Here’s a familiar action-movie trope: The protagonist has to defuse a time bomb as it’s ticking down the seconds to detonation, with just minutes left. BEEP-BEEP-BEEP! He finds the right wire to cut. The sweat drips down his face, the music swells dramatically, and… he snips it! Whew. Except that instead of defusing the bomb, he’s just set the clock forward so now he only has seconds left.

That’s what just happened to the environment, apparently. We thought we had a whole 12 years left to do something before we all die from globalclimatewarmingchange, but apparently that wasn’t scary enough. The clock just got moved way, way up.

Joe Romm at “Think” “Progress” reveals the horrible truth:

Scientific reality makes clear that the only plausible way to preserve a livable climate — and hence modern civilization — starts with aggressive national and global cuts in carbon pollution by 2030…

With eight years of a pro-science president, Barack Obama, the nation made steady progress on reducing emissions and committing to future reductions, enabling a global climate deal in Paris in 2015. But with just two and a half years of an anti-science administration, national and global progress have both stalled under President Donald Trump…

That means November 3, 2020 — the U.S. presidential election — is the deadline for Americans who do not want to destroy the health and well-being of current generations, their children, and future generations. If Trump is reelected, the prospects for the necessary national and global cuts in carbon pollution by 2030 will be gone.

If that outlook seems bleak, the news from noted scientific genius Bruce Banner is slightly better:

There’s no time to waste. We must treat #ClimateChange like the emergency that it is. https://t.co/7djvQXnwoe — Mark Ruffalo (@MarkRuffalo) July 25, 2019

Eighteen months gives us a little more breathing room, I guess. But that’s still bad news for Marvel Studios, which already has superhero movies planned for release through November 2021 and beyond. That’s way after the deadline. Will any of us even be alive by then?

I’m going to remember that Romm and Ruffalo and the rest of these brainiacs are saying this stuff. Because once this new deadline passes, that will mean there’s nothing more we can do to stop the planet from killing us. It will be too late. There will be no more reason to shout it from the rooftops. “Think” “Progress” and all the other panic-mongers will be able to rest easy, knowing they did everything they could.

And then they can finally shut the hell up.