Some notes on the haiku above...
I have seen it various places observed that exponential growth is such that if you have population that doubles every 20 years, then 20 years before you reach any point of "too much", the world will be only half full. We struggle with that because it's taken all of human history fill half the world, so we may feel we have plenty of room. But exponential growth sneaks up, and if it's doubling every 20 years, half full is almost full.
The same, then, with exponential rise in any quantity, such as temperature. We may look back at previous rises in temperature and think "no big deal", but that intuition, that desire to use experiential knowledge, is not going to serve us well. We invented, or learned to describe, mathematics so that we could reason better than our primitive intuitions lead us to do. Our brains like to presume linearity, but the effects we see are not linear. What we know from math tells is that we must take nonlinear effects seriously, lest we get surprised in a possibly swift, surprising and fatal way.
We're in denial that this is happening, but the science says something truly horrible is about to happen. We're not doing well with conventional planning. We look around and, in spite of dire warnings, things look normal. But maybe notmal is what things look like just before it all collapses.
We perhaps need to fast forward to what's going to happen and say, "what will it have looked like just before?" If the answer is "just like any other day", then we need to find something else to look to in order to know we're about to fail. Something we cannot so easily deny.
From time to time, we see mass death events in other species. Rivers or lakes full of dead fish, cooked, metaphorically, though almost also literally, by the heat. One day that will be us.
I heard a news story recently about a large number of heat deaths in India. The problem is already horrible. Every life matters. And yet that number is dwarfed by what's coming. Millions, even billions. A few hundred will seem quaint.
But also like we should have heeded the warnings better. Or allowed ourselves to see them at all.
Rather than shrug off warnings, figure out what warning you're not going to ignore. Draw a line in the sand. Say it out loud, to friends, family, the world. Ask them to hold you to account, to make you finally care. Ask them what THEIR line is.
What is your line?
When do we stop and make this our global focus? If not now, when?
, on 19–20 July 2025.
Submission: 21 May 2025 
Notification: 28 May 2025
