If it feels like the news has gotten harder to look at lately, you’re not imagining it.
This summer, the governor of the state of Washington declared a state of emergency as record heat and high winds fed wildfires across the state. Iowa just logged one of its hottest, muggiest Julys in memory, with the state’s own climatologist confirming record dew points at airports across the state. And that’s just the in the USA.
Earlier this year, a heat dome pushed temperatures near 122°F across parts of Australia while wildfires tore through Argentina’s Patagonia region and killed more than twenty people in coastal Chile. South Africa logged its worst fire season in years.
Scientists tracking these events keep saying some version of the same thing: human-caused climate change is no longer just nudging the odds. Sadly, it’s overwhelming the natural variability that used to set the baseline. And somehow, in the middle of all of it, the news cycle in this country barely blinks. A fire emergency here, a heat warning there, and then on to the next segment. It’s not that people don’t care. There’s simply too much to hold, with no clear container to put it in.
If you’ve felt that mix of alarm and numbness, this post is for you. I say this not because I have a tidy answer, but because I think there’s a way through it that doesn’t require you to become an expert, an activist, or a different person than you already are. It starts with four simple entry points: stripes, stats, spirituality, and stories.
Stripes
You’ve probably seen the climate stripes before, even if you didn’t know what to call them: a wall of vertical bars moving from cool blues to increasingly angry reds, one for each year, tracking the planet’s warming over time. They were created because numbers alone weren’t impactful. A single image says in one glance what paragraphs of data struggle to convey. Sometimes we need to see it before we can feel it, and sometimes we need to feel it before we’re ready to act.
If you’re a visual person, start there. Look up the climate stripes for your own state or country. Notice where you were born on that chart, and where your kids or grandkids will be standing.
There are a few sites you can use to generate your own set of stripes. Start with Climate Central (used in this post) and Show Your Stripes.
Stats
Once the picture has your attention, the numbers can do their work. This isn’t about memorizing figures to win an argument at Thanksgiving. Rather, it’s about grounding a real, felt sense of urgency in something more solid than a headline. Statistics aren’t just disembodied numbers; they represent real people, wildlife, trees and plants, watersheds, food for humans and non-humans alike.
A couple of trends worth sitting with: multiple recent years now rank among the hottest ever recorded (at least when humans existed). Wildfire seasons that used to be regional oddities are becoming annual features on more than one continent at once. These aren’t projections about some distant future. They’re descriptions of the world as it is right now.
Statistics won’t move most people by themselves. Sometimes, they even cause arguments about what they really mean or why they should or shouldn’t matter to us. Yet they’re like an anchor, something to hold onto when the emotional weight of a story or an image threatens to become just another wave of anxiety that passes and fades.
Spirituality
This is where stripes and stats alone fall short, and where faith communities have something distinct to offer. Data can tell you the planet is warming and what landscapes are most affected as a result. It can’t tell you why that should matter to you, or what to do with the grief, anger, or helplessness that comes with knowing it.
Whatever your tradition, chances are it has something to say about our place in creation, our responsibility to each other, and what it means to care for what we didn’t build ourselves and won’t fully see the end of. But that’s not a distraction from the climate crisis. It’s just the kind of resource this moment calls for. The data can tell you what’s happening. Your tradition can help you carry it.
One of my favorite definitions of spirituality that I heard many years ago is, “Coming alive to life.” When we intentionally place ourselves in the midst of the natural world, pick produce from a garden we have tended, spend time with a beloved pet or new friend, or become aware of the contours of the landscape as we drive, we develop an appreciation for the many miracles in our midst…and then, hopefully, our desire to protect and preserve them grows substantially over time.
Stories
And finally, tell climate stories, because most of us aren’t moved to action by a chart or a citation nearly as often as we’re moved by a person. (Get our how-to guide here.) Talk about the neighbor whose insurance dropped their home after experiencing two floods in two years. The farmer watching planting windows shift under their feet. The grandmother in Chile who didn’t make it out of her home in time. Stories don’t just inform us; they put a face on the abstraction, and they remind us that “the climate crisis” is really just shorthand for millions of individual, specific losses.
If you’re looking for a place to start, start there. Ask someone in your neighborhood whether they’ve noticed anything changing, like a garden that blooms earlier, a well that’s run lower, a season that doesn’t feel like it used to. You may be surprised how many stories are already sitting all around you, just waiting to be asked about.
Where This Leaves Us
Neither stripes, stats, spirituality, or stories is a complete answer on its own. But together, they’re a way in, a chance to meet the enormity of “the world is on fire” reality without either shutting down or being paralyzed by the scale of it. Having these four things in your “climate toolchest” can help you to get more comfortable talking about this challenging, sometimes polarizing subject.
You don’t have to do this alone, either. Faith communities have always been places where big, hard things get carried together—grief, uncertainty, hope, or ecoanxiety. This is no different. Over the next several posts, we’ll be sharing more ways for your congregation to take this from something you read about to something you do together, in significant ways. Consider this the first stripe on the chart.