The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report is out, and as expected the IPCC's consensus has gone from dire to catastrophic. There is now little to no chance of limiting climate change to less than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above that of its pre-industrial average. That means we can expect the extraordinary new weather events that have pummeled the United States and the world in the last few years to continue, from terrain-altering megafires to "heat domes" powerful enough to wipe out tidal ecologies to regional droughts that will throw agriculture into chaos and allow the water sources supporting some cities to simply dry up.

This isn't the time to tune out; this is a time to get angry. Very, very angry. As in the pandemic, now stretching out into new crises due to incompetent leaders and willfully self-destructive behaviors by shallow ideologues, much of this could have been prevented and all dangers at and above the 2-degree mark could still be. The scientific consensus has properly pinned the cause of the crisis for a half century. The effects were known in abstract even then, and are far more thoroughly detailed now.

It has been stonewalled at every turn by falsely premised denials issued from those most invested—often literally—in the causes of the crisis. Oil companies have opposed the expansion of solar and wind energy. Governments have opposed either measuring or acknowledging their nation's contribution to the crisis. From plastics manufacturing to car companies, every industry that has turned a profit by socializing the consequences has asserted that the world could not possibly continue to function if their profits were impeded.

The people you see on your television screens, the ones preening with self-importance as they banter to each other about the economy and the deficit and the elites and socialism are the people who crafted this new landscape. God help you, you should be mad. You should be livid. 

The new IPCC report, the headlines say, should be a "wake-up" call. It should be more than that. It is a written description of the failures of world leadership in the past, the continued failures of world leadership today, and the newly updated odds of existential crisis as greed and apathy shove us past each point of no return and towards the next. It should be a pitchforks-and-torches sort of call. It should be a final line drawn in the sand—no matter what malicious bullshit invested actors have used in the past to refuse to face the crisis, not an ounce more should be tolerated.

We can either take worldwide action to curb the use of fossil fuels immediately and drastically or we can sentence ourselves to a world in which fires regularly consume entire cities, hurricanes routinely reach intensities that were once rarities, and we all choke on summer air thick with the smoke of fires half a world away—in the best-case scenario. Be angry. We saw this point coming a half century off. It wasn't inevitable. We got here for the same reason people were long "confused" over whether cigarettes caused cancer—because the people selling the products made damn sure to keep the "confusion" going as long as they possibly could.