A sadly misinformed person writes, "When I was a kid, the worry was about food shortages...That didn’t freak people out enough yet so they switched to global warming and promised that the polar caps would be completely melted away by 2000, then 2002, then 2005, the 20, then 20, then 20, then 2018, then 2020...."

Flyingsaucesir replies:
My friend, you apparently know nothing of Earth science. In fact, climate scientists NEVER said the polar caps would be melted by 2000 or even 2020. They did predict, about twenty years ago, however, that the Arctic Ocean would be ice-free in summer by the year 2100. That prediction has turned out to be inaccurate only in that it placed the time of an ice-free summer too far in the future. The way things are going, the Arctic Ocean will be ice-free in summer before 2050.

We see a similar acceleration of ice melt on both the Greenland ice cap and the sea ice around Antarctica. At the height of last summer, the melt water that was pouring off Greenland was roughly equal in volume to 20,000 elefants running into the sea EVERY SECOND.

Scientists tend to be very conservative in their predictions. Right now they are saying publicly that a three-foot rise in sea level by the end of this century is pretty much assured. But what some in the know are saying privately is that the rise could be as much as 30 feet. (Make no mistake: a 3-foot rise will be devastating. Thirty feet would be a catastrophe.) Removal of the ice shelves around Antarctica may be like pulling the cork from a Champagne bottle, allowing a massive surge of ice flow into the sea. Scientists don't know that this will happen; just that it could. So they are being responsible and sticking to known facts. They cannot be faulted for that.

In the history of our species, change on this scale has never before been seen. This is not the world our ancestors evolved in. And the extreme and rapid changes we are seeing with ice are only one aspect of a much wider spectrum of problems. Scientists predicted decades ago that global warming would lead to the expansion of the ranges of diseases like West Nile virus, Zika virus, and malaria. And so it came to pass. They predicted that storms would become more powerful and more frequent, and so it has come to pass. Houston, Texas got hit by three 500-year storms in three years. The very concept of a 500-year event now needs to be revised. In fact, because things are changing so fast, and because the pace of change is accelerating, we cannot even use the term "new normal." The Beaufort scale for measuring hurricane strength needs a new category now. For the biggest storms, "category five" is no longer sufficient. And the sheer number of storms is also increasing. Last year saw the most named Atlantic storms ever recorded, requiring not just the entire English alphabet but also the Greek letters up to theta (34 storms in all). This year, having already gotten to the letter E in early July, we are on track to beat last year's record. Pacific typhoons have also become bigger, more frequent, and more deadly than ever.

And where the eastern US has had unprecedented heat and floods, water is in short supply in the western states. They are drying up in a bone-cracking drought with no end in sight. Last year, the record for acres burned in forest fires was shattered by a factor of five; the previous record had only been set the year before that. The Pacific Northwest states of Oregon and Washington, and Canadian British Columbia just went through an unprecedented heat wave that killed over 800 people. Scientists say that whereas up to now this was the kind of event that you might only expect to see once in 500 years, we may well see it happen every decade or two from now on.

Now I ask you: do you need to see that actually happen before you will act to mitigate the problem? Mind you, the longer we wait, the worse the problem will get. The science on this is very clear: burning fossil fuels is causing our atmosphere and oceans to heat up. The solution is also very straightforward: stop burning fossil fuels. The technologies needed for a conversion to 100% green energy already exist. Yes, we will also have to make changes in our behaviour. We cannot continue to be so wantonly wasteful. And we will need good, enlightened leaders to lead, and hidebound curmudgeons to get the f**k out of the way.