The Prince of Wales did not mince words in warning about the ravages of global warming. No piddling nonsense about a few inches of sea-rise; nothing so trivial as coastal erosion; no focus on the plight of the polar bear. No, the prince had a louder alarm he was sounding, one about the Future of Mankind: The “threat of catastrophic climate change,” he said, “calls into question humanity’s continued survival on the planet.”
These strong words, The Scrapbook hastens to point out, come from March 2009, when Prince Charles was visiting Brazil. That date is significant because the prince was convinced that time was, even then, running out. And not in some vague, way-off-in-the-distant-future kind of running out: The reckoning was to be upon us on a very specific timeline. “The best projections tell us that we have less than one hundred months to alter our behavior before we risk catastrophic climate change, and the unimaginable horrors that this would bring.”
