A Warming World Can Also Turn Winter Into a Weapon
Deadly cold emerges from decisions made long before the snow falls
Today, I feel torn between two urgent crises. One unfolds slowly, through rising temperatures, shifting circulation, and cumulative harm. The other is immediate, public, and brutal, carried out through executions, repression, and the steady normalization of fascism.
There’s a paralyzing sense of inadequacy: how can I write about a polar vortex when people are being killed in broad daylight?
The doubt loops. I stall. I talk myself into continuing, then question the justification for doing so.
As Emily Atkins (one of my role models in this absurd crusade against the most evident of predicaments) writes, the tension comes from a job that asks us to direct our attention toward the horizon while our eyes remain fixed on the acute violence unfolding right in front of us. That pull lives in the body. It shows up as fatigue, guilt, and the sense that any choice of focus risks becoming a moral failure.
But climate change and state violence are not separate emergencies. They are expressions of the same machinery, operating across different timelines and scales.
One moves through policy, neglect, and atmosphere. The other through courts, secret police, and weapons. Both rely on the same logic of disposability.
Climate change becomes legible as a series of direct decisions, made by states and enforced by systems, that allow certain people to die. Death arrives through supercharged cold spells, heatwaves, pollution, hunger, flooding, and displacement, all produced by a warming world rather than a trigger pull.
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