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Climate adaptation isn’t surrender. It’s survival.

This year’s hot, smoky summer shows why cutting emissions won’t be enough to protect us from the warming already here.

In 2019, the AI researcher Rich Sutton published a short essay called “The Bitter Lesson.“ Seventy years of AI research, he argued, kept demonstrating the same thing: the most effective ways to train AI rely on raw, brute-force computing power — simply scaling up — rather than clever approaches built on human insight. It didn’t matter how elegant researchers’ work was. More compute would win every time. It’s a bitter lesson because, well, no one wants to accept that even the best efforts can go unrewarded.

Explore the big, complicated problems the world faces and the most efficient ways to solve them. Sent twice a week.

This summer, climate change has been teaching its own kind of bitter lesson. Last week smoke from out-of-control Canadian wildfires reached more than 120 million Americans, sending out air quality alerts across 18-plus states from Minnesota to Virginia. Those wildfires, which were made more likely by the effects of climate change, followed record-breaking heat waves in Europe that contributed to the deaths of thousands of people.

Why air conditioning became a cross-Atlantic culture war

Disasters like these inevitably renew calls for climate action, but no current US emissions policy, no amount of carbon cutting now, could clear the air, just as nothing Europe has done on climate — and it has done more than any other region, at no small cost — could protect it from those killer temperatures. Not this summer, not this decade, not the one after. The steps countries take now to reduce carbon emissions — to mitigate climate change — will not protect them from the present-day effects of climate change.

That’s the bitter lesson of climate change, and 2026 is the summer it has become unignorable. The dangerous effects we’ve been warned about are here, locked in on every timescale that matters to the people living through them. We can’t prevent the worst from happening right now, so we need to figure out how we’re going to adapt to it.

The smoke we can’t stop

Canadian wildfire smoke is as close to an unstoppable disaster as exists today. The fires are Canada’s, the ignition is mostly lightning, the fuel is a subcontinent of boreal forest no fire agency can manage, and the whole system sits outside US jurisdiction. While strategies like prescribed burning and forest thinning can help reduce the wildfires that crop up in the western US, the sheer scale of Canadian forests........

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