TEOTWAWKI

Most apocalypse movies/books have A Big Event where everything changes. A virus wipes out 99.99%, or aliens wipe out the same in a single strike, or storms/earthquakes/whatever take place over a few days, changing everything, and everybody knows that everything is different.

Way too often The Media tries to capture the urgency of climate change with headlines about how Now Is The Time We Must Actually Do Something. For example “on the brink of catastrophe” and so many references to “the tipping point”.

The unfortunate reality is that no single day, or week, or month, or even year is so dramatically different than the last. We have known about this problem for a long time.

Two hundred years ago is when the research started on greenhouse gases, and let’s say we’ve at least suspected we could have a problem for about a hundred years. Clearly we’ve been burning fossil fuels for a long time, and the burning of fossil fuels has accelerated over time with the largest “contribution” in the last 100 years.

Remember in the first Indiana Jones movie, where he’s running away from the giant rolling ball? Imagine a giant rock/sphere/ball like that at the top of a very, very large hill, that has a very, very long slope, at a constant grade. When this ball first starts rolling down that hill, it would be easy to stop it. Place a small stopper underneath it, and…