AI-generated image: With CO2 now exceeding 420 PPM, humanity is leaving the Holocene and returning to the Mid-Pliocene warm period. Glacial erratics provide reminders of the ice sheets that once existed. Rising seas have claimed land. Tropical plants have migrated northward. The world is a vastly different one from which modern humans evolved, proliferated, and prospered.

Despite overwhelming scientific evidence concerning climate change and its causes and growing urgency for humanity to choose a safer climatic future, COP 28 failed to adopt even minimal targets for curbing and reducing the fossil fuel emissions driving climate change. Despite bold rhetoric about addressing climate change, the United States became the world's largest oil and gas producer on record. Both outcomes are a de facto choice to take humanity into a climate that has not been seen since the Mid-Pliocene period, which was 1.8°C-3.6°C (3.2°F-6.5°F) warmer than the pre-industrial climate. Then, seas peaked at 25 meters above current levels. Those outcomes represent an unspoken but real down payment toward sacrificing some of the world's great coastal metropolises—Amsterdam, Bangkok, Jakarta, Lagos, London,New York, and Tokyo—to Neptune for only human misery in return.