of the Paris Agreement and 75% support regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant.
The point: We have more power than we give ourselves credit for.
Demonstrations were banned, so people left their shoes to “march for us.”
I also wrote in the piece about how I keep a memento from the Marshallese delegation to Paris on my desk, all these years later (and all these desks later; I’ve moved three times since then! I’m a professor in Oregon these days)…
On the day the Paris Agreement was adopted, I spent hours with the delegation from the Marshall Islands, a nation of low-lying islands in the Pacific that fears being subsumed by rising seas. I’d visited the country earlier in 2015 for a CNN article. I’ll never forget a woman telling me that the sound of the ocean, which used to lull her to sleep, had become threatening after waves crashed through her home and flooded it. Her family had decided to move to Arkansas to get far away from the water and that sound.
The Marshallese delegation in Paris gave me a palm frond ribbon to remember them by. I kept it in my pocket as I relayed news of the agreement to viewers around the world.
It’s sitting on my desk as I type this, 10 years later.
It reminds me that the optimism and the urgency of that moment have not been forgotten.
I know it will help to have that little memento around as I watch news coming in from the COP30 talks in Brazil, which start Monday. I can’t help but feeling a little naive for having written, in 2015, that “this is the end of fossil fuels” — referring to the Paris Agreement. It wasn’t, of course. But it doesn’t change the fact that we know that’s the direction the world must head if we are going to stabilize the atmosphere. And if anything, we know, 10 years on, that getting there is entirely possible.
A popular button and slogan from the Paris talks in 2015.
Thank you all for reading this post. Please feel free to share the newsletter with a friend. It’s been a WHILE since I’ve been active here, but I’m going to start posting more. Please shoot me a note and let me know what you think. What you’d like to see more/less of. How you’re feeling about the state of the climate 10 years on, etc.
John here from the BASELINE series. I know your minds are likely elsewhere right now, but I’m excited to share a few links and give you a Covid-era update.
Kottke is still doing Kottke
Despite this film not existing yet, we are somehow all over the media this week:
Vox’s David Roberts interviewed me about the idea of using documentary to counteract “generational amnesia” on the climate crisis. (I think that happened because AR Siders, whose work on “managed retreat” from the coasts in the climate era is truly vital, tweeted at him and told him about BASELINE).
Kottke (what up Web 1.0!) had a great description of BASELINE:
Taking a page from The Up Series, director John Sutter is making a series of films that revisit four geographic locations every 5 years until 2050 in order to document the effects in those areas due to climate change. The name of the series is Baseline and it’s a reference to the concept of shifting baselines, which the trailer above defines as “a phenomenon of lowered expectations in which each generation regards a progressively poorer natural world as normal”. The four areas the films will focus on are Alaska, Utah, Puerto Rico, and the Marshall Islands.
A friend messaged me after I posted the Kottke link saying that his homepage used to be Kottke.org. I’ve been obsessed, too. And I’m going to start reading again. (For those unfamiliar, Kottke is like THE original tech-culture blogger. Think 1998-original.)
So, anyway, all that was kinda fun.
Kids are helping us make this film
Now, the update: Partly because of Covid and mainly because it feels right, we’re starting to ask kids in these four locations to help us make this film.
It’s been wild and fun so far. We’ve sent cameras to a few young people in Utah as a pilot, and plan to send them to the other locations. (The iPhone SE 2020 isn’t super expensive as phones go, and they shoot 4K video with an adjustable frame rate.)
I’ll report back on how this is going soon. But I also wanted to say a quick thank you to other creators who are working in this space, which MIT broadly has dubbed “co-creation.” (Check out a report MIT’s Co-Creation Studio). Also take a look at the work of Pam Sporn, who’s been making films with high school students in New York for decades. And Paloma Martinez, whose short film “Crisanto Street” has been an inspiration to me as we’re trying to figure out this new mode of filmmaking.
Again, more on this soon. Meantime, have you seen interesting examples of “co-created” films? (Looking at you, iReport alums!) If so, please send ‘em my way.
I’ll leave you with a closing thought from John Lewis. These words have been bringing me comfort this weekend. He’s such an inspiration during this dark time. (I’m proud to have been repped by him while I was living in Atlanta). Rest in power.
