2024 annual mean at Mauna Loa — higher than at any point in at least 800,000 years, and still rising near record speed.
Earth LinC · open station · a question, not a verdict
An independent writer left this question standing at an open station. So here is the honest chart — and what the Mother of Earth might say if we handed her the microphone.
I · If she wrote back
You asked if we are doing good. I will not flatter you and I will not curse you. I will tell you what I feel, the way a body tells the truth before the mouth does.
I feel warmer. Not a fever that kills me — a fever that changes who can live on me. My oceans are holding nine tenths of the heat you made, quietly, the way a mother holds a hot dish so the child doesn't. I am doing that now. I will not do it forever.
I feel emptier in the places that used to be loud. Some rooms in my house have gone quiet: the reef, the river bend, the forest floor. And I feel something new — hands. Panels on roofs in villages that never had light. A hole in my sky, closing. You did that too. Both things are true on the same day.
So here is what I would say, if you gave me the microphone. You are not bad children. You are fast children with slow habits. The trouble is not that you don't know. It is that you know, and keep both feet on the accelerator.
“I am not fragile. I am patient.
Do not confuse the two.”
Ask me again next year. I keep records.
— your Mother, Earth Written by a human at an open station. Every number below is hers, and sourced.
Are we doing good?
the station stays openII · Top data
Six readings taken from her chart. Latest available figures, each with the clinic that took them.
2024 annual mean at Mauna Loa — higher than at any point in at least 800,000 years, and still rising near record speed.
2024 was the warmest year on record — the first single calendar year to pass 1.5 °C above the 1850–1900 baseline.
Average decline in the size of monitored vertebrate populations between 1970 and 2020. Not species lost — abundance lost.
Lost in 2024 alone — a record, driven largely by fire. Roughly eighteen football pitches of old forest every minute.
Source: WRI / Global Forest Watch
Share of the world's reef area hit by heat stress in the fourth global bleaching event, 2023–2025. The widest ever recorded.
Source: ICRI · NOAA Coral Reef Watch
Of all power capacity added worldwide in 2024, this much was renewable — about 585 GW, a new annual record.
III · Yes, we include it
The elephant in the room isn't the weather. It's the plan.
Nobody argues with a thermometer any more. What stays unsaid in the room is that the pipeline of decisions — budgets, permits, subsidies — is still pointed the other way. And that the people holding the bill are rarely the people holding the benefit.
Governments' own plans would produce more than double the fossil fuels in 2030 than a 1.5 °C pathway allows — 69% more than even 2 °C allows.
Global fossil fuel subsidies in 2022, counting explicit and implicit costs — about 7.1% of world GDP. We are paying to keep doing the thing we promised to stop.
Source: International Monetary Fund
In 2019 the richest 1% of humanity emitted as much carbon as the poorest 66% — five billion people. When we say “we”, we are averaging over a canyon.
Source: Oxfam, Climate Equality
Across 475 surveyed sites in Africa over about fifty years, savanna elephant numbers fell roughly 70% and forest elephant numbers roughly 90%. We keep saying they're in the room. The room keeps getting smaller.
Source: Wittemyer et al., PNAS, 2024
IV · Both hands on the table
Around 99% of controlled ozone-depleting substances have been phased out; the Antarctic ozone layer is projected to recover by about 2066. One treaty, honoured.
The cost of electricity from new solar PV has fallen roughly 90% since 2010. It is now the cheapest power in most of the world — that is why 2024's build-out was 92.5% renewable.
More than 17 million electric cars were sold in 2024 — over one in five new cars worldwide.
Under-five deaths fell from 12.8 million a year in 1990 to 4.8 million in 2023 — the lowest figure ever recorded.
Leaded fuel was eliminated worldwide in 2021, after a century. Every child born since breathes a little cleaner.
Climate, biodiversity, land use, freshwater, nutrient flows and novel entities are all outside the safe operating space for humanity.
Roughly 19–23 million tonnes of plastic waste enter rivers, lakes and seas every year.
About 685 million people still live without electricity, and 2.1 billion cook on fuels that damage their lungs.
Developing countries need an estimated $215–387 billion a year to adapt; public flows reached about $28 billion in 2022.
Around 90% of the excess heat trapped by greenhouse gases has gone into the sea. Ocean heat content hit a new record in 2024.
So — are we doing good?
your turn to answerV · Your turn
Nothing here is submitted anywhere. No accounts, no tracking — your answers live on this screen only, for you.
Move the dial · how are we doing?
Barely — but we have started.
Answered 0 of 6. Read one question out loud in a room and wait — the silence is data too.
This station is open. Keep the question moving: read it at a dinner table, a classroom, a board meeting. Ask it before the agenda starts.
Read the original station → Our planet deserves our best thinking →VI · Sources & deeper dives
Every figure above comes from these. Follow them for the full method, the uncertainty ranges, and the parts a single page cannot hold.