Year 2, Month 1, Day 10: Y3K Edition

The London Metro reports on a new study projecting climate change’s effects a thousand years in the future. Hint: it’s not pretty.

Obviously, a lot can happen between now and the year 3000, so the scary thousand-year forecasts of a team of climate scientists should not be misunderstood as constituting an inevitable future. But we must recognize that their prognostications are based on a set of best-case starting points in which the entire world community begins to act like a community, reducing CO2 emissions rapidly and responsibly. If Shawn Marshall and his team were to run the worst-case numbers, they would foretell horrifying prospects for our species and our planet. Ultimately, it’s up to us; as private citizens, we must become aware of the climate crisis’ immediacy; as civic actors, we must pressure our politicians to do the right thing for the long term, rather than bow to the inevitable exigencies of the electoral cycle. After all, why make dire predictions if all we do is wait for them to come true?

Warren Senders