Climate change is both predictable and unpredictable. We don't need certainty to know it's a crisis

If you knew your home would burn down exactly one year from today, you’d take immediate action. You’d clear out flammable clutter, upgrade alarms, and perhaps install fireproof doors or sprinklers. You’d also prepare for the worst — updating insurance, setting aside savings, and making an evacuation plan.

The human brain responds best to threats when they are clear, and certain. That unfortunate truth helps explain why we’re struggling to take action on climate change. Despite broad scientific consensus and growing certainty that the climate crisis will continue to worsen, there’s no way of predicting how or where it will strike. Knowing the exact dates and locations of disasters may not make it any easier to prevent — but it would likely spur decisive action.

Remember Y2K, the impending doom that would befall us all when ill-equipped computer systems switched from “99” to “00” at the stroke of midnight on December 31, 1999? The threat didn’t materialize, and not because it wasn’t real. It had a deadline, and the world’s governments and companies invested some $300 to $500 billion in upgrading computer systems and critical infrastructure to avoid it.