++What itâs like to study a world facing unprecedented changes. +
++2023 is the hottest year in at least 174 years and recent months have been the hottest in 125,000 years. All of that warming led to deadly heat waves, disease outbreaks, floods, droughts, and record low ice levels around Antarctica. +
++The extreme weather this year stems in part from natural variability, including a powerful El Niño warming pattern in the Pacific Ocean that reshaped weather around the world. But beneath these cycles, humanityâs ravenous appetite for coal, oil, and natural gas is driving up concentrations of heat-trapping gasses in the atmosphere to levels the Earth hasnât witnessed for 3 million years. +
++This year may be the first time that annual temperatures have risen 1.5 degrees Celsius, 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, above the global average at the dawn of the industrial revolution. Under the 2015 Paris agreement, just about every country in the world agreed to keep the planetâs average temperature from rising more than 2°C, striving to stay below 1.5°C. A single year rising past this level doesnât mean this target is toast, but if people keep heating up the planet, a year like 2023 will become one of the coolest weâll experience in the rest of our lives. +
++Earlier this month, leaders from around the world just wrapped the largest climate conference in history aimed at preventing this outcome. The COP28 meeting in the United Arab Emirates produced an agreement that explicitly called on countries to reduce fossil fuel use for the first time and provide more money to countries facing destruction worsened by warming. But the commitments made so far are still not enough to limit warming to 1.5°C, and greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise. +
++Half a world away, scientists who study this warming and its consequences gathered at the American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco. Climate change is not an abstraction for these researchers, and many are observing it in real time, often in areas that have personal stakes for them. Looking back on the hottest year on record and what little humanity has done about it, some are reckoning with how their own work fits in. From the retreat of Arctic ice to rising demand for air conditioning, scientists with their fingers on the pulse of the planet are experiencing a mix of optimism, dread, and urgency as they endeavor to make their research practical in the real world. +
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Umair Irfan/Vox
++I spoke with seven researchers studying Earthâs changes from different angles. Their comments below have been lightly edited. +
++Daniel Schindler at the University of Washington researches how climate change affects aquatic ecosystems, including Alaskaâs sockeye, chinook, and chum salmon. He was one of several scientists presenting the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administrationâs Arctic Report Card for 2023 at the conference. The Arctic has been warming four times faster than the rest of the planet, and this year, the region saw its warmest summer since 1900 (when record-keeping began), with knock-on effects like Canadaâs worst wildfire season on record. As negotiators in the United Arab Emirates bickered over the future of the planet, Schindler noted that the effects of climate change are underway now, and itâs already reshaping ecosystems and human communities: +
++++I think the reality is, if you look at Western Alaska, climate change is not something thatâs coming down the pipe somewhere in the future. It is happening now, itâs been happening for decades. And whether youâre talking about fish or people or birds, there are real impacts that we need to deal with right now. +
++And when you hear about whatâs going on at COP28, there may be a reason to be optimistic. But the reality is, we need action on the ground right now, not to necessarily turn around climate change immediately, but to deal with the fact that weâre going to be challenged by it, now and for decades to come, so we need action now at local scales. +
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+Rick Thoman, who studies Alaskaâs climate and weather at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, echoed the call for more immediate steps to deal with global warming, noting that the Arctic has been at the leading edge of climate change long before it reached the extremes seen this year. The communities there may have important lessons for the rest of the world: +
++++As Alaskans, as peoples in the Arctic, we are living this change every day. And we have no choice, no choice at all, other than to work with whatâs happening. We need the big picture solutions, but everyone â Indigenous communities, all the people of the Arctic â are having to adapt right here, right now. It didnât start today. It didnât start yesterday. This has been ongoing for years. Listen to the elders. This change has been happening for decades, century-scale changes. And Arctic peoples are still here and weâre still going to be here. +
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+Sarah Cooley, an assistant professor at the University of Oregon, is studying how climate change is altering ice in places like coastal Alaska and has found that when you zoom in, the way it affects people can be quite complicated. How ice melts and the impacts it has on communities can vary drastically, even in nearby regions. With COP28 still falling short of global climate goals, Cooley is also looking into the way the success or failure of international negotiations will manifest on the ground: +
++++In this broader context of warming climate, loss of ice, thawing permafrost, threats of coastal erosion, and sea level rise, thatâs kind of this giant signal that each person experiences differently depending on their interaction with their environment. +
++I get really excited about being able to do research that is locally relevant. One of the things we did in this project is weâre thinking about how Paris climate agreement targets translate to local on-the-ground experiences. If you tell somebody that the Earth is going to warm by 1.5°C or 2°C, thatâs an incredibly abstract concept because the difference to us of two degrees doesnât mean anything. But if you can translate that experience of two degrees warming to an actual on-the-ground experience thatâs highly localized â so letâs say a loss of 30 days of ice versus 50 days of ice, which is a huge deal for someone living in the community to lose a month of ice versus losing two months of ice â that to me is really exciting work that we can kind of take large-scale big numbers that are really abstract and bring them down to a local experience. +
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+Robert Green, a scientist at NASAâs Jet Propulsion Laboratory, is leading a project to track mineral dust using instruments on the International Space Station. This is an important mechanism that can change air quality, the flow of nutrients across the planet, and the amount of sunlight hitting the Earth, which can cool the planet. Green is also keeping an eye on methane, a greenhouse gas with about 30 times the warming potential of carbon dioxide. At COP28, countries made new pledges to curb methane, and Green said scientists can help them meet their targets: +
++++We can tell people where the point sources of methane are, where leaks are happening, and give people the information to address those leaks. And thatâs something that is just so important to do. Nobody wants to waste money out of a leaking pipeline. Letâs go ahead and fix those leaks, and we also reduce the impact of methane for climate change. +
++Iâm excited to be making a difference. Iâm an optimistic person, and we can work together to address this problem. Itâs not an easy problem, but the pieces are coming together. So Iâm going to remain hopeful. +
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Umair Irfan/Vox
++Stepp Mayes, a doctoral student at the University of Southern California, studies how people use electricity and the ensuing consequences for the climate and for health. Lately heâs been examining the growing demand for air conditioning as temperatures rise and the stresses that imparts on the power grid. As temperatures go up, people install more cooling systems, run them longer, and crank them up during the hottest times of day. Thatâs often when the power grid is struggling the most to provide electricity. The extreme heat this year coupled with record-high energy demand signals that this work is only going to become more important: +
++++It makes me nervous. Thereâs a big intersection because weâre all about looking at the relationship between temperature and AC use and AC penetration. I think that people are directly responding to increasing temperature, and I think we are going to see that continue as temperatures continue to rise, where our reliance on AC â as a public health issue, and as a grid issue â becomes larger and larger. +
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+Aliyah Griffith, a doctoral student at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, studies coral reef infrastructure around places like Barbados, from satellites and from the water. Griffith is also the founder and CEO of Mahogany Mermaids, a nonprofit that works to encourage women of color to pursue careers in science, particularly in aquatic fields. The extreme temperatures this year, including heat waves in the ocean, have renewed her determination: +
++++My family is from Barbados. Not only does that make me feel more driven to answer questions from a scientistâs perspective â how can we help the reefs? How can we understand what they need and what theyâre facing? â but also: What do the communities need? How can we interact with their local governments, their local institutions, and understand where they can be elevated? You have to really respect a lot of the work and effort that theyâve already done to see what can change in the future. +
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+Gordon Walker, a researcher at the University of Hawaiâi at Manoa, studies paleoclimate, particularly how past shifts in the climate and weather influenced historical events. For instance, changing climate conditions in Africa and the Caribbean were a factor in the slave trade and may have played a part in uprisings. For Walker, the role of the climate in historical periods of unrest is adding urgency for the need to fill in data gaps as the climate breaches records, particularly in regions experiencing the most acute impacts of warming today: +
+++For me â my focus being the Caribbean and Africa, and the transatlantic slave trade, and climate variability associated with those regions and the historical event of the trade â I think that itâs important for us to collect data on regions in the global South â the Caribbean, South America, Africa â because a lot of the science and research is focused on the global North. +
++I think itâs imperative, especially in areas where we donât have a lot of data, to start collecting data and applying the powers or the tools of analysis that we have for climate to the global South. Because a lot of countries in those regions are not necessarily resource-poor in terms of raw material but resource-poor in terms of economies and having the ability to respond to extreme climate. So I think the greater lead time we have with projections based on studying the past, the better for those countries to be able to respond, especially with limited economies, as compared to countries in the global North. +
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++Ravenous, carnivorous, and totally yoked: How men in tech have evolved. +
++Silicon Valley is embracing a new era of masculinity. Its leaders are powerful, virile, and swole. They practice Brazilian jiujitsu and want to fight each other in a cage. They can do 200 push-ups while wearing a 20-pound weighted vest. They can spend $44 billion on a website as a sort of elaborate joke. They can do all this because if these tech executives are one thing above all else, it is this: They are men. +
++This renewed sense of masculine dominance hit a fever pitch in 2023. The softer, soulful leaders of Silicon Valleyâs previous decades have vacated. Gone is the delicate, ascetic presence of Jack Dorsey and the laissez-faire leadership of Sheryl Sandberg. Gone are the girl bosses. In their absence, the richest, most powerful men in tech are leading Silicon Valley toward a more macho future, one in which strength can be measured in muscles, women are absent from the boardroom, and ruthlessness is a virtue. +
++âAll of Silicon Valley reminds me of the first Top Gun movie: the abundance of testosterone, like 1970s, 1980s all over again,â said Manu Cornet, a cartoonist and software engineer who formerly worked at Twitter, now X. âItâs not even sarcastic or second degree.â +
++âItâs a very jacked up movement,â said Glenn Kelman, the CEO of Redfin. âThe people I know are thinking about testosterone and eating 500 grams of protein a day. They are ravenous, carnivorous, and totally yoked.â +
++Only two decades ago, Silicon Valleyâs expression of masculinity was at odds with the status quo. Tech champions were nerds and geeks: skinny outliers in hoodies armed with a nonconformist mentality â a mindset that would prove indispensable to the creation of dozens of companies that launched the digital age. Then came the Obama years, when tech companies were propped up as progressive bastions of diversity and forward-thinking corporate culture. Under the influence of Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley ceded board seats and C-suite jobs to more and more women. +
++But more recently, these same Silicon Valley companies have begun to look like the conventionally bloated behemoths at the pinnacle of corporate culture. Their leaders, too, have adopted a performance of masculinity thatâs strikingly conventional and includes angry rhetoric, muscular physiques, and a newfound interest in physical combat. The men responsible for building the products that touch the daily lives of billions of people display an increasing preoccupation with flaunting masculine bravado. Itâs not just for show, either. The way these powerful men run their companies is impacting who is considered welcome in Silicon Valley. +
++Today, there are fewer women in tech leadership roles than only a few years ago, with women representing 28 percent of tech leadership (it was 33 percent at its height). And this number may only be decreasing: A 2022 McKinsey study found that women are leaving corporate roles faster than ever before and that they have less representation in technical roles than they did in 2018. +
++While it looks like Silicon Valley is regressing, thereâs a chance this suddenly hypermasculine culture is just the next logical step in its evolution. Like Wall Street before it, the tech industry is ultimately hell-bent on making as much money as possible. And as economic conditions have shifted, preserving progressive values isnât necessarily part of that mission. +
++âThe truth is that, through these ups and downs, women and people of color havenât made much progress,â said Kelman. âItâs been a tragedy. Iâve been doing this 30 years â I really thought we would be different by now.â +
++The vibe shift: âNow, no one pretends to include women anymoreâ +
++Only a few years ago, it was not so easy to be so unapologetically male in Silicon Valley. +
++These were the 2010s, when Silicon Valley outwardly championed diversity. At the time, having an all-male executive team was considered regressive and slightly embarrassing. Companies introduced diversity initiatives, venture capital firms loudly backed startups led by women and people of color, and the media wrote glowing profiles about female CEOs. +
++âWhen I started working in this space [a decade ago], it was very male dominated, but everyone pretended to include women,â said Joelle Emerson, CEO of Paradigm Strategy, a Silicon Valley consulting firm that specializes in diversity and inclusion. âNow, itâs still very male dominated, but nobody feels the need to pretend that itâs true.â +
++These years of PR-friendly progress were only heightened by the pandemic, which ushered in growing awareness surrounding social injustice, racial inequity, and income disparity. Tech employees, suddenly with ample time on their hands and without access to the officeâs free-flowing kombucha, began questioning their role not just at work, but in society. +
++âI got to this point pre-Covid where I was hustling, and then Covid hit and I had this awakening,â said Brent Boeckman, a coach for the menâs wellness community Evryman who worked in sales at startups and enterprise tech companies for more than a decade. âYouâre working but for what?â +
++Such personal revelations were highly inconvenient to the bottom line of Silicon Valleyâs many corporations. Tech employees began putting in minimal effort at work or quitting their jobs to pursue passion projects. The media wrote about âquiet quitting,â âthe Great Resignation,â and labor rights. The status quo was shifting, and tech executives felt it. To appease their employeesâ demands, they adopted a meeker stance. +
++âI would talk to CEOs â all men â who would say, âIâm not really enjoying my job. Iâm the king of the jungle, and yet Iâm tiptoeing around my employees,ââ said Kelman. +
++By the end of 2022, FTX collapsed and the crypto bubble burst. An uneasy pall fell over the valley. There was a sense of âHoly shit, thereâs nothing there!â said Ed Zitron, founder of the consumer tech PR firm EZPR. It was a revelation that made people insecure: One of the most buzzworthy technologies Silicon Valley had produced in decades appeared to be nothing more than hype. As the economy tightened, the venture capital frenzy cooled, and many of the unprofitable companies of Silicon Valley drew their last breaths. +
++âThere was something that cracked in them,â said Zitron. âThey saw the world they loved going away, while at the same time making more money than they ever made.â +
++Buff Bezos and the rise of swole entrepreneurship +
++To fully understand how we reached this moment of hypermasculinity, you must look farther back, before the pandemic, to 2017, when a pair of arms were first photographed emerging from the sleeves of a snug black polo shirt at a conference in Sun Valley. The arms were tanned and vascular, and they belonged to Jeff Bezos, a formerly reedy bookseller whose public image up until that point had embodied a sort of endearing, sexless twerpiness. +
++Bezosâs new appearance signaled a shift in the tech executiveâs aesthetic makeup. Previously, the male costume of Silicon Valley was one of studied nonchalance: rumpled T-shirt, messy hair, anemic build â an appearance meant to convey that what actually mattered was the merit of a manâs ideas, not his physical strength. +
++But as Silicon Valley generated the richest men on the planet, these men, in turn, were deploying their millions to become more closely aligned with the prototypical image of masculine desire, whether by employing Tom Cruiseâs personal trainer or purchasing a full head of hair. +
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Drew Angerer/Getty Images
++It was an inflection point that slowly rippled through the ranks of Silicon Valley. Soon, venture capitalists were posting shirtless photos of themselves on Twitter, flaunting their gains and dropping fitness routines. The message was clear: Physical strength and stamina were necessary prerequisites to building a massive tech company. The more you demanded of yourself physically, the more you could demand of your company. +
++There was also the reality that many tech companiesâ leading executives, Bezos included, had reached middle age. Mortalityâs inevitable creep was closing in. It seemed unfair â cruel, even â that people who had acquired all that the material realm had to offer might be forced to face a fate so pedestrian as old age and, eventually, death. +
++Soon, the notion of living a healthy life for as long as absolutely possible became a core component of Silicon Valley dogma. A new cohort of health and longevity influencers emerged. Among them is Andrew Huberman, a buff, straight-talking Stanford professor of neurobiology who recommends HIIT workouts and cold baths on his popular podcast, Huberman Lab. And there is Bryan Johnson, a former venture capitalist, who is attempting to achieve his mantra, âDonât Die,â through a longevity regime that involves a strict diet, going to bed at 8:30 pm, and tracking his nightly erections. +
++When it comes to the Bezos effect, there are some very âboring economic issuesâ at play, said Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, a business psychology professor at Columbia University. âThere is a cycle in which innovation leads to growth, and then growth hinders innovation.â If the leaders of big tech companies are performing an expression of masculinity identity that feels infinitely more traditional compared to what was championed only a few decades ago, it might be because their companies have become infinitely more traditional. +
++The original founders of todayâs tech juggernauts â people who were once âanarchic and rebelliousâ â have become the institution, according to Chamorro-Premuzic. âThese startups matured and started getting lawyers, HR people, sales people,â he said. âThey became corporations. Theyâre more interested in maintaining the growth than being creative.â +
++Mark Zuckerberg learns to fight +
++No company signifies the shift from scrappy startup to corporate establishment more than Meta, a company thatâs better known for ripping off other companiesâ ideas than producing its own. And so far, its most original innovation in years â a $10 billion bet on the metaverse â has come up mostly empty. Meanwhile, Metaâs primary strategy to keep growing has been sputtering, posing an existential threat to the company. In February 2022, for the first time in history, Facebook was losing users. Its stock plunged by 26 percent, wiping out $230 billion in market value. +
++It makes sense, then, that Zuckerberg seems to be searching for new ways to transform not only his companyâs public image but his own. During the pandemic, Zuckerberg, a self-improvement hobbyist whose wide-ranging interests include learning Mandarin and slaughtering his own meat, discovered the combat sport Brazilian jiujitsu. Immediately, he was hooked. âLike five minutes in, I was like, âWhere has this been my whole life?ââ Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan in a 2022 interview. âIt really is the best sport.â +
++Soon after taking up the new hobby, Zuckerberg was posting about it on Instagram â everything from photos at UFC games and sweaty, shirtless selfies with professional kickboxers to videos sparring on a barge to the theme of Mission Impossible. One of the most iconic images of Mark Zuckerberg following the Cambridge Analytica scandal was a photoshopped portrait on the cover of Wiredâs March 2018 issue: Zuckerberg, badly beaten, with two black eyes and a bloodied brow, his face made up in an expression of weary introspection. +
++Now, plenty of pictures of Zuckerbergâs bruised and beaten face grace his Instagram, but this time, the beatings are genuine and hard-won. âSparring got a little out of hand,â a caption reads beneath a selfie in which he is pictured with bruises beneath his eyes. +
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