Bad news from a dying planet, and what we can do about it. Each issue names something going wrong and then grades every response to it — from things running at scale now to things that exist only as arguments — at both individual and structural scale, with the costs printed next to the benefits.
Hard news about the planet, with the responses attached. Each issue takes one problem, describes it accurately, and then sets out what people are actually doing about it — from things already ordinary to things that exist only on paper, each one labelled so you can tell which is which.
No issue here stops at the bad part. That is the rule the whole collection is built on.
What the labels mean, and how this kind of writing usually lies to its readers, are below the cards.
In series order. Numbered in their own series, like the field guides — the zine numbering says when and is referenced by number across the changelog, the ledger and years of prose, so a serial does not insert itself into it. The issues run ascending rather than newest-first, because the prev/next chain follows collection order and a reader walking the chain should meet them the way they were written.
1.5 °C sounds small because it is an average of a planet that is mostly ocean.
Five separate reasons a number that reads like nothing arrives as fires and failed harvests — then eleven responses graded from deployed to speculative, with what each one costs.
The number is not measuring what most people assume it measures, and there are five separate reasons for that. It is a global mean over a planet 71 per cent covered in ocean — at a global 1.09 °C for 2011–2020 the land was already at 1.59 °C, and the IPCC assesses land warming at 1.4 to 1.7 times the ocean rate with the Arctic above twice the global rate. It is a twenty-year running average, so 2024 at 1.55 ± 0.13 °C was the first calendar year above 1.5 and was not a crossing. Extremes move further than the mean and rarer extremes move furthest: a hot day that came once in fifty years over land becomes 8.6 times more frequent at 1.5 °C and arrives 2.0 °C hotter — against 4.1 times for a once-in-ten-years event, because as the IPCC puts it, projected percentage changes in frequency are larger for rarer events. The Last Glacial Maximum was 6.1 °C colder in the global mean, which makes 1.5 a quarter of the distance from a kilometre of ice over Chicago, travelled in a century and a half rather than ten thousand years. And the surface figure is a receipt: the Earth system took up 381 zettajoules between 1971 and 2020, of which 89 per cent went into the ocean and 1 per cent into the atmosphere — the part the thermometers read. Then the sentence nobody put next to the other one. UNEP’s Limiting Overshoot says on its first page that full implementation of every national climate plan plus additional net-zero targets still puts expected peak warming at 1.8 °C — and six pages later, that beyond around 1.8 °C, decline to 1.5 °C during the 21st century becomes increasingly challenging. The optimistic case lands exactly on the boundary past which coming back gets hard. Current policies, by the same report, give 2.6 °C by 2100. Eleven responses are then graded, five mitigation and six adaptation, each with its costs: methane cuts as the fastest brake; net-zero as the thing that stops the rise; afforestation carrying the sentence that should follow every tree-planting headline (over 100 years at current scale, with zero residual emissions, for 0.1 °C); novel carbon removal with its storage limit; urban canopy; agrivoltaics; heat protection for workers; crop adaptation; and the entry that corrects the question it was written to answer — Pacific Islanders have explicitly rejected the framing of ‘climate refugees’, and the IPCC finds with high agreement that agency over if, where, how and when people move is what decides whether mobility is adaptation or an additional harm. The report’s own question, adopted here: whose relocation is it?
The ocean absorbed the heat and the carbon, and is now being billed for both.
Six things happening to the sea — the sixth is about the observer rather than the water — then twelve responses graded, and a third answer to the question of who has to act.
Written for one person and published because the position is not unusual. The ocean took 29 per cent of anthropogenic CO2 over 2015–2024 — more than the land — on top of most of the excess heat, and part one is the invoice. Marine heatwaves have very likely doubled in frequency since 1982, with 84–90 per cent of those from 2006 to 2015 attributable to anthropogenic warming, and are projected roughly 20× more frequent under RCP2.6 and 50× under RCP8.5 by 2081–2100. The fourth global bleaching event stressed 84 per cent of the world’s reef area across at least 83 countries, and NOAA’s Coral Reef Watch coordinator says reefs will now bleach on a near-annual basis — the unit of study has changed from an event to a season. The acidification planetary boundary had already been crossed by 2020, costing a 43 per cent reduction in suitable habitat for tropical and subtropical reefs and up to 61 per cent for polar pteropods — and it is the one mechanism no shade can touch, because the IPCC says solar radiation modification approaches “do not mitigate ocean acidification.” The open ocean lost 0.5–3.3 per cent of its oxygen over the upper 1000 m, oxygen minimum zones grew 3–8 per cent, and species are moving poleward at 52 km per decade — two hundred kilometres over a working life. Then the sixth mechanism, which is about him. Daniel Pauly’s 1995 shifting baseline syndrome, quoted from the one-page original: each generation takes as its baseline the state of things at the start of its own career. The reef he first dives on will feel like a reef. Part two grades four tipping points — warm-water reefs as the first Earth system to cross its central estimated threshold, virtually certain (>99%) to tip even at 1.5 °C without overshoot, with the threshold estimate itself shown moving from ~1.5 °C to 1.2 °C in three years rather than smoothed; acidification as a crossing with no cliff; kelp forests, the one most likely to be watched happening; and the North Atlantic, where the circulation that is close is not the famous one — the subpolar gyre at ~1.8 °C, high confidence, against the AMOC’s ~4 °C at low confidence. Two assessments are printed disagreeing: the IPCC’s medium confidence that there will be no abrupt AMOC collapse before 2100, and the 2025 report’s “we cannot exclude that an AMOC tipping point may already have been passed.” Part three is twelve responses, led by the sentence that sizes them all: coral reef restoration options may be ineffective if global warming exceeds 1.5 °C. Restoration carries its median 100 m²; fisheries management carries a genuine success (assessed stocks at target, and 3× the harvest rates where management is weak) and its own limit; the High Seas Treaty, in force since 17 January 2026, carries the fact that the tools now exist and the areas do not. And the entry argued hardest for is the least glamorous: start a forty-year time series, because it is the only instrument that beats a shifting baseline and the only one that can only be started young.
A Trigger has two halves and needs both. The first names a harm accurately, including the parts that are worse than the coverage says. The second sets out what can be done about it, graded, so that a reader can tell the difference between something a city could start next month and something that exists as a paper.
Naming a harm and stopping is not an argument. It is just harm, redistributed to the reader — and this site is built by and for people for whom that redistribution has a cost. So the second half of the title is load-bearing rather than decorative. A piece that cannot say what to do about the thing it has raised does not belong here; it belongs in a different collection, or nowhere.
Five collections here sort by register, the kind of argument a piece makes. Print and Sound sort by medium. Glimmers sorts by occasion. Glimmer Wire sorts by issue. And Field Guides and How We Got Here sort by form — a catalogue of same-shaped entries, a chain with one link per spread.
Triggers is the third form-sorted collection, and it is not a new axis. Saying so plainly rather than inventing a sixth axis is the honest call: what makes a Trigger a Trigger is its shape — harm, then graded ladder — exactly as what makes a field guide a field guide is its shape.
There is one genuine difference worth recording. This is the first collection here that constrains its subject as well as its form. A field guide can be about stars or turtles or nests; a chain can start anywhere. A Trigger is about the planetary crisis. That constraint is deliberate, because the grading convention below only earns its keep on problems large enough that the gap between a deployed response and a proposed one is the difference between two futures.
How We Got Here marks every joint in a chain documented, contested or leap, because a Burke chain is built to feel inevitable and the notation is how the form carries its own epistemics. Triggers has the equivalent problem in a different direction, and takes the same solution.
The defect in every list of climate solutions is that it puts loft insulation next to direct air capture as though they were the same kind of object. One is a thing millions of people have already done. The other is a technology whose total contribution this century UNEP puts at a few tenths of a degree at best. Printed as a flat list, those read as two options. They are not two options.
So each response gets one of five grades — deployed, scaling, demonstrated, proposed, speculative — and a note saying whether it is individual, structural or both.
A grade is about deployment, not merit. Something can be deployed and nearly useless at the scale required, which is exactly what afforestation turns out to be. Something can be proposed and be the most important item on the page. The grade says how far a thing is from ordinary and nothing else — and keeping that distinction visible is the whole reason the scale exists.
A list that opens with shorter showers and closes with and write to your representative has quietly moved a problem of energy systems, land use and international law into a reader’s kitchen — where it cannot be solved, and where failing to solve it feels like a personal failing. That produces people who feel responsible and powerless at once, which is the combination that stops anybody doing anything.
So Triggers marks the scale of every response rather than mixing them. Where the honest distribution is mostly structural, the page says so and then says what an individual can genuinely do, in order of size — without inflating it and without pretending it is nothing.
And no unsourced figures. Per-action carbon-saving tables are the most quoted and least traced numbers in this subject; this collection prints none it has not verified at a primary source.
Trigger No. 1 marked each response individual or structural. Trigger No. 2 is addressed to someone choosing what to do for a living, and neither value fits that: a working life is not a consumption choice and it is not a policy lever. It is a third thing, with its own reach and its own ceiling. So the marker set is now three: individual, structural, vocational.
The new marker brings its own way of lying, and it is named on the page that introduced it. A vocational column is an efficient way to tell a young person that their career will fix a structural problem — which is the personal-footprint error in a lab coat. No. 2 therefore leads its ladder with the structural entry that sizes every other one, and says outright that nothing in a marine biologist’s toolkit substitutes for cutting emissions. A marker describes what a job can do at its real size, or it should not exist.
Glimmers defines its own term, following Helen Edgar’s reading, as “simply the opposite of a trigger — a moment of joy or comfort, sensory or cognitive.” That sentence was published here before this collection existed. Triggers is not a clever inversion; it is the other half of a definition already on the site.
The word carries weight in our communities, and using it as a shelf label is a deliberate choice rather than an unnoticed one. Two things make it defensible. First, it is accurate: these pages are about things that are genuinely distressing, and a title that said so is more respectful than one that did not. Second, a trigger with a way out is a different object from a trigger. Every issue here is required to carry the exit, and that requirement is what the collection is for.
The same distinction Glimmers relies on applies here: a frame is load-bearing and a label is not. No piece in this collection frames a reader’s response, diagnoses anybody, or makes a clinical claim. It names what the pages contain.
The standing rule here is a two-member floor: what earns a collection page is a form observed in finished work, never a folder opened in advance. It has been broken twice on purpose — Easter Eggs, where the absence of an index section is the mechanism, and Glimmers, on the argument that a running log is defined by its cadence and cadence cannot be observed retroactively.
This is the third break, and its argument is the weakest of the three — which is stated here rather than dressed up. The grading convention above is the thing that makes a Trigger a Trigger, and a convention cannot be demonstrated by a single instance: one graded ladder is a page, not a form. The honest position is that this collection is provisional until a second issue shows the convention surviving contact with a different problem.
It was opened anyway for one reason: the grading scale needed somewhere to be written down that is not inside the piece using it. A convention held in one page’s head is a convention that gets reinvented differently next time. If a second issue does not arrive, this page is the record of a form that was tried once — which is more useful than the same fact left unwritten, and is why it said so on its face.
The second issue arrived on 6 September 2026, and the paragraph above is kept rather than deleted because the test it set is the thing that was passed. No. 2 takes the five-tier scale to a different problem, at a different scale, addressed to a different reader, and the scale did the same job: it kept coral restoration and marine carbon removal on one page without pretending they are the same kind of object, and it forced the cost of each encouraging entry into the same block as the entry.
What did not survive contact unchanged was the who marker, which needed a third value — recorded above. That is the more interesting result. A convention that survives a second use untouched has probably only been used once in two costumes; one that bends in a specific, arguable place has actually been tested. The floor is met. The provisional note is retired, and the record of why it was there is not.