I'm having massive mood swings on this issue. I really didn't expect to end up here when I thought "I'm going to write on Climate Change in retirement". I need a hobby.

Sigh, my grief is crushing right now. I really didn't "see" this aspect of the situation until recently. I am hoping someone brilliant will explain why I am wrong.

So, on my comment on your piece.

Right now this is a short-term vs long-term scenario. Both scenarios must be addressed simultaneously. If you don't survive the short-term there will be no long-term.

But surviving the short-term, "at any cost" and exhausting yourself is also a fail. It's not enough to survive.

We have to survive the next five years of the coming heat spike, intact enough to regroup and fight this in the long term. The next five years are going to be brutally hard on the world.

Over a billion people will probably die of hunger. That's a "direct effect" of the heat spike. How they die, how we handle that globally. Will decide how high the "secondary death toll" becomes.

If those billion people decide to "die hard" and Global brush wars start flaring up everywhere. Then the death toll will multiply rapidly.

Imagine 8 or 9 "Ukraine" scale wars breaking out globally over the next four years. Plus hundreds of smaller scale "conflicts" as regional areas go to war over things like a lake or access to a river.

A billion people starving can become 2 or 3 billion people dying very easily.

The next five years are the first "Climate Shock" to our current World Order. We still have inertia, people mentally are still living in the old times. There is still the feeling that we can get "back to normal".

Plus we still have tremendous physical reserves. There are still supply chains working. Electricity is still flowing. We can still mobilize and respond to disasters.

Food is going to get expensive but we can adjust to that. Here in the US there will be hunger but we don't do it where it's visible.

We have people drive up (oh the bitter irony of gasoline powered cars in line doing more environmental damage) in their cars to get bags of food discreetly. So that we don't have to have soup kitchens and bread lines for regular people. Those are only for the "homeless".

Here in the US we are going to get hungry in a way not experienced since the Great Depression. Failing infrastructure is about to become an increasingly urgent and crippling issue.

We still have deep reserves but getting through the next five or six years is going to burn through them. If we don't use that time to reconfigure and prepare.

Well, the next spike or the spike after that, will cause collapse.

We have to act now or Collapse is certain. There is no more time. We got it wrong.