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The current phase will end. Then the real excitement begins.
In his book The Ministry of the Future, Kim Stanley Robinson portrays a terrible incident in India — a heat wave that kills 20 million people in a single day. Although we are experiencing a wide variety of unprecedented climate disasters, we haven’t yet seen anything quite like that. We haven’t had “The Big One.”
We will. I’m guessing it’s coming soon. I don’t know for sure, but we are seeing bigger “impossible to ignore” climate effects. I can’t help but expect The Big One will be here soon. I don’t know if a city will suffocate or a county will be burnt to a cinder in a wildfire. But there will be something.
I’m only hoping that The Big One isn’t, say, a massive out gassing of C02 from the oceans, suddenly and decisively killing us all. Since “The Big One” is, I believe, inevitable given what we’ve done to the biosphere, I’m hoping for something big enough to jolt us out of our slumber — but not the end.
And I’m trying to be ready to take advantage of this terrible event. We have a status quo that’s been protecting oil and threatening every living thing on the planet. But that group of foolish plutocrats won’t be able to deal with the coming events.