When the latest major initiative to address the climate crisis collapsed this past week on Capitol Hill, the first thing I thought of was a tattoo.
Spencer Glendon, the creator of the eye-opening climate platform, Probable Futures, told me he has no tattoos. But when he explained what tattoo he would want if he got one — I reached out to an artist for a rendering.
Those lines track the history of temperature on Earth going back 100 million years.
For most of that history — from the far left of the image to center-right — the Earth experienced wildly shifting climates. And then . . .
Basically starting 10,000 BCE, so 12,000 years ago . . . the climate stabilized at this level that was just perfect for humans. Civilization is built because we have a stable climate.
Understanding the impact of a stable climate on our past — and an unstable climate on our future — drives Spencer Glendon’s work. And he wishes “everybody could know and feel and see” the history embedded in those lines — that’s how central they are to his Probable Futures platform.
Glendon, for those of you who missed my preview here last week, is a former Partner at the trillion-dollar investment firm, Wellington Management.
His work there centered on topics ignored in the world of finance but with potential for a seismic impact.
Twenty years ago, when the Chinese economy was relatively insignificant, he foresaw its meteoric rise, and its threat to America’s middle class, before most others.
Ten years ago, he turned his attention to climate change.
And I’ve been following his work closely since 2019, when he gave one of the most riveting presentations on global warming that I’ve ever seen.
I urge you — no matter how busy you may be — to watch the following brief excerpt of our recent Wavemaker Conversation, as Spencer Glendon boils down 100 million years of the earth’s temperature into just five minutes.
Please click the image below to play the video.
“What’s So Big About One Degree”
What difference has it made for the earth’s climate to have warmed — since pre-industrial times — by 1.1 degrees Celsius — or 2 degrees Fahrenheit, which is where we are now?
What difference will it make if the increase is 1.5°C — which is expected by the end of this decade?
What about 3°C — more than 5 degrees Fahrenheit? If we stay on the path we’re on, and don’t drastically reduce our fossil fuel emissions, that increase is likely by the 2060s.
To help us visualize the difference that those incremental temperature increases will make, Spencer Glendon’s Probable Futures team is developing powerful tools, including interactive maps.
When I've shown these maps to people in high levels of finance, they say, "Oh my God. No one is going to lend or make long-term commitments to places that will be under [this level of] stress."
In the video below, Glendon walks us through some of those maps, illustrating the anticipated range of wet bulb days throughout the world — days in which the levels of heat and humidity are so high that working outdoors can be deadly because sweat cannot evaporate and, therefore, the human body cannot cool itself.
The most frightening of these maps represent futures that we still have the power to avoid.
Please click the image below to play the video.
Living Wonderfully Within Limits
I’d like to strongly recommend you watch one more segment, in which I asked Spencer Glendon to share with us the extreme health struggles he has faced through his life.
They began when he was a teenager, with a debilitating, extended battle against ulcerative colitis, followed by a diagnosis in his early 30s of a degenerative disease that would ultimately require a liver transplant.
And that provided clarity for me that, okay, I've got some number of years before I get really sick. And that too was clarifying. It sort of said, well, I've got limits. Let's figure out what I can do within those limits.
That clarity connects deeply to what we face in an increasingly warm and far more unstable climate.
My own body has been a helpful guide to living with limits, to understanding limits, to respecting them, and then to celebrating that you can live wonderfully within limits . . . . And if we could learn to live within the ranges of a really bountiful planet we've been given, we could live extraordinarily well. And so that's the hopeful side of Probable Futures, is we can populate [a world] that's not a sort of electric car paradise or some kind of dystopia. We can populate a more complicated world that's a little bit degraded, but still quite bountiful and live extraordinarily well in that. And I don't want to overplay the comparison to my body, but it's pretty great to be alive, if you live on those terms.
Please click the image below to play the video.
If you’d like to hear or watch the full conversation with Spencer Glendon of Probable Futures, including his fascinating professional backstory in the world of finance, simply click the Spotify link below.