From a NYT Magazine edition fully devoted to how we could've significantly curtailed climate change over thirty years ago, the opening paragraph:
"The world has warmed more than one degree Celsius since the Industrial Revolution. The Paris climate agreement — the nonbinding, unenforceable and already unheeded treaty signed on Earth Day in 2016 — hoped to restrict warming to two degrees. The odds of succeeding, according to a recent study based on current emissions trends, are one in 20. If by some miracle we are able to limit warming to two degrees, we will only have to negotiate the extinction of the world’s tropical reefs, sea-level rise of several meters and the abandonment of the Persian Gulf. The climate scientist James Hansen has called two-degree warming “a prescription for long-term disaster.” Long-term disaster is now the best-case scenario. Three-degree warming is a prescription for short-term disaster: forests in the Arctic and the loss of most coastal cities. Robert Watson, a former director of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has argued that three-degree warming is the realistic minimum. Four degrees: Europe in permanent drought; vast areas of China, India and Bangladesh claimed by desert; Polynesia swallowed by the sea; the Colorado River thinned to a trickle; the American Southwest largely uninhabitable. The prospect of a five-degree warming has prompted some of the world’s leading climate scientists to warn of the end of human civilization."
Amazing to think that these sorts of visions of the future aren't already the focus of writers of all tiers and disciplines. The problem of it being an abstract threat, is what people keep coming back to. Well, it seems it won't be abstract for long - and I wonder how we'll look back on the relatively quiet moments before the storm -- knowing that first we failed to stop it, then we failed even to talk about it in realistic, preparatory terms. Times like this, I turn to authors like Roy Scranton -- not for comfort but for strength and focus.