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My aunt sent me a graphic last Thanksgiving. You know the kind. Red background, dripping font, a countdown clock, and a caption that said something like "SCIENTISTS AGREE: WE HAVE LESS THAN A DECADE LEFT." She tagged me because she knows I teach science, and she wanted me to tell everyone at the table how scared to be.I did not tell anyone how scared I was. I put my fork down and asked her a question instead: how many of these countdown clocks has she personally lived through already. She's sixty-one. She could not name one. Not one single specific year, name, or quote. Just a general, permanent, floating sense of dread that has apparently been humming in the background of her entire adult life, refreshed every few years with a new deadline, never once checked against the last one.So I went and checked all of them for her. All of them, going back to 1969. I found the original quotes. I found the original dates. ......THE RECEIPTS. DATES ATTACHED. NO VIBES.1969 — UN Secretary-General U Thant's own environment report warned humanity had roughly ten years before the future of life on Earth could be endangered. Ten years from 1969 puts that expiration at 1979. PASSED.1972 — Maurice Strong, the very first director of the UN Environment Programme, said the world had about a decade to avoid catastrophe. That clock ran out around 1982. PASSED.1982 — UNEP's own Mostafa Tolba told the world that by the turn of the century we'd be facing an environmental catastrophe "as complete, as irreversible, as any nuclear holocaust." The turn of the century came. We threw a Y2K party instead. PASSED.1988 — Maldivian officials said their islands would be underwater within 30 years, and that the drinking water specifically would run dry by 1992. In the decades since, the Maldives built a brand new international airport terminal. On the same islands that were supposed to be gone. Both clocks, PASSED.1989 — Noel Brown, running UNEP's own New York office, told the Associated Press that entire nations could be wiped off the map by rising seas if the warming trend wasn't reversed by the year 2000, and that governments had a ten-year window before it slipped past human control. Apparently the millennium was a busy season for parties, because we were still throwing them. PASSED....
