George Epstein: Apocalypse Now

How will the world end? As a second-grader in the 1950s, Miss Mott would have us go out into the hallway with our jackets, get on our knees, press our heads against the wall and pull the jackets over our heads. The fact that I remember this 70 years later says something about the traumatic nature of the experience. There was very likely to be a nuclear war, and our only chance of survival was to Duck and Cover. Since we have made it this far without mushroom clouds all around, we now simply ignore the fact that annihilation of most or all of humanity is only a couple of code words and a crazy leader away. That guillotine continues to hang over us.

The earth is getting warmer and the rate of warming correlates closely with the amount of carbon in the air. Our novels and movies join many scientists in predicting violent climate change leading to a collapse of society. We continue to send billions of tons of carbon into the air, and the temperatures will continue to rise, but we don’t have nearly the amount of data we need to make accurate predictions about the timing or extent of the impact. With the current administration ending much of the research on land, under water, and in the air and with other countries not filling the gap, we continue to make guesses about the risks we are taking. Ending subsidies encouraging clean energy and increasing subsidies for coal plants will obviously exacerbate the problem.