| My daughter was born yesterday. There are many things I plan to share with her: taking her first steps into the cold Pacific Ocean; hooting back at the owls haunting our backyard; and strapping on a backpack for our first trip into the Sierra Nevada one day. Those, and a million other experiences, I'll relive for the first time. But there are as many things I'm afraid she will never know. The world my daughter will grow up in will have billions of fewer birds flying through its skies. Ninety percent of the big fish have vanished from the oceans. When she's my age, the atmosphere may have warmed nearly 4 degrees Fahrenheit (2.2 degrees Celsius). Near our home, nearly snowless winters and summer temperatures above 107 degrees may feel routine. The ultimate direction of her future, however, is not completely out of my hands — or yours. Carbon dioxide emissions from the energy and industrial sectors may peak as soon as next year. Solar, wind and batteries are now so cheap, they're outcompeting fossil fuels on their own. As Shannon Osaka, Maxine Joselow and Sarah Kaplan wrote in The Post, we're entering a "strange new climate era." We're on track for what the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change calls "dangerous and widespread disruption." But the outlook is far brighter than the 4 degrees Celsius (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming predicted by 2100 when the Paris agreement was struck on Dec. 12, 2015. Opposition to climate action, once centered on climate skepticism or denial, has shifted dramatically toward the costs of addressing it, argues Aseem Prakash, a political science professor at the University of Washington and director of the Center for Environmental Politics, in the journal PS: Political Science & Politics. To read about other reasons that make it optimistic, click below. My last installment of Climate Coach: Real Estate Edition will come out later this month to help you navigate the U.S. home insurance market as risks from extreme weather mount. Write me with your stories and questions at climatecoach@washpost.com. I read all your emails. | 
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