Down to the wire : confronting climate collapse / David - Index of

Introduction
There were rumors of unfathomable things, and because we couldn’t
fathom them we failed to believe them, until we had no choice and
it was too late.
Nicole Krauss, The History of Love
z
In our fi nal hour (2003), cambridge university
astronomer Martin Rees concluded that the odds of
global civilization surviving to the year 2100 are no better than
one in two. 1 His assessment of threats to humankind ranging from
climate change to a collision of Earth with an asteroid received
good reviews in the science press, but not a peep from any political
leader and scant notice from the media. Compare that nonresponse
to a hypothetical story reporting, say, that the president
had had an affair. The blow-dried electronic pundits, along with
politicians of all kinds, would have spared no effort to expose and
analyze the situation down to parts per million. But Rees’s was
only one of many credible and well-documented warnings from
scientists going back decades, including the Fourth Assessment
Report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(2007). All were greeted with varying levels of denial, indifference,
and misinterpretation, or were simply ignored altogether. It
is said to be a crime to cause panic in a crowded theater by yelling
“fi re” without cause, but is it less criminal not to warn people
when the theater is indeed burning?