Now it’s happening to almost all of us as climate change acts as a “threat multiplier,” not only posing security risks to nation states and financial risks to businesses large and small, but also making our floods and famines, our hurricanes and tornadoes, more frequent and more fatal. Entire towns now vanish overnight from wildfires. Communities that have already lived through multiple floods quiver with collective PTSD during each hard rain. Wars over fossil fuels burn more fossil fuels and lead to more wars.
What’s coming to your town?
When tomorrow becomes today
The thing about future shock is that we are always living our way into the future. Tomorrow becomes today, becomes yesterday. Carbon levels ascend unabated. The dire predictions of sea level rise and melting ice caps—some of them made by fossil fuel companies in the 1960s—are playing out, some sooner than scientists had thought. And despite NASA scientist Hansen’s use of the word “now” in Congress 38 years ago, the public has been able to keep alive the alluring myth that climate change is distant not only in place, but also in time.