"It's worse, much worse, than you think."

The opening line to David Wallace-Wells' "The Uninhabitable Earth," and it's no joke, not hyperbole, but the gods honest rational truth.

There are always massive perturbations in any stable system, such as the climate, before a rapid and turbulent shift to another radically altered stable state.

I don't just think of the daily extreme weather disasters happening around the world, but the way in which the weather right outside my front door changes radically, in 20 or 30 or 40 degree shifts, this constant seesaw of above normal then below normal temperatures, and not just where I live, but where friends and family and loved ones live in other parts of the country.

Massive perturbations before a radical shift to an enitrely new, much changed, stable state.

The earth has undergone these rapid climate shifts in the past. It is called abrupt climate change and a certain segment of climate scientists have been warning about it for some time, to no avail, as these scientists were chastised as too gloomy and too doomy to be taken seriously, but now we find ourselves observing this rapid transition in our climate.

We have passed tipping points without even knowing it, but such is the fate with any tipping point -- you don't know you've passed it until it is in the rear view mirror.

The climate has collapsed. It IS past tense. Our little human brains are having a very difficult time processing and internalizing this new information, based on myriad new data and observations, including those observations each of us make as we step outside our front door each day.

It is slowly dawning on humanity the huge and dangerous challenges we have ahead. Covid ain't nothing compared to climate change, and look how we handled covid.

We are in trouble, there's no doubt, and the only hope we have now is that the sooner we realize that we are the frog in the near to boil pot, the better chance we have to save some lives in the near term.

That's some good we can do.