If . . . if . . . if . . .

Hardly a day goes by when I don’t see some concerned, well-intentioned person saying we still have a chance to stave off a climate change apocalypse IF we act now to stop carbon emissions.

Hey, I’ve been one of those IF-ers, too.

But we all need a reality check. We’re done. Even IF mankind reduced carbon emissions to zero overnight, we are powerless now to prevent extreme weather events from gaining momentum and wiping out life as we know it.

And we are not in a position to stop our carbon emissions, anyway. And there’s the rub, eh? We are the proverbial lobsters in a boiling pot that we can’t remove from the burner. It’s a sad lesson in Karma 101. Mankind is reaping now what it has sown since the Industrial Revolution.

Still, the band will play on to the bitter end — and we might as well live for today because our species as well as many others will be extinct sooner than we know. We’ll see more turbocharged ocean hurricanes fed by increasingly warmer waters like the one that hit Atlantic Canada last weekend and the one barrelling in on Florida today. We’ll see more flooding and wildfires around the world along with high winds that will snap hydro poles like matchsticks and wipe out power grids.

We’ve upset the balance of nature, and there is no quick fix. But nature will cleanse itself over time and eradicate the source of its disturbance: us.

I write these snapshots in the hope that they might help future historians, but I don’t think there will be any historians in the future. There will be no one left to read all of the words that mankind has written.

Click, click . . .

— Jillian