In David Wallace-Wells’ recent article for New York Magazine (here), he cannon-balls into the deep dark end of Climate Change. It quickly becomes clear that he does not think our culture is taking the dangers of Climate Change seriously and has decided to take it upon himself to scare the b’jeezus out of as many people as he can entice into the article.

With sobering statements noting “[the] upper end of the probability curve runs as high as eight degrees [of planetary warming]” and “[at] seven degrees of warming, … in the jungles of Costa Rica, for instance, where humidity routinely tops 90 percent, simply moving around outside when it’s over 105 degrees Fahrenheit would be lethal. And the effect would be fast: Within a few hours, a human body would be cooked to death from both inside and out.” – he’s succeeded in scaring me.

The problem of Climate Change is unarguably difficult to wrap our minds around when the conversation relies on phrases like “mid-century” and “gigaton”. However distant and vague these may feel in a daily life dictated by urgency and no more forethought than next week’s progress report, we are on the verge of 2020 – only 30 years from mid-century. When the permafrost is already melting and record heatwaves are being recorded in every corner of the planet, perhaps the kind of alarmism that Wallace-Wells is slinging is just what we need.