politicnewsbusterinsiderpostreview: The year our climate crisis got even more real

January 4, 2022

Good afternoon. If you're anything like me, you probably have a difficult time processing what's going on with the climate. One of the main difficulties in following a problem as all-affecting (and terrifying) as climate change is that it's hard to fit all the warming-related droughts, firestorms, tornadoes, and hurricanes into a single, digestible narrative. The scope of the problem is simply too large for many of us to wrap our heads around.

That's why I was hugely impressed by Bibi van der Zee's titanic effort to draw together all the climate-related occurrences of the last year into a single article. Van der Zee not only chronicles the natural disasters that ravaged the world from Malaysia to Texas, she also cuts through the noise to locate what exactly people are doing to attempt to resolve the central issue of our time. From heat waves in Washington to sandstorms in China, 2021 may have been a disastrous year but it was also a year of heroic, small-scale efforts to stave off environmental catastrophe. Van der Zee's investigation helps us step outside the moment-to-moment hysterias of the news cycle to focus on what really matters: the threat to the planet and the people trying to resolve it.

—Noah Y. Kim