Honestly, I don’t think we really get it yet.

Let’s face it. It’s going to be hot, hot, hot. Or do I mean hotter, hotter, hotter, or even hottest, hottest, hottest, or someday, for all we know, beyond any words we might now have to describe it.

Though it seldom seems that way in the daily news, we’re talking about a genuinely apocalyptic possibility. Give us human beings full credit. Somehow, we’ve managed to come up with not one but two distinctly apocalyptic ways to potentially destroy ourselves and this planet—one a relatively speedy way to go and the other already operating in world-destroying slow motion—and that, believe me, is no small thing.

Here are just a few examples of that slow-motion version of our self-destruction on this increasingly extreme planet of... well, can I really say “ours” anymore, or should I say theirs?

The Don is indeed an atomic bomb or at least a climate bomb of a president his second time around.

Of course, Europe has recently experienced remarkably extreme temperatures and scorching fires across significant parts of the continent (heat estimated to have resulted in at least 16,000 extra deaths—and no, that is not a misprint—at its high point in June and at least 35,000 across the whole summer). Western Europe, in fact, experienced the hottest June on record. And that (or worse) is increasingly likely to be an every-summer event for what’s now the fastest-warming continent on this planet.

And don’t forget that the predicted El Niño in the Pacific beginning this fall, expected to be the strongest in more than a century, or a “Godzilla” event (if you happen to remember your movie dinosaurs), is likely to heat significant parts of the planet even more severely. (Oh, and in case you missed it, it’s not just the land that’s getting ever hotter. This August, the world’s oceans hit their hottest temperature ever—yes, ever!—adding, of course, to sea level rise and the further flooding of coastal communities.)

And sadly enough, we just can’t seem to stop, can we? Worse yet, humanity’s latest brilliant invention-discovery—artificial intelligence—may someday have to be relabeled artificial stupidity (of the first order), given that the production of AI is, it seems, going to involve pouring staggering amounts of—yes, of course!—fossil fuels into our already overheating atmosphere. As environmental expert Bill McKibben put it recently, “The planned data center buildout will increase greenhouse gas emissions from the electricity sector by at least 20%, and perhaps as much as a third.”

In truth, you’ve got to hand it to us humans when it comes to utter self-destructiveness (and I’m not even thinking about our never-ending, devastating wars from Ukraine to Gaza to Sudan and Somalia that also pour endless fossil fuels into the atmosphere, as does the US military).

A Global Disaster That Needs a New Name

You would think, of course, that, faced with what’s likely to happen in the years to come, humanity might have responded by working ever harder to bring our fossil-fuel usage under control. But not much such luck there, of course. After all, China, the country that has moved in the most significant fashion on climate change by figuring out how to produce ever more green energy and sell globally the mechanisms—solar panels, batteries, and wind turbine equipment—that make it (as well as stunning numbers of electric vehicles), continues to pour the most greenhouse gases into the atmosphere of any place on Earth.

And though other countries are indeed beginning to try to switch to green power, when you look at this endangered planet of ours, explain to me how, in 2024, the American people by a slight majority (even if not quite 50% of the vote) managed to reelect as president one Donald J. Trump, a climate-change denier of the first order. And in his second term in office, he’s focused as much attention as he’s capable of focusing (which, of course, is a distinctly limited amount) on blocking wind and solar projects while promoting ever more fossil-fuel production of every kind. (And of course, in the process, he’s brilliantly ceding the vast and growing green-energy sales market to that other superpower, China.)

Let me guarantee you one thing: Someday, when it comes to the overheating of this world of ours, he will be seen as an almost unparalleled idiot, assuming that anybody then is seeing much of anything.

Consider climate change, in fact, a potential global disaster that deserves a far more horrifying name. And consider it just the latest form of (in)human warfare to come to our attention, this time against the planet itself as a livable place for us. And consider it as........

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