A decade ago, the world got together and decided to fix the climate crisis by adopting the Paris Agreement.I remember it like yesterday. This was December 2015 at the UN climate talks in Paris. I was standing in front of a CNN camera as the news came through an earpiece: Nearly every country on Earth agrees to cut emissions to net zero by 2050 — holding warming short of catastrophic levels. A hilariously on-the-nose green gavel hit a desk. The convention center erupted in applause. Diplomats wept and hugged. Even Al Gore managed to not look all that wooden.My column the next morning trumpeted this headline: “This is the end of fossil fuels.”AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementSomehow, it doesn’t feel like 10 years and some 300 gigatons of carbon have floated by since then.Paris was not the end of fossil fuels, of course. From the perspective of the atmosphere, the last decade could accurately be described as a slow-moving fever dream — one in which pollution from fossil fuels has continued to rise year after year. All those emissions drive global heating and make the planet more dangerous.And in this dangerous decade climate disasters have continued to intensify — from the massive hurricane that walloped Puerto Rico in 2017, to Jamaica this October where the most powerful Atlantic storm on record came aground.Residents gather amid debris in the aftermath of Hurricane Melissa on a street in Black River, Jamaica, Thursday, Oct. 30, 2025. – Matias Delacroix/APIt’s a decade in which new fossil fuel projects continued to be approved by the very governments that had promised to slash emissions; and one in which the United States twice elected a climate-denier to the nation’s highest office. This fall, US President Donald Trump, after cancelling billions toward clean energy projects and moving to open a swath of the Arctic for oil extraction, bucked the scientific consensus on global warming again by falsely stating that climate change is the “greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.”AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementIronic, then, that this has also been a decade during which scientists realized that, if anything, they underestimated some of the threat …
