We are now faced with the end—an end we made all by ourselves. The seas are now warming faster than we expected, the ice melting from within itself, the dead zones expanding. The summers are growing ever deadlier. Fish are migrating north, flowers are too. Frog ponds are growing silent. Bee hives collapsing. Forests are falling faster, burning faster, bedeviled by drought, chainsaws, beetles, fires and shifting seasons. Ancient caches of frozen methane are escaping into warming depths and through melting permafrost, while all the long warm nights of planet earth, the crowded super cities glow and fume atop their nests of glittering roadways, the citizens putting off change, even as the branch they nest upon creaks ominously beneath them.

No flying saucers will save us. No angels of mercy or glorious miracle of science. It is all too late. Scientists have already calculated that dramatic changes are inevitable. In ten or fifteen years, millions will be fleeing the desert cities of the American Southwest, a Katrina event that will rival the Dust Bowl and shake the nation. But this will only be a foreshadowing of much worse to come. In twenty years, the snow melt of the Hindu Kush, responsible for allowing a billion Indians and Chinese to survive will begin to fail all those many people. In desperation, they will flee, just like the families of Las Vegas and Phoenix did before them. Only, the weight of their panic will sweep across borders as far away as Russia, Europe, and North America. And as they move, they will undoubtedly bring war.

It is estimated that under current trends, at least 1 billion human beings will die by century's end due to global warming. But this assumes that this one-sixth of humanity will go out quietly. The worst case scenario...the likely scenario...is that civilization cannot survive the upheaval that is upon us. Indeed, in our own lifetimes, we will all see our world grow dry, hot and deadly. And if our children were to survive it, their children would be some of the last human beings in the universe. For at the end of this awesome horror, will be a globe that is unlike anything humans or any hominid has experienced, and possibly one where we cannot survive.