Why does it seem that we are on a crash course towards an impending doom? As humans, we have known about our impact upon global climate since the early 1900s through greenhouse gases, but we have still not made any considerable efforts to collectively reduce our toll upon global climate (Climate Change History - HISTORY). While some people are noticing the doom that awaits us if nothing changes, others still deny the reality of the situation.

The sad reality is that we are not strolling toward this doom either. Rather, we are accelerating. In fact, early models of our warming world were not accurate in the sense that they did not expect the change in our world to be so rapid. For instance, by 2030 it is believed that most of the ice in the Arctic sea will be gone (Climate Change Is Accelerating, Bringing World ‘Dangerously Close’ to Irreversible Change - The New York Times (nytimes.com)). There is a considerable amount of freshwater contained in that ice, and, on top of that, there are vast ecosystems that thrive on the melting Arctic ice. In case its already not obvious, these rapidly changing conditions are very significant! With overwhelming evidence for a changing climate, why do we not see any collective efforts toward an inevitable doom?

I think an answer to this prior inquiry lies in a theme explored by Tom Sweterlitsch in The Gone World. In this novel, Sweterlitsch uses time travel to explore the inevitability of apocalypse. More specifically, he creates a reality where there is an impending doom (the Terminus) that is only avoided by traveling to the future to answer questions in the present. By creating this narrative, Sweterlitsch may be trying to suggest that we are not taking our future into enough consideration in our present times.
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This realization relates to climate change in the sense that we have evidence of an impending doom, but we are not taking action to prevent this doom by taking the future into consideration like the characters in Sweterlitsch’s novel do. If we fail to keep our future in mind as we make decisions in the present, the sad truth is that our apocalypse will be inevitable. This is quite sad because it is entirely avoidable, yet inevitable due to inaction.