Fossil Fuels Undermine Climate's Known Derivatives

Time to break out the math (and the acronyms).

The more conversations I have, the more convinced I become that the biggest hurdle in getting a critical mass of people to engage with climate comes down to …

Sorry—Editor Mark jumping in here to say how much Writer Mark sucks for using the word engage (in the first freaking sentence, no less). What a tired marketing cliché. My bad. Let’s try again:

… the biggest hurdle in getting a critical mass of people personally invested in the climate fight comes down to one of the biggest challenges human society has ever faced: making people care about math. That’s the first bit of bad news. That’s the seemingly unsolvable messaging problem we face.

Now, it’s not the math itself we need them to care about. It’s what the math tells us. Namely, that time is our greatest nemesis.

The second piece of bad news is that the math involved isn’t just x + y = z stuff, either. This is the kind of math that teaches you the massive difference between something that’s getting worse and something that’s getting worse faster. We’re talking derivatives, inflection points, and curves that steepen with each lost moment. Deep breath …

We need to talk about calculus

But before we dive in, let’s pull back for a sec. Let’s say you’re a smart, successful person who grew up in greater LA and still lives there. You run in conservative circles, and there are few social or political forces steering you toward climate change awareness—in fact, as a republican, it’s safe to say that political forces in your life push you away from it—so you haven’t had a transformative climate moment where the scales have fallen from your eyes. But you do, nonetheless, walk around with your eyes/ears/nostrils open.

In an overdue chat with me recently (you and I are college friends), not long after the LA fires, you were not ready to attribute the fires to climate change, and I was not about to press the point. But you did describe how the Santa Ana winds are different from how they were when you were a kid—the season is longer. But what struck you lately is more of a daily occurrence: the marine layer—that cool, wet layer of air that used to burn off in the early afternoon—burns off earlier than it used to. And you know this because you walk outside every morning, just like you did decades ago. And it’s different now. Day after day, it’s hotter and drier earlier than it used to be.

“I’m starting to think this climate change thing is real.”

That’s what you told me. And that makes you part of a wide-ranging group that I’m not convinced shows up in the demographics: peeps of all persuasions and from far-flung locations who have a lifelong timescale with the geographical postage stamp they call home, and therefore know that the local climate (or weather, if climate is a dirty word) is different than it used to be. Hotter. Drier. Deader. Stormier. Meltier. Your connection to the place you call home is incredibly strong, and your awareness of local warming makes you engagable* gettable when it comes to global warming.

*Editor Mark says: OMG again? You disgust me.

But for those gettable peeps who see and feel that, yes, the climate has noticeably changed, there’s an understandable tendency to look around and see that it hasn’t changed a ton. So onward they march and on stay the blinders. So how do we recruit them to join the fight? What metaphor do we use to inspire them to think differently? Time may be our greatest enemy, but it’s faceless and, for that matter, blameless. Time marches; that’s all time does.

So where should we place the blame?

How about squarely on the shoulders of Big Oil? And this is where I think the calculus can be our ally. If we can incorporate just enough accessible math into our messaging to illustrate that the previous (utterly wasted) 50 years meant more than the next 50 can ever mean, then that sets the table for showing people that the fossil fuel industry spent those five lost decades deliberately lighting the clock on fire.

I’m a sucker for a good acronym. Remember TACO from a few weeks ago, about how Trump Always Chickens Out when it comes to enacting his tariff taxes? I know, it feels like an eon ago because so much crazy shit has since happened. My first reaction to TA was that it’s cheating to make an acronym that spells something that’s already a word. But then I embraced it. First because I—like all humans everywhere—love a good taco, and second because I realized that reverse engineering acronyms from words that already exist is a pretty neat game:

LOBBY: Let’s Overreact Before Buying You.

Kinda fun, yeah? One more:

BIG OIL: Because Intergenerational Genocide Offers Incredible Liquidity.

More than anything else, what the wildfire spread of TACO suggested to me is that we’d do well to invent and adopt a TACO-like acronym for climate messaging purposes. Hence the title of this post:

Fossil Fuels Undermine Climate’s Known Derivatives = FFUCK’D

We had the math. We knew how fast things were changing because that’s what a derivative tells you: rate of change. For climate, that means how fast things like temperature, sea level, or emissions are increasing over time. So if you think of global temperature rising year over year, or CO₂ concentration ticking up annually, or the number of extreme heat days growing per decade, or arctic sea ice coverage shrinking annually—each of those trends has a first derivative: a slope, a trajectory.

And the second derivative? That’s the acceleration of that change. It tells us that not only is the climate changing, but it’s changing faster than it used to:

• Temps aren’t just rising—they’re rising faster than before

• CO₂ isn’t just accumulating—it’s accumulating more rapidly

• Glaciers aren’t just melting—they’re melting more and more quickly

• Disasters aren’t just increasing—they’re doing so exponentially

That’s what makes time our nemesis. Linear change is manageable. Accelerating change? Not so much.

Calling out the fact that we’re FFUCK'D is only partly about saying how deep we’re in the shit. The second purpose is calling out that Big Oil has done everything possible to cast doubt on the math. When scientists showed the curve steepening, they attacked the scientists. They sued Michael Mann’s lab for emails, weaponized the bogus Climategate scandal to smear researchers, funded pseudo‑experts to muddy the waters, and even denied their own staff’s projections.

So we didn’t act in time. And now the second derivative—acceleration—is the reality we’re trapped inside. Welcome to life on the curve they said wasn’t curving.

Now, dude, I can hear you saying, FFUCK’D is nice enough—but you’re yapping about the importance of accessibility and then you hit us with an acronym that has the word derivative in it? What, because sine and cosine were already taken?

It’s a fair point. Derivative is a net negative. Not in math class, maybe, and maybe not once an audience has been eased into the conversation—but right off the bat? It’s a roadblock. So we need an alt we can deploy that keeps the same punchy message. What about simply:

FFUCK: Fossil Fuels Undermine Climate Knowledge

That gives us a baseline proposition, no? FFUCK is something to build on. As I have said before and will repeat many times in the future—quite possibly so often that it becomes the four-on-the-floor beat that drives this newsletter—the best way to get people to join* the climate fight is to help them get properly pissed off.

*At least Writer Mark didn’t say “engage with“ that time. Baby steps.

Tune in next time for a proper rant about the value of getting people pissed off.