Hinge has tried its darnedest to fix online dating. Is the real problem us?
Online dating has taken over our love lives: One in two Americans who’ve never been married — as well as 30 percent of all US adults — have used a matchmaking app or site. If you’re looking to date, you’re almost certainly looking on your phone, and the app Hinge is this massive industry’s darling. Its user base and revenue are growing rapidly, making executives at its parent company, Match Group, speak of it in quarterly earnings calls as they would a favorite child (they do, after all, have many, including Tinder, OkCupid, The League, Plenty of Fish, and Match.com).
Hinge is not the biggest dating app in the US; that crown still belongs to Tinder, with Bumble as the runner-up. While Hinge lacks, uh, penetration in rural areas, experts say, it is hugely popular in large cities. It has reached the top of the app download charts in several European markets, where it launched more recently. For years, those bigger apps have had users endlessly swiping, addicted to their game-like nature, whereas Hinge seems to have found a sweet spot of scale and user-focused approach. This helped it become the go-to place for those seeking relationships online — which these days means people seeking relationships, period. Hinge has been resonant, said longtime industry consultant Mark Brooks, “because they have true integrity, and because their product actually works.”
Users almost agree.
“It is the everybody app,” said Nahal, a 34-year-old executive at a software company who splits her time between New York and Los Angeles, who has used the app on and off since 2020. When Bryce, a 29-year-old nonprofit director in Kansas City, started using it last summer, “It was the one that everyone was talking about.”
Being popular, though, isn’t the same as being beloved: Neither Bryce nor Nahal is particularly enthusiastic about Hinge. “You’re not going to find a gem there, but you’ll find something solid,” said Nahal. “It’s still dissatisfying,” said Bryce. “I don’t like it — but it’s interesting, it does work a little bit.” “It’s definitely the best of the worst,” said Shoshana, a 30-year-old who works at a think tank in Washington DC.
Hinge has had a long and winding road to becoming “the everybody app.” 2023 marks 10 years since it officially launched, but it only really hit its stride around 2018, then exploded after it was acquired by Match Group in 2019 and was boosted even further by a lockdown-era dating boom. In those several years, Hinge acquired a reputation for being an app that works for, in industry lingo, “high-intent” daters, or people who are dating for keeps.
So why do users feel so deeply ambivalent about it? Why are so many unhappy with their experience, even though the app is trying to give them what they want? What else could Hinge do, aside from iterating on a dating paradigm that has exhausted so many but is the dominant system of courtship in today’s world?
Hinge, a history
After some fits and starts as a dating website aimed at a younger demographic than Match.com or Jdate, Hinge, founded and led by Harvard Business School grad Justin McLeod, launched as a mobile app in 2013. It was a swipe app with a simple sign-up process, which connected users via their Facebook profiles, creating a “friends of friends” dating network. The app remained buzzy for several years — particularly among college grads in big cities — but eventually growth started slowing and McLeod was disappointed in the direction the company was heading. From the beginning, he wanted the app to be “wholesome” and relationship-focused, unlike Tinder, which it was increasingly getting conflated with. Hinge was “kind of just this copycat app that has the same interface with a small twist,” McLeod admitted to Guy Raz on the podcast How I Built This in 2021.
In a bold move, inspired by his own tumultuous story of rekindled love, he decided to take the whole thing apart and rebuild it. The app relaunched in 2016, notably redesigned. Swiping was gone, profiles were more robust. The idea was to force users to slow down and look at potential matches a bit more carefully. At the time, McLeod said all this was meant to make the experience less anonymous and more like being on a social network than a dating app.
With its redesign, Hinge was trying to address a problem that was already clear a few years into the mobile dating revolution: Many were deeply frustrated with the app.
Steve Dean, a dating coach in New York, said he used to steer clients away from Hinge but that the relaunch was “transformative.”
Instead of having to match with someone to send a message, you could now do that as you were “liking” something about them, be it an answer to a mandatory prompt — conversation starters like “my most irrational fear,” or, since these get updated with the zeitgeist, “my therapist would tell you” — or a particular photo on their profile. “It’s really the messages that matter because that’s when you prove you’re a human, prove you’re not a bot, prove your worth someone’s attention in the first place,” Dean said.
On many apps and dating sites, you can’t message someone or even know they’ve “liked” you before you’ve both expressed interest — unless you pay for the option. On Tinder, for instance, people try to game the system by buying auto-swiping bots to do the upfront work for them. All that “liking,” McLeod told Raz, “creates a lot of engagement, but … it frustrates people because a lot of those matches don’t go anywhere.”
Since people know which piece of their profile others are engaging with on the updated Hinge, they can also see what works and what doesn’t. Bryce, for instance, has experimented with which prompts he answers, turning to the Reddit Hinge forum to see what women actually want to know. When he answered the “I’m looking for” prompt, his match numbers improved.
Shifting away from using metrics such as time spent on the app, the bread and butter of the attention economy, was another key part of Hinge’s big rethink, according to the company. It introduced a “We Met” feature, a little survey that asks users whether they went out with someone and if the date was a “type of person they’d like to see again.” Hinge says it uses those answers to inform further recommendations.
“From what I understand, it is one of the first companies that has really looked into the data and reacted to it,” said Brooks, the industry consultant. “This is surprisingly rare.”
All these bets paid off. The company ended up benefiting from positioning itself as the relationship app, and, effectively, as the anti-Tinder — and attracting big investment. Seeing promise in Hinge’s popularity among “urban, educated millennial women looking for relationships,” and in a clear effort to stave off competition from the female-focused Bumble, Match Group bought a 51 percent stake in Hinge in 2018, and acquired it in its entirety a year later, giving the up-and-comer access to the enormous resources of the dating behemoth. Match, in turn, got “the missing piece in the portfolio,” according to Brooks: a dating app aimed squarely at users aged between Tinder and Match.com.
The problems with online dating: 2023 edition
I both know personally and have spoken to people for this piece who have had success finding long-lasting relationships on Hinge, some of them very quickly. When Alex, a video editor from New York, downloaded the app in 2018, his first date turned into a four-year relationship. Allison, a copywriter in Kentucky, told me a similar story of meeting her boyfriend on her first online date ever, through Hinge, in 2021. Two days after we spoke, I got a follow-up saying her boyfriend had proposed.
Dean recommends the app to his clients because, he says, it does get people out on dates. “I don’t know of a better app if you want to go on a date this week with someone who generally doesn’t suck,” he said.
Alex admits that, nowadays, “all the apps kind of look the same.” Bumble and Tinder introduced their own versions of prompts. But unlike its competitors, Hinge prompts are mandatory, giving the user at least a “snapshot of somebody’s personality and energy,” Alex said. Bryce says he “cannot stand” the other apps he’d tried. He thinks they are “engineered to keep you swiping,” while Hinge “does not seem to do that as much.”
None of this is exactly high praise. A lot of people use the app only begrudgingly, and many complain about their experiences. When Hinge had a service outage in March of this year, the internet was brimming with glee. TikTok, Twitter, and Reddit are filled with users’ Hinge grievances: “Hinge is hiding sexy people,” “Hinge is hell,” “Hinge is not where u find ur soulmate”. Users are always “deleting Hinge” out of frustration, while others are trading tips on how to game the algorithm.
Some of the dissatisfaction with Hinge surely stems from its recent rise to one of the biggest players in the game and from the inherent difficulty of delivering on the “relationship app” promise. There are also a number of issues that were diagnosed years ago and haven’t significantly changed, issues that are endemic to online dating and our lives on the internet that no app or site has been able to solve.
One key problem across the apps is the slog of self-presentation, or “impression management,” said Rachel Katz, a digital media sociologist who studies online dating at the University of Salford in the UK. “An important aspect of it is knowing your audience,” Katz said. On dating apps, you don’t know who exactly you’re presenting yourself to when picking a profile picture or composing your bio. You also don’t have physical cues that can help you adjust that self-presentation. “You’re trying to come up with something that’s generally appealing to people, but it can’t be too weird. It can’t be too unique,” said Bryce. “That’s partly why it’s exhausting,” Katz explains, “because it’s this constant labor. … You’re not really sure of how to do it, you can’t just fit into a comfortable social role.”
It seems Hinge’s prompts were introduced in part to help with the labor of impression management. But Dean says they are inadequate for someone who is actually trying to find a relationship. If you add up all the words you can include in your profile, “You only really get 450 characters of meaningful text,” and “that means that users on Hinge, just like on so many other apps, end up stuck in this process of mindlessly swiping because you’re not actually finding people who resonate.”
It’s not that the app isn’t capable of surfacing people that seem appealing to each user. “They know who you’re attracted to. That’s not the hard-part problem anymore,” Dean said. The big question, especially in an app that’s supposed to be geared toward relationships, is compatibility. And that is hard to assess when there’s so little information to draw from.
“Ninety percent of the people in this town are putting on their prompts ‘Kansas City Chiefs, golden retrievers, and Taylor Swift,’” said Bryce.
Nahal says the people she matched with were “super random,” like a former football player who was five years younger than her, seemed “kind of funny” but looked “like he’d never read a book.” She said, “These are not people I wasn’t attracted to or didn’t have something to say to,” but they weren’t people she had much in common with. “That randomness was thrilling, but I don’t think that it had as much legs to it as one might hope if they were looking for something real.” (She did date football guy; it didn’t work out).
The app tries to give its users “most compatible” user suggestions, which many online complain completely miss the mark — whether because it’s “humbling,” or (allegedly) matches you with … your sibling.
This lack of relevancy makes worse another fundamental and longstanding problem of online dating, known as the “paradox of choice,” a term coined by psychologist Barry Schwartz with regard to consumer behaviors. When dating apps are not delivering on compatibility, Dean said, they are leading you to “believe that there’s a forever volume of people you can always like.”
Logan Ury, a dating coach and behavioral scientist who has been Hinge’s director of relationship science since 2020, says that, fundamentally, “matching people is really hard,” regardless of who is doing it. There’s no way to optimize for serendipity. What Hinge is trying to do is to make the experience of “looking at a two-dimensional version of someone as close to the real-life version as is possible through technology.” This is why, in the last two years, the company has rolled out profile polls, audio and video prompts, and voice notes, all in an effort to make profiles “richer” and more lifelike. (The company’s research found, for instance, that conversations with voice notes are 48 percent more likely to lead to a date.)
Ury rejects the notion that apps should be asking people for more about themselves in writing or through extensive questionnaires. Users may match up on paper but end up disappointed in real life. “I would have rather that people understand that sooner by meeting up earlier,” she said. “Use the app as a matchmaker who gives you the matches — and then, as quickly as possible, the two of you should be chatting live to see if you are a match,” she said. “We found that three days of chatting is the sweet spot for scheduling a date.”
Katz’s research shows that another big issue across dating apps is people’s conflicting goals as to why they are on there in the first place. Their interactions can be very dependent on how they are feeling in a given time or even where they are physically. “Sometimes, even though you generally want a relationship on a dating app, in that particular moment, you might be in line at Chipotle, or you might be at work, and it’s just kind of a quick thing.”
Even on Hinge, the “relationship app,” Shoshana has been asked by a couple to join them in a threesome. Men, she said, often don’t even seem to want anything in particular. “I think they just want some vague level of approval,” she said. “I’ve even had female friends say to me, ‘Yeah, I don’t want to really meet anyone. I just want guys to tell me I’m hot.’”
Hinge, for its part, is trying to address the issue, made more pressing by the fluid approach Gen Z has to defining their relationships. In 2022, it introduced two features that let users say upfront what their intentions and relationship types are — including for those who are non-monogamous.
But Shoshana doesn’t fault the app itself for the biggest problem she faces while using it. Unless you’re very lucky, she says, Hinge is “a bottomless pit of cruelness and just selfishness.” She blames the men in her city, Washington, DC. “I don’t think Hinge can do much better,” she said. Every time she’s reported someone for inappropriate behavior, Hinge has taken action.
Harassment is a massive concern across the entire online dating industry. And it’s similar to all these other issues: They may not be any individual app’s fault, but they stem from how we’ve learned to use the internet at large. Anonymity has taught people that it’s very easy to be awful online. The ease of signing up for just about anything has proven we barely have to put in any effort to find what we want. The internet’s premium on snark and pithiness makes it that much harder to earnestly fill out an extensive dating profile. You get stuck between appearing cool and being vulnerable.
It’s the same thing with paying. So many things on the internet have been free — including online dating, for years propped up by venture capital funding — that many balk when they are asked to fork out for a regular subscription.
There’s a certain stigma attached to paying, an echo of the stigma that used to surround online dating in general. But at the end of the day, the apps are a consumer product and, annoying as it may be, they are designed so that paying works. Bryce upgraded to HingeX, the company’s most premium offering, which costs a steep $50 a month. It significantly increased his match rate. Hinge explicitly says that paying for the X version boosts user profiles and their likes. It’s also what many on social media gripe about: They are turned off by Hinge asking them to pay to play.
The people I spoke to found Hinge’s “roses,” a digital gift that indicates to a match you are really interested in them, a particularly cringey paid feature. “It automatically makes me feel a little off, it feels like you’re not approaching somebody from the same level,” said Alex. “It’s so cheesy, I hate it,” said Shoshana. Similarly, Hinge’s “Standouts” section — filled with attractive people you need to send a rose in order to interact with — is a notable source of strife; users call it “rose jail.”
Could AI fix online dating hell?
Emily Stykes, a business analyst at New Street Research, doesn’t think any of the major apps, including Hinge, have solved the basic problem of relevant matches. But, she notes, they are aware of it. “They know there’s a fundamental mismatch between what people want from these apps and what’s being delivered.” At an investor conference in March, McLeod said that “the feeling like this app doesn’t really get me” is one of the biggest issues Hinge is facing.
This is where, according to Ury, AI could help. “AI could do an even better job at letting us know who you’re interested in and what your type is,” she said. The industry envisions that AI will function as a kind of coach for daters. McLeod said during the investor conference that AI could help users not only find “higher quality, fewer quantity matches,” but also help with their interactions, “even potentially going past the first date.” The aim is to have the best “personal matchmaker in the world” who knows “everyone out there.”
Brooks said that the value of a human matchmaker is “pre-date prep and post-date feedback” from both sides of the match. “That’s also when dating apps should get to know their customers, based on the feedback,” he said. “That’s what would feed a truly informed AI.”
In some ways, we’re already there. Apps are implementing AI to help users with the labor of impression management: Tinder, for instance, has been testing a feature that uses AI to identify your best photos. Bumble’s app for making friends introduced AI-generated “icebreakers,” which are questions based on the other person’s profile and can be used in the middle of the conversation. Users themselves are using AI to make the grind of messaging easier, the Washington Post reported earlier this year.
But implementing AI on a large scale to help with romance will be a tricky needle to thread, since the whole point of the endeavor is to find real, authentic connection. The users I spoke to were wary, to say the least. Hinge wouldn’t say how specifically they were planning on employing AI.
At the same time, the company seems to be aware that more tech may not solve problems — at least in part — wrought by tech. It announced in December that, to combat the generation’s loneliness epidemic, it was instituting a $1 million fund to get Gen-Zers to meet in real life.
Even by House GOP standards, 2023 was absurd.
There’s nothing quite like starting the year with 14 consecutive rounds of failed speaker votes.
Just one week into 2023, House Republicans had already endured a humiliating leadership race full of infighting and chaos. And while that was a low point for them, things arguably went downhill from there.
Since then, the GOP followed up its first wave of speaker drama with another equally tumultuous contest, expulsion votes on one of its own members, failed attempts to get much of its policy agenda out the door, and floundering investigations of President Joe Biden.
Spending a year dealing with political and personnel problems left the party with little to show for itself policy-wise ahead of an election year in which Republicans hope to expand on their narrow House majority. And it has given Democrats plenty of ammunition to use in making the case the GOP shouldn’t be trusted to govern.
According to the New York Times, this is the most unproductive the House has been in years, even compared to other instances of divided government. In 2023, the House passed just 27 bills that became law, a far lower figure than the 72 it passed in 2013 when Congress was similarly split.
It was always going to be difficult for Republicans to leave a mark given Democratic control of the Senate and White House, but in the past, parties in the GOP’s position have stayed better united on their policy priorities and put pressure on the administration while sticking together on their demands. Although there’s still time to turn things around next year, at this point in the term, it seems as though this House will be remembered for being the one in which Republicans were seriously in disarray. Below is a rundown of some of the moments that defined that mayhem.
Speaker drama (round one)
For four days, members of the House’s right flank like Rep. Matt Gaetz refused to back Rep. Kevin McCarthy for the role of speaker because, they argued, he hadn’t sufficiently committed to their interests and wasn’t conservative enough.
That led to round after round after round of failed votes. On the 15th round of voting, McCarthy was finally able to secure the majority he needed to ascend to the role, but not without making some serious concessions that greatly diluted his power.
Those concessions included putting multiple members of the Freedom Caucus on the Rules Committee, an agreement to curb government spending, and changes to a policy known as the motion to vacate, which would allow any one member to introduce a resolution to remove McCarthy from the job.
That last concession would come back to haunt McCarthy later in the year, when House conservatives would use it to protest his handling of government funding legislation. The whole speakership debacle also foreshadowed the ideological divides that would come to plague Republicans for the duration of this year and make not just keeping a leader, but producing concrete legislation, difficult.
Debt ceiling
A segment of the House Republican conference has long threatened to refuse to raise the debt ceiling — something that could spark economic calamity — if they don’t get the spending cuts they demand.
The debt ceiling is the limit that the US is able to borrow, and if the country defaults on it, it’s unable to pay its bills. Congress has to either raise or suspend the debt ceiling every few years to ensure that the US doesn’t default. If it were to do so, there’d likely be cascading negative effects on the US and global economies: The US could have a lower credit limit, interest rates could go up, and unemployment could surge. Despite these concerns, fiscal conservatives have long suggested they’d be open to defaulting if it meant that they could secure the social spending changes they demand.
This year, those lawmakers, which include members of the Freedom Caucus, urged then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy to take a hard-line stance in negotiations with Democrats. Specifically, they called for major cuts to climate spending and new work requirements for Medicaid in exchange for any willingness to raise the debt limit.
McCarthy did take a strong position in negotiations, to the point that questions were raised about whether the US, which typically comes down to the wire on debt ceiling deals, might actually default this time. In the end, with days to spare, GOP leaders wound up settling for a debt ceiling deal that didn’t include many of these requests. While they were able to secure some Republican wins — like the repurposing of roughly $20 billion in IRS funding and a cap on non-defense spending — the cuts wound up being far less than what some members had urged. The deal was generally seen as a compromise for all involved; not a loss for the GOP, but not a win, either.
Conservatives were incensed, setting the stage for later confrontations between the party’s right-most members and the rest of the caucus. “The concessions made by the speaker in his negotiations with President Biden fall far short of my expectations,” Rep. Wesley Hunt (R-TX), a Republican who opposed the deal, wrote on Twitter.
Investigation flops
One of Republicans’ chief promises when they entered office was that they’d be launching a series of investigations, including many that centered on the Biden administration and alleged biases the federal government has against Republicans.
These investigations have focused on everything from Twitter’s handling of a story about Hunter Biden’s laptop to the White House’s withdrawal from Afghanistan to the purported “weaponization of the federal government.”
By and large, as Vox’s Christian Paz has reported, many of the investigations have been nothing short of flops. The laptop investigation failed to find anything incriminating President Biden in misconduct, and the Afghanistan investigation didn’t turn up any useful knowledge to use against Democrats the way the Benghazi investigation did years earlier. Overall, not only have inquiries into President Biden failed to turn up any concrete evidence linking him to wrongdoing, these endeavors haven’t generated a lot of discourse, and the impeachment effort in particular has been unpopular.
According to a December Marist poll, voters were split on Biden’s impeachment inquiry, with just 48 percent approving of it. That figure is lower than the percentage of voters who approved of Trump’s two past impeachment inquiries, according to the Washington Post.
Although some of these efforts, like Republicans’ recent launch of Biden’s impeachment inquiry, might help rally the GOP base, they also endanger battleground members given they aren’t especially backed by the broader public. That makes these actions more risky for House Republicans, whose ability to maintain a majority hinges on these battleground members, 17 of whom are in districts that Biden also won.
Speaker drama (round two)
As if the January drama wasn’t enough, Republicans had yet another speaker debacle in October when the far-right faction of the GOP conference joined with Democrats to oust McCarthy from the speaker’s job.
The trouble began when McCarthy opted to work with Democrats to pass a short-term spending bill that kept the government open. Each year, Congress has to pass 12 appropriations bills, often consolidated into a larger package, to allocate the funds needed to keep the government running. Conservatives had hoped that McCarthy would leverage a potential government shutdown to force Congress to pass individual long-term spending bills that contained the cuts to programs like SNAP and Medicaid they wanted.
McCarthy’s decision to avert a shutdown followed other actions that had upset these far-right members, including the concessions he had previously made on the debt ceiling deal.
As a result, Gaetz opted to use the motion to vacate to force a vote on removing McCarthy, which was ultimately successful.
After McCarthy was booted, Republicans faced even more problems as the far right opposed other speaker options that were proposed, and moderates opposed the conservative options the far right wanted. Multiple people were floated as potential options, including longtime leadership member Rep. Steve Scalise from Louisiana and former Freedom Caucus Chair Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan. None were able to get the support needed to become speaker.
All of this culminated in the election of conservative member, election denier, and relative unknown Rep. Mike Johnson (R-LA) to the position.
The same fault lines that sparked the McCarthy drama, however, haven’t disappeared. Instead, they’re expected to re-emerge in 2024 when the House will have to figure out how to handle the passage of long-term spending bills as another funding deadline approaches in January.
Johnson will have to navigate these tensions on those bills — as well as on the Biden impeachment inquiry — as different factions of the party push for competing paths forward.
Failed abortion bills and culture wars
Beyond investigations into Biden, House Republicans kicked off their term with a laundry list of goals they hoped to achieve.
Chief among these were policies that would restrict abortion rights. Like the investigations, however, this goal proved fraught and revealing of the divisions in the caucus. Though some far-right members agitated for a national abortion ban, there was rapid blowback to such harsh proposals —with poll after poll after poll showing that Americans are in favor of at least some abortion access. In lieu of considering a national abortion ban, the House voted on a slate of abortion bills that would put limitations on federal funding for abortions and require care for infants if an abortion failed.
These had no chance of making it through the Democrat-controlled Senate.
A similar dynamic played out on legislation like the annual defense bill, which lays out the military budget that the US has each year. House Republicans used their version of the bill to restrict funds that the federal government can provide for servicemembers to travel for an abortion, and to limit funding for gender-affirming surgeries for trans servicemembers. Those amendments did not make it into a final compromise bill with the Senate.
While both bills were wins for a chamber that has struggled to pass even basic legislation, they also marked another failure by House Republicans to get their policies into law.
“I want my Republican colleagues to give me one thing — one — that I can go campaign on and say we did. Anybody sitting in the complex, if you want to come down to the floor and come explain to me, one material, meaningful, significant thing the Republican majority has done,” Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX), a far-right member said in November during a floor speech criticizing Republicans’ failures on spending cuts.
George Santos and a winnowing majority
After the 2022 midterms, the House GOP’s majority was narrow: In those contests, Republicans only won a nine-seat majority, after winning 222 seats to Democrats’ 213.
A combination of circumstance, bad luck, and misconduct have further winnowed that majority thanks to the scandals of former New York Rep. George Santos and some lawmakers’ decision to leave the House of their own volition.
Santos’s expulsion was the latest embarrassment for the GOP, and marked the first time a House lawmaker had been expelled in roughly two decades. His removal followed a 23-count federal indictment, extensive coverage of the lies he told about his work and educational history, and a scathing review by the House Ethics Committee.
In addition to Santos’s departure, there have been many other resignations on the Republican side. Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) has said he’ll leave his post before the end of 2023, and Bill Johnson (R-OH) has said he’ll leave his post in 2024, meaning their seats will be vacant until they can hold special elections in their districts (though both are expected to eventually be replaced by Republicans).
That means Republicans could be operating with fewer votes to spare in the new year. With McCarthy gone, they’re only able to lose three votes to keep their majority. Those narrow margins could give any small group of GOP lawmakers outsize control over policy or force them to keep relying on Democratic votes for key bills. “Hopefully no one dies,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) lamented in a tweet on this issue. (That post also suggested that Republicans will have only a one-vote majority which isn’t the case.)
What it’s 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, humanity’s ravenous appetite for coal, oil, and natural gas is driving up concentrations of heat-trapping gasses in the atmosphere to levels the Earth hasn’t 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 planet’s average temperature from rising more than 2°C, striving to stay below 1.5°C. A single year rising past this level doesn’t mean this target is toast, but if people keep heating up the planet, a year like 2023 will become one of the coolest we’ll experience in the rest of our lives.
Earlier this month, leaders from around the world 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.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25174092/PXL_20231215_010615844.MP.jpg)
Umair Irfan/Vox
I spoke with seven researchers studying Earth’s 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 Alaska’s sockeye, chinook, and chum salmon. He was one of several scientists presenting the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s 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 Canada’s 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 it’s already reshaping ecosystems and human communities:
I think the reality is, if you look at Western Alaska, climate change is not something that’s coming down the pipe somewhere in the future. It is happening now, it’s been happening for decades. And whether you’re talking about fish or people or birds, there are real impacts that we need to deal with right now.
And when you hear about what’s 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 we’re going to be challenged by it, now and for decades to come, so we need action now at local scales.
Rick Thoman, who studies Alaska’s 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 what’s happening. We need the big picture solutions, but everyone — Indigenous communities, all the people of the Arctic — are having to adapt right here, right now. It didn’t start today. It didn’t 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 we’re still going to be here.
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, that’s 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 we’re 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, that’s an incredibly abstract concept because the difference to us of two degrees doesn’t mean anything. But if you can translate that experience of two degrees warming to an actual on-the-ground experience that’s highly localized — so let’s 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 — 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.
Robert Green, a scientist at NASA’s 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 that’s something that is just so important to do. Nobody wants to waste money out of a leaking pipeline. Let’s go ahead and fix those leaks, and we also reduce the impact of methane for climate change.
I’m excited to be making a difference. I’m an optimistic person, and we can work together to address this problem. It’s not an easy problem, but the pieces are coming together. So I’m going to remain hopeful.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25174086/PXL_20231213_225800412_2.jpeg)
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 he’s 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. That’s 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. There’s a big intersection because we’re 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 — as a public health issue, and as a grid issue — becomes larger and larger.
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 scientist’s perspective — how can we help the reefs? How can we understand what they need and what they’re facing? — 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 they’ve already done to see what can change in the future.
Gordon Walker, a researcher at the University of Hawai‘i 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 — 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 — I think that it’s important for us to collect data on regions in the global South — the Caribbean, South America, Africa — because a lot of the science and research is focused on the global North.
I think it’s imperative, especially in areas where we don’t 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.