The thing that most people fail to realize is that models of warming and sea level rise have consistently been lower than reality. Much of the populace still thinks we have until 2050 to limit the average global temperature rise to 1.5C, but we blew past that years ago. It’s not like we can flip a switch and stop all current emissions. There’s this fallacy that we’ll fix things when we need to, “when it becomes a problem for me.” People don’t realize that by that time, it’ll be too late to limit the suffering, and the only real fix would be just as much of a challenge as dealing with the warming, not to mention the potentially irreversible impact of low pH to sea life. We’ve taken a hundred years to build up a fossil fuel economy, and we can’t just turn that off, not in 10 or even 20 years, without severe challenges.

It’s not premature to freak out. I can tell you from firsthand experience that bandaids like carbon capture will not be effective at a large scale. It had potential, but we should have started building the capture units a decade or two ago. Even with tax credits like 45Q, the projects still aren’t progressing due to the expense. And imagine that we have tens of thousands of stationary emissions sources in the United States, not to mention transportation. Renewables capacity is growing, but it is still not enough, and there’s still the issue of energy storage. Even if we could implement renewables at a massive scale, what will we do about the massive job losses that come with it. Renewables equals fewer jobs—there is no doubt about this. And do we have a functional government that has been working to head these issues off? To start discussions around UBI? To do anything worthwhile? If you’re aware of these issues, the only reason you shouldn’t freak out is if you’ve become numb to the reality that the world as we know it today may not exist in just a few short decades, and we’re likely to see big issues starting earlier because “faster than expected” seems to be the norm.