What do we do when catastrophic climate chaos is a fact? Are we already there? Is it now too late to avoid warming of one and a half degrees and maybe two as well? How did we even reach the point where these questions seem relevant to ask?
What follows is a history of what we shall call the overshoot conjuncture, or the period when officially declared limits to global warming are exceeded – or in the process of being so – and the dominant classes responsible for the excess throw up their hands in resignation and accept that intolerable heat is coming.
This acceptance can be tacit or explicit. It is often couched in the idea of a promised return to safer levels: we can let the warming pass 1.5°C or 2°C and then, at a later date, reverse it and turn the temperatures down to where they should be. Too much heat is acceptable, because it can be undone post factum with technologies for cooling the Earth.
