Why are we talking about anything but climate change?

This is a question I ask myself every time scientists release one of their consistently alarming reports on the projected countdown to doomsday.

Doomsday being the moment when the ability to lower the atmospheric temperature has slipped from our control. The moment when we puny humans are finally and irrevocably at the mercy of hurricanes, fires, tornadoes, drought, food shortages, rising sea levels and all the socio-political carnage that will accompany same.

The moment that, by the latest estimates, is less than 10 years away.

So the first thing we need to do is stop using the term “climate change,” which makes the situation seem relatively benign and natural, as if the Earth were entering menopause and all those scientists just want us to know that hot flashes can be expected.

The man-made shift they are predicting will cause a large number of humans to regularly die by heat, fire, water, drought and famine.

That isn’t a “change,” that’s a crisis.

The notion that our ability to prevent this could slip from our control is equally misleading. We could prevent it right now if we were willing to make a substantive shift to clean energy, which we are technologically able to do.

Far from “slipping away,” our ability to lower atmospheric temperature has thus far been flung to the four (now regularly hurricane-level) winds, because a few of us are making too much money from fossil fuels and the rest of us are busy weighing in on things like “cancel culture” or what the film academy should do with Will Smith to notice that we are boiling ourselves to death.

I say this as someone who has weighed in on cancel culture, Will Smith and countless other nonclimate-crisis topics. When the latest report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change came out this week, warning us that we were not even close to achieving the pledge of the Paris Agreement on climate change, I was knee-deep in screeners for “The Offer,” caught up in the dramatic tension of whether “The Godfather” would ever get made when I knew for a fact that it had.

I was contemplating the irony of Netflix, which has turned television into something approaching a controlled substance, organizing a live comedy festival — “don’t take your eyes off the screen until we tell you to.”

I was praying for the people of Ukraine and the families that lost loved ones in Sunday’s deadly shooting in Sacramento and wondering whether I could bring myself to write another plea for gun con