Or, more importantly, how do you want me to say it?

I could stand here and narrate my world to you

like it's the opening credits of a disaster movie.

This is the setup.

2050, far enough in the future for all this to seem plausible.

Climate catastrophe reported as normality, the daily index

of maximum time allowed outside in Doha

or Austin or Manchester.

In all these places, it is over 50 degrees centigrade.

If you go outside for more than your allotted hour,

then you will die.

Some specific new tragedy.

Targeted bioweapon takes out Cape Town

as the statelets of a collapsed South Africa fight for water.

First use of live ammunition to keep the hordes out

on the Italian/Swiss border.

I could be a newsreader, if we still have those.

A citizen journalist, screaming into a phone

against the backdrop of burning old growth forest.

Ported into your optic nerve through a neural network,

a studio improvised in a spare bedroom

to half a billion subscribers.

But not anything we'd recognise as TV news, or newspapers,

obviously.

Whatever a newspaper looks like then,

we're probably imagining it wrong.

Whatever happens, whatever lies look like,

whatever truth becomes, it probably won't look like this.

This isn't really the future.

This is an idea of the future that by the time

you're watching it is in the past anyway.

This is what the future looked like in our heads in 2019.

I'm just here saying, how do you want me to talk to us?

Should we talk about dystopia, maybe?

But dystopia is weird, isn't it?

It feels now like we might have made a mistake about it.

Depending on which version of this future world

I'm in right now, of course.

I mean, maybe we scared ourselves a bit too much.

All that footage of rising oceans,

and rioting in the cities, and the streets

of London underwater, and one filthy

polar bear that was all ribs, and hunger, and sadness.

All those water wars, desiccated dead

piled in the uninhabitable streets, and the rise of idiots

feeding on fear with simplistic solutions.

A lot of that happened.

Or from where you're watching this, a lot of that

is going to happen.

The processes are in motion.

Dengue fever's gearing up for a world tour.

Extreme heat's eyeing up more people

than just the old or young or sick.

People are dying of this stuff right now.

But if that's what we tell ourselves,

we internalise the end, the idea of it.

We lie down in the face of it because it's just too big,

and then that is the end.

Because we'll put our trust, our need to be saved from all that,

in things we can't see yet.

We'll take the chance of an off-moment of inspiration

over the provable reality.

It's just the way we're built.

The big discoveries of self-regenerating bodies,

and fusion power, and everything quiet, and humming,

and electric.

Bringing the global temperature down

with sulphates or electric cars or some method of clean energy

we haven't even thought of yet.

Our ability to pull salvation out

of the apocalypse hat at the last minute, to carbon

capture our way out of this.

The idea there's a sole solution that

will save us through the power of eureka is seductive.

And we're trying all these things.

We are.

But whatever arrives, if it does,

it can't reach back through time to now.

We've never really worked out how to talk about this.

We probably should have.

I mean, it's not as if we didn't know.

Even if some of us took comfort in the voices

that only told us what we wanted to hear.

And then we spent a long time trying to blind ourselves

with science, and we're sorry.

That didn't necessarily work.

Graphs.

Graphs, red lines, colours, and concentrations,

parts per million, and rises of degrees, and millimetres.

And we look around ourselves and think, don't we?

These numbers are too small or too large or meaningless.

What does 2 degrees mean on a cold day?

And what does it mean decades from now?

Which of them is easier to feel in our bones

and then get on with our lives?

If we could have sung scientific facts like pop songs,

we'd have got to the chorus sooner, but we didn't.

It's not that we could have stopped

these things from happening.

But we'd have been better prepared to face them

in a way that didn't kill so many of us.

Maybe we screwed ourselves up with too much

speculative fiction.

I could be standing at the edge of the sea

telling you the future looks like this,

that most of the streets you grew up in

are behind me in the waves.

List the countries that are gone,

and the parts of countries, because they're underwater

or you just can't go outside in them,

where the local biospheres collapsed,

show you the normal life that plays out

against that backdrop.

A kind of warmer, more beige version of now

with potholes and soldiers on the streets everywhere,

rather than just the poor places.

And only three types of toothpaste.

Thing is, when you make the argument about lifestyle

degrading, you either don't want to believe it

because you think you're immune, or you don't care,

because you're already living it.

But the one thing nobody told us was that everything

was going to be all right.

Nobody serious, anyway.

And if that's what you heard, it wasn't what we were saying.

We never found the way to make ourselves do enough,

fast enough.

I mean, some of us, yes.

But doing enough consistently, talking

in a way that made this possible to grasp

in the quiet parts of life in the times between the times

that we all march, no.

We needed to make this as everyday as bath time.

As graspable as pre-packed sandwiches or your loved

one's hand.

And we didn't.

Every time we tried to make the defining statement,

we thought, maybe this is the one.

Maybe this is the one that gets through.

We didn't need data or heroes.

We didn't even need voices pretending

to be from the future.

We're in the same place.

It's not about our children or our grandchildren anymore.

The future has come to meet us.

Most of the people watching this will be there when it happens.

We needed to understand, quietly,

every day, that this is the future--

now.

Every single second.

We're not waiting for the future.

We're not trying to fend it off.

We're living in it.

It is now.

And it is us.