or try this: "the world has only got 100 months left," etc. from a guardian column titled the climate change clock is ticking. this is a column that has appeared in the guardian in one variant or another every day for a decade or so. what is accomplished by repeating it? well, you don't hear it at all, but for just that reason it becomes the truth. on the other hand, there can't really be any serious motivation to write what you've written a hundred times before, or devote space to it. the only way to lend it an ersatz motivation is ever-more hyperbolic formulation, a fresh screech that the crisis will kill us all by next weekend etc. this piece, for example, has no motivation except that some website claims that we've got a hundred months until our incineration becomes inevitable. in other words, it's not about science; it's not even about the columnist's interesting moves in an argument, his poetry or rhetoric or something: it's simply reporting that someone else has jacked up the volume, yet again. speaking of months we have left, there won't be anywhere to go by october except to claim, or to report someone else's claim, that we are all already dead. after that, the timetable will stabilize.

Comments

[SillyWilly]

Dear Lord, I sincerely hope you're comin', 'cause you really started somethin'.

[SillyWilly]

"We've got five years."--Bowie

'Course he said that in 1970-something.

[Rik Little]

How bout that Mayan timetable?