Timing Error

Watch the clock and the situation

Gemini Image Prompt: Picnic in a Forest fire [Author]

You cannot score after the game is over. Our strategy of pulling it out in the fifth quarter does not work, yet I hear people saying this. I also listen to people noting how things will be in twenty or thirty years, as if only the things they are interested in will radically change.

We need to grasp what time we have left. Yes, we are not talking hard-edge time here. The cumulative tipping points that end our ability to do anything but survive against worsening odds will not be set in stone until they are, but we know, after years of scientific work, where things are going.

I will do this with charts based on our best knowledge, to get it out of the way:

Below is the latest monthly global surface temperature anomaly graphic, with a quadratic trendline (assuming accelerating warming). What’s new? This updated trendline shows us passing 1.5°C later this year and 2.0°C in 2036. [Source]

We are in a policrisis with so many interrelated factors and outcomes that there is no way to conceptualize the effects that will change our reality as we move from 1.5 degrees C of warming to 2.0 degrees. That is why…