Living in probabilities

We humans have trouble living and thinking in probabilities. That’s normal. It’s built into our evolutionary brain. We cultivate the illusion of certainty—being sure the planet will be fine, for example—in order to calm down and feel safe.

The facts belie the illusion. I know the odds are more than even that we’ll breathe an unhealthy layer of smoke again this summer. As the world has continued to warm, climate models predicted correctly that Seattle’s summers would be drier and hotter and the winters would be wetter. Sea level along the U.S. coastline is projected to rise, on average, 10-12 inches in the next 30 years, which will be as much as the rise measured over the last 100 years.  In 2024, the World Meteorological Organization projected an 80 percent probability that the planet would temporarily surpass 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming for one of the next five years, up from 20 percent in 2020. As it turned out, last year was in fact the first year when global average surface temperatures exceeded the Paris Agreement's 1.5C guardrail.

I find myself pulled into a vortex of climate data: in the past 30 years, the number of heat waves around the world has increased by a factor of 50. Spring temperatures in India, for example, reached 52.9 °C (127.2 °F) in 2024. Now consider these possibilities: climate models suggest that India’s heat waves, unprecedented in their severity, duration, and geographic expanse, were made 30 times more likely by global warming, and that another degree of warming could lead to 32 times as many extreme heat waves as there were at the end of the twentieth century, each lasting five times as long. I'm having a dreadful time wrapping my head around five times as long.

Probabilities came home to me in 2021 in my corner of the globe, the Pacific Northwest, when temperatures hit thirty degrees above normal. We notched 108° in Seattle; it reached 116° south of us in Portland, and 121° in British Columbia. My Kousa Dogwood shriveled. Neighbors covered their windows in tin foil. Acres of shellfish were cooked in their shells when tidepools were turned into stewpots. My Yuletide Camelia was left for dead. In just three weeks, the heat wave caused nine billion dollars in damage. Worse, more than 1,200 people died.

And since then, there have been days when Seattle had the worst air quality in the world—worse than Beijing and Delhi. Before 2017 we’d never had wildfire smoke cloaking Seattle, when ash fell like snow. Now a summertime “smoke storm” is unexceptional, a probability that was predicted by climatologists. Nowhere on earth is safe.

Living with probabilities like these—it’s anxiety-producing. We’re not sure imminent climate misery can be averted; we don’t know if we’ll survive our planetary chemistry experiment.

Yet some still don’t want to believe the fact that climate change is happening. Some don’t think that behavior change can help us avoid the worst of it. And while we’ve known for decades climate disaster could happen, we did little about it and in many ways we are unprepared. 

Worst of all, the current regime in my country has withdrawn from the Paris Agreement. Sucked the teeth out of pollution controls on vehicles and power plants. They scrapped clean energy initiatives and are promoting oil and gas drilling on public lands. And they’re trying to prohibit states from implementing their own climate policies.

At the most recent (2024) gathering known as COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the UN body for assessing climate science) gave up on their reassurances of past years that the world could stave off the worst ravages of climate breakdown. Instead, climate scientists warned that the world’s 1.5C climate target was “deader than a doornail.” Their published meeting results focus on financial support for developing countries.

I believe in science. But how can I acclimate to the reality of climate calamity in day-to-day living? I know I have to revise my life: buy the expensive electric replacement furnace and curtail my airplane travel. Keep calling all my representatives. Drive a rechargeable car. It’s overwhelming.

And then I look around. The sky is blue on this summer day, my cat watches the crows dive bomb the sparrows, cat hair is collecting in the corners and, I don’t know, I have to go to class, then stop at the grocery store and feed my family and figure out how to fix my leaking toilet. And the project of adapting to a warming climate is somehow less real than life’s daily mundanities. On my way to the store, a Ford F-150 pickup truck, 5,000 pounds and averaging 19 miles-per-gallon, floors it to pass me going up a hill. And I think: what possible difference does it make that I drive a hybrid and pay someone to recycle my single-use plastic film?

I read a comment by Nick Bond, former Washington state climatologist and a senior research scientist with the University of Washington. “Having these kinds of years and figuring out how we can adapt to them will help us be resilient when they come along more often in the future, as it looks like they will,” he said. They’re a chance to learn, he added, and not a reason to despair.

And I wonder: that’s all we can do, get used to the probable consequences? Do too little too late? I’m working on hope and resilience, but despair seems the rational choice.

© 2025 Su Cummings. All rights reserved.

Image: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0.