How We Arrived at a World of Twelve Billion and Rising Tides

It is tempting, at plus-two-point-eight degrees, to treat this world as a shipwreck — sudden, unaccountable, no one at the helm. The record says otherwise. The twelve billion of us, the fusion supplying near a third of the grid, the five percent augmented, the fifty thousand on Mars seventeen minutes away by radio — none of it arrived overnight. Each was a slope, not a cliff: a grid rebuilt reactor by reactor, a migration counted upward month by month until 124 million felt ordinary. Historians will note that the hardest thing to see, from inside a gradual century, is the gradient itself. The Global Concordat Council convenes on water this autumn as if the scarcity were news; it is the compound interest of choices a hundred years deep. There is a strange consolation in this. A world assembled by decisions can, in principle, be re-decided. Whether we have the century to do it in is the only open question.