Modern — overdeveloped — societies in the West are already in a severe crisis. Something, which will eventually turn into a long global emergency in the years and decades ahead. A five centuries long era of economic growth — ushered in by colonization and leading to the plundering of natural, mineral and most of all fossil fuel resources —
That timeline is now effectively unavoidable due to the phase change in the planetary system Earth we’ve triggered through our initial greenhouse gas injection pulse. The pulse itself is self-limiting, it began mostly by 1950 and will be rather advanced into its tail phase by 2050. Only about a century’s worth of a massive anthropogenic release. Whatever happens then is out of our hands. It arguably never was in our hands: human ensemble behavior is effectively deterministic.