Longtime So Cal resident Charles Carr is a nationally published journalist and playwright. His award-winning Southpaw column has appeared in college textbooks published by Macmillan, St. Martin's Press, Bedford, and others. Charles writes Southpaw for his hometown newspapers, The Times-Advocate and The Roadrunner.

A new word

        So far as I know, no one has ever correctly predicted the end of the world. From the guy on the street corner with the "DOOM" sign to the fundamentalist preacher who has calculated our little circus will wrap up for good this coming Saturday at 2pm (which, I imagine, will make for a very small collection plate at Sunday service), most of us just roll our eyes and ignore them.

        Then there are the thoughtful, carefully researched messages from climate scientists warning us we're perilously close -- if it's not too late already -- to a point of no return.

        Completely different messages, right?

        Not so much.

        Turns out the messages from scientists often end up eliciting the same response from the public as the guy on the corner or the preacher. Eye rolls. In fact, they can backfire badly. The climateologists' intent is to give us a wakeup call, but what they often end up doing is letting people off the hook. I'll admit to catching myself a few times reading the latest dire headline and thinking: Well, if it's too late and there's nothing I can do about it, I might as well make the most of what time is left. Partay!

        "They’re a dream for climate deniers, who weaponize poor forecasts and say: 'Look, you can’t trust the scientists, they’ve got this wrong before, why should we listen to them now?' " said Hannah Ritchie, a senior researcher at Oxford University and Our World in Data in a recent interview for The Guardian. To wit: The right cannot possibly order enough reprints of the 1975 Newsweek cover predicting a coming ice age. They frame them and hang them on office walls.

        "I grew up with climate change," Ritchie added. "I don’t really remember a time when it wasn’t talked about, so I became obsessed with it – a big part of my life was worrying about it. Then I went to university and that was all I was studying. The environmental metrics were getting worse and worse. ... This fed into the notion that humans were incapable of solving problems."

        But, as a result of a growing realization that the Chicken Little tack is not working coupled with heartening, if scant, news on the climate front, a strange new word is starting to creep into the prognosticator lexicon: hope.

        Ritchie's said she discovered it when she looked past the gloom and noticed that many of the metrics she'd assumed to be getting worse were actually getting better.

        The UK, for example, has nearly three times as much forest as it did at the start of the 20th century and the EU as a whole has added vast amounts of woodlands. In a piece for Bloomberg, David Fickling notes, "China’s forests have increased by a region the size of Ukraine while the US and India have together planted forests that would cover Bangladesh in an unbroken canopy of leaves."

        Fickling cautions that complacency would be as big a mistake as giving up entirely. "The carbon benefits from forests aren’t sufficient to offset more than a sliver of our greenhouse pollution. ... Still, we should celebrate our success in slowing a pattern of human deforestation that’s been going on for nearly 100,000 years. Nothing about the damage we do to our planet is inevitable. With effort, it may even be reversible."

        Ritchie agrees. "The realization I came to was that... we can continue human progress while addressing our environmental problems."

        There's that word again: hope.

        Capitalism with its profit-at-any-cost model got us into this mess and it's just going to have to get us out of it. Far-thinking governments and corporations must continue to redirect and supercharge the profit motive to make renewable power too cheap to ignore. We're there already with solar and wind, particularly when the true cost of fossil fuels is factored in. Ultra conservative Texas is now the nation's leader in wind power. Its legislators like to pretend they aren't; but they are anyway. Rock-ribbed Republican ranchers like John Davis, owner of the Pecan Spring Ranch in West Texas, now look up at the new wind turbines spinning lazily above over their fields and saying, "I don't see red or blue. All I see is green. As in cash in my hand. I can't afford not to do this."

        Let's make the most of life while not forgetting to roll up our sleeves and making genuine -- yes, sometimes painful -- efforts to whittle down these challenges. Work at them. Chip away. Filter out the crazies and the Cassandras alike. Hope. And the very least each of us can do can do is to stop resisting change. Don't stand in the doorway. Don't block up the hall, said Mr. Dylan.

        It may well be the end of the world as we know it. Time will tell. It certainly may be the end of the world as it knows us. Many thousands of years from now the earth will blithely remove every trace we ever existed, even our worst sins forgiven and forgotten. The only question is: Would we would like to stick around for the ride or curl up and die.