No biggie, just checking the odds on the end of the world

Now that it feels so much closer, what do you have in the end-ofthe-world pool: virus, climate catastrophe, fascism-sparked political conflagration, or other?

“Other” might include any of the various Hollywood projections of note — wayward meteor, killer comet, blast-us-to-bits asteroid, aliens, and/or the pathogen that turns certain of us into deadly monsters.

That last one’s looking pretty strong right now.

Anyway, some people have begun trying to handicap the top contenders to be the planet’s official cause of death, including my friend and former PostGazette sportswriter Chico Harlan, now the Rome bureau chief for The Washington Post.

Retweeting the Post’s story on the possibility that global warming has led to an “almost complete loss of stability” in the system that drives Atlantic Ocean currents, Chico stated, with just a hint of the Vegas odds-maker’s panache, that the planet’s destabilizing climate “makes all other worries pale in comparison.”

If that’s the early line out of Europe, you have to respect it, but as of this morning I still had COVID-19 as the 5-2 favorite to turn out the lights on life as we know it. Climate I’ve got at 4-1, with Fascism at 6-1. These odds are for entertainment purposes only, obviously.

Many of us addicted to entertainment might have preferred a narrative of the end times more closely resembling “Deep Impact,” “The Day After Tomorrow,” “2012,” “Armageddon,” “World War Z,” “War of the Worlds,” “28 Days Later,” “The Core” or “Greenland,” so when I heard this week about “Code Red For Humanity,” I thought it might represent a fresh cinematic story line for doomsday, but no.

Code Red For Humanity is not a movie.

It’s a phrase used to describe a new United Nations report out this week indicating the planet is warming at a rate that’s probably irreversible, with co-author Linda Mearns, senior climate scientist at the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research, noting that “It’s just guaranteed that it’s going to get worse. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.”

Gotta say I liked Code Red a lot better as a refreshing alternative in the Mountain Dew lineup of beverage excellence.

But when it’s 113 degrees in Greece, parts of which are being called “a biblical catastrophe,” when there have been 217 wild fires in Turkey since July 18, when there are killer floods in Germany and Belgium, when it’s so dry in Madagascar that back-to-back droughts could mean famine for up to half a million people, when Northern California is a tinderbox and more than 100 fires are burning in 14 states, when UCLA scientists are saying 2021 is the driest the West has been since 1580, when shellfish in the waters of the Pacific Northwest are being cooked alive, and when you realize the hurricane season hasn’t really ramped up yet, to say nothing of the hurricane playoffs, well, the climate might just have a claim to the status of Ultimate Reaper (not a film, yet).

For the moment though, I think it’s apparent that COVID can get everything wrapped up before collective climatological disaster, especially if you look at this month’s data trends in the good ol’ USA. This is where about 90 million of our 330 million people remain unvaccinated out of ignorance, truculence, or just plain terminal dumbassery, accelerating a viciously contagious coronavirus variant at a grim cost to everyone else.

Many of them would rather be dead than wrong and many will soon be at rest with their preference.

“We’re certainly losing this battle right now,” Dr. Leana Wen was saying on cable news the other day. “We’re at 900% the level of new infections compared to early July and there’s no particular end in sight. All of us would want the vaccination numbers to be a lot higher in the sense that we need a lot more community immunity. We can get there, however, we also have to keep in mind that vaccination for the short term is not going to be the answer.

“Even if every single person were vaccinated today, we’re still looking at another six weeks before there is enough immunity from that population. It’s really upsetting that in the parts of the country that have the most surge, they are the places that are the least likely to be imposing vaccine requirements and masking requirements.”

As for the final remaking of the world’s oldest democracy into a fully authoritarian state, that looks to be more than a year away, but don’t hold me to it. Already there’s been a coup attempt, aka Jan. 6, in which a mentally imbalanced wannabe dictator arranged a deadly attack on the U. S. Capitol in which scores were injured, his own lickspittle vice president nearly hanged, and an election almost overturned.

In response, Democrats in Congress have arranged some committees. Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, after listening to seven hours of testimony the other day from the then acting attorney general, indicated over the weekend that Trump might have done something wrong. He said they might even issue a report.

Oh boy, the gloves are off now. Everything considered, I’m rooting hard for the blasted asteroid right now, but putting the odds at about 100-1.