Five minutes to midnight
The End Is Always Nigh I suspect I am not the only person to feel this way, but for me the present moment seems to have a strong five minutes to midnight character to it. Another way of putting it is the end is nigh , although I prefer five minutes to midnight because it carries fewer religious connotations. (And also because it gives a nod to the famous Doomsday Clock started by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists following the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.) From xkcd.com First and foremost in my mind is the climate crisis. We're told by the IPCC the tipping point could be as low as 1.5 °C, which is only 0.4 °C away from where we are now. And that (making optimistic assumptions) we have a CO 2 budget equivalent to 10 years of emissions at today's rates. Beyond the tipping point the future looks so bleak that even if humans do survive it's hard to see there being very many of them, or their lives being very nice. But it isn't just th...