I was born in 1978, which means I have been hearing about global warming for most of my life.
Not as fringe theory. Not as mystic doom theater. As science. As charts. As trends. As calm people with credentials explaining, in increasingly plain language, that if we kept doing exactly what we were doing, the planet would get hotter, the ice would melt, the seas would rise, the storms would sharpen, the fires would spread, and a certain class of well-dressed idiots would keep smiling into cameras as if physics were a polling issue.
And here we are.
I grew up in that long fluorescent hallway between warning and consequence. As a kid, I got the starter kit: pollution, ozone, melting ice caps, endangered species, the warming planet. By young adulthood, the message had hardened. The graphs got cleaner. The models got better. The language got less polite. We were told, over and over, that there would be a cost for treating the atmosphere like a dump and the future like a pawn shop.
The message was never cryptic.
This planet has rules. The atmosphere does not care about ideology. Carbon does not salute the flag. A coastline cannot be negotiated with. A forest does not become less flammable because some senator took fossil fuel money and went on television to cosplay skepticism for the cameras.
And still, we kept our foot on the gas.
That is the part that catches in my throat. Not ignorance. Ignorance has innocence to it. This was something more embarrassing. We were warned. We understood enough. We had decades of notice. And still, as a species, we chose convenience, quarterly profit, tribal identity, and the narcotic bliss of not changing a damn thing.
We did not wander blindly into this. We strutted into it. We high-fived on the way.
That is why the denial now feels less like disagreement and more like public performance art staged by arsonists. There may once have been room for uncertainty, or at least for people pretending uncertainty was the issue. That era is over. At this point, if someone in public life insists climate change is not real while temperature records keep falling, fire seasons keep sprawling, flood maps keep expanding, and insurers start backing away from whole regions, that person is not engaged in debate. They are lying. Openly. Ritualistically. Like a priest of stupid reading liturgy to a burning congregation.
And the lie itself has become humiliating.
There is something almost too perfect about watching people spend decades dismissing scientific warnings, only to arrive in the exact future those warnings described and continue insisting nothing unusual is happening. It is the kind of bit no satirist would write because it would be rejected for being too broad. A man stands in smoke and says the fire is exaggerated. A governor tours flood damage and says no one could have seen this coming. A pundit wipes sweat from his neck on the hottest year yet recorded and explains that climate has always changed, as though that sentence, delivered with enough smugness, counts as an argument instead of a costume.
No one could have predicted this, he says, while standing in the crater where the prediction landed.
At the species level, this is already damning. We deserve some mockery for it. Not because humanity is uniquely monstrous, but because we are apparently smart enough to detect the pattern, model the future, explain the mechanism, invent alternatives, and still dumb enough to let greed, inertia, and status games steer the whole carnival into the ravine. That is not merely tragic. It is clownish. Cosmic clownishness. A self-own at civilizational scale.
But leadership deserves harsher judgment.
Ordinary people are busy, exhausted, propagandized, underpaid, and trapped inside systems they did not build. Leaders do not get that excuse. People with power had access to the information, the scientists, the briefings, the leverage, and the time. Many chose not merely inaction, but sabotage. They protected the industries cashing checks on the damage. They muddied public understanding. They laundered obvious reality through focus groups and talking points until the truth itself sounded partisan.
That should not be treated as a respectable disagreement.
At some point, mockery becomes necessary because seriousness alone stops working. Some lies survive because they are dangerous. Others survive because too many people keep dressing them in dignity long after they deserve to be pelted with rotten fruit. A politician denying climate change in the age of record heat and visible consequence should not be met with solemn nods and “well, that’s one perspective.” They should be treated like what they are: court jesters for collapse. Men in expensive suits insisting the floodwater around their knees is a liberal conspiracy. Mouthpieces for thermodynamic illiteracy. Sales reps for the end of winter as we knew it.
Not because mockery is enough. It isn’t.
Not because contempt lowers emissions. It won’t.
But because false dignity is one of the last shelters of obvious bullshit.
And this is not doom talking.
I do not think we are doomed. I do not think this ends in one grand cinematic extinction reel with tasteful music and a final aerial shot of the species learning too late. Despair is too easy. Too neat. Too self-flattering, even. It lets people pretend the story is finished when in fact we are still in the long, ugly middle, where choices matter, consequences compound, and the bill keeps arriving item by item.
What makes this moment so maddening is precisely that it is neither hopeless nor excusable.
We are not dealing with some cosmic prank. We are living through the consequences of a long, stupid, preventable refusal to take reality seriously because too much money was being made in the meantime. The damage is real. More is coming. And now the task is uglier than it needed to be: more adaptation, more loss, more heat, more strain, more triage, more political idiocy under worsening conditions.
Not apocalypse. Logistics.
Not one dramatic finale, but decades of paying extra for the dumbest possible choices made by men who mistook appetite for wisdom and profit for intelligence.
Maybe that is the most human part of all this. We had the intelligence to see it coming, but not the discipline, courage, or collective maturity to act proportionately. We let convenience masquerade as realism. We let greed put on a tie and call itself pragmatism. We let short-term gain hold the future hostage and congratulated ourselves on being adults.
So yes, I think we deserve some ridicule for being warned for decades and proceeding full speed ahead anyway. And I think our leadership deserves far more, especially the ones who still look into cameras and deny what is happening while the old predictions keep showing up in the real world wearing smoke, floodwater, heat alerts, evacuation orders, and insurance cancellations.
They should be mocked relentlessly.
Not because mockery solves the crisis.
Because calling a farce a farce is part of telling the truth.
We were told.
The warnings were real.
And the people who waved it all away for profit, power, and ego should not be granted the dignity of retrospective seriousness.
Let history laugh at them.