A heron at the Mamirauá Sustainable Development Reserve in Uarini, Amazonas state, Brazil, 7 March 2018. Photo by Bruno Kelly/Reuters A heron at the

Despite decades of inaction we can avert the climate Hellocene and restore the atmosphere to keep our world habitable

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2025-01-14 12:00:09

A heron at the Mamirauá Sustainable Development Reserve in Uarini, Amazonas state, Brazil, 7 March 2018. Photo by Bruno Kelly/Reuters

is the Michelle and Kevin Douglas Provostial Professor and a senior fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment and at the Precourt Institute for Energy at Stanford University. He is also chair of the Global Carbon Project. His latest book is Into the Clear Blue Sky (2024).

Whoosh. Our boat rocks a bit when a pink river dolphin surfaces and blows just a paddle’s length away. We’re in a low, open boat in western Brazil, a few hundred miles downriver from the borders of Colombia and Peru.

As a climate scientist at Stanford University, I’m here with colleagues at the Mamirauá Sustainable Development Reserve deep in the Amazon to build new towers for monitoring emissions of carbon dioxide and methane, two of the world’s most powerful greenhouse gases. I study methane in particular because, pound for pound, it’s 90 times more potent than carbon dioxide at warming Earth in the first two decades after release. And methane concentrations have risen faster in the past five years than at any time since record-keeping began, for reasons we’re still trying to understand.