June 25, 2019 "Information Clearing House" - We have less than a millisecond left.

You see, the planet we call home has existed for roughly 4.55 billion years. But numbers that large mean almost nothing to me, nor to most people, so I choose to break it down. If we lay the age of the Earth out over a calendar year, that would amount to 518,264 years per hour or 144 years per second. So if we have 10 or 11 years until the point of no return, as climate scientists have repeatedly told us, that means we have a millisecond left before midnight in which to change our society completely to avoid turning the Earth into a piping hot fajita. (If you want to be more generous and instead look at how long modern homosapiens have been walking around, it’s 315,000 years. So if you lay that over a calendar year, we have roughly 15 minutes before the stroke of midnight to combat climate change. Not sure that makes me feel much better.)

None of us should be thinking about anything other than climate change. We all kind of know it even if we think we don’t know it. Even people who deny climate change exists probably secretly know it. They’re just confusing what they want to be true with what they subconsciously know to be true. I did the same thing when I was a child and tennis legend Jimmy Connors lost in the semifinals of the 1991 U.S. Open after his monumental run at the ancient age of 39. (For an 11-year-old, 39 sounds pretty close to mummified.) I was certain Jimmy would be playing in the finals. I knew deep within my bones that Jimbo would dazzle us with diving volleys and mid-court passing shots in the championship match because how could the powers that be allow the only character America genuinely cared about to bow out before the finals? In my mind it was akin to killing off Iron Man halfway through the movie “Iron Man.”

Jimmy Connors did not show up to the finals. Climate change is the only thing we should be thinking about.

I don’t just mean there should be a report every couple hours about climate change by our bloviating bullhorns of mainstream news. I don’t mean once a day you should mention to a friend that Al Gore seems vaguely douchey but probably has a point. I mean climate change should be ALL we’re thinking about. It should be a major factor in every conversation, every job, every TV show, every humor column, every tweet, every clever T-shirt slogan and every fortune cookie message. Climate change should be everything.

Plastic action figures for kids should have one arm melted off to symbolize the effects of climate change. Your server at a nice restaurant should sprinkle sand in your soup du jour to remind you of the disappearance of fresh water. Ice cream should be exclusively served melted to symbolize rising temperatures. Hamburgers should cost $200 to compensate for the global emissions of factory farming. And every time you go ice skating someone should punch you in the face and yell, “Enjoy it while it lasts”

We have less than a millisecond left.