Arthur Eddington once said that the universe is not only stranger than we imagine but stranger than we can imagine. He meant imagine scientifically, of course, not religiously, any fool can imagine supernatural beings with long white beards throwing thunderbolts, or with wings playing harps.
He is probably wrong, because we now know how this universe began, how matter is formed from nothing, and how galaxies evolved, and that all took a great deal of scientific imagination beyond 'common sense' (and common senses).
But he was right in a sense that would have been unimaginable in the 1920s. Now we have to try to imagine a world different to any that a human being has ever seen. A world with little if any ice at the poles or on mountains, a world with much higher ocean levels, oceans so acidic that sea life is becoming extinct, a world with six hot dry continents, and perhaps only Antarctica still habitable, a world with frequent massive storms, a world completely without many major groups of animals such as amphibians, birds, butterflies, and a high proportion of once familiar individual species such as polar bears and penguins.
The dinosaurs were the last witnesses to anything like this, and there were no humans around then to share that view. There were of course some pretty nasty times in the last million or so years, and humans managed to hang on in the face of heat and droughts alternating with icy cold conditions. Many species didn't hang on, and we can now view the remains of animals such as mammoths only in museums, alongside the dinosaurs. But the conditions in the cyclical world of the ice ages were nothing compared to what we are faced with now, coming ready or not.
So can you imagine the unimaginable? A world with conditions so harsh that human life is almost certainly not going to be viable, except that small groups may, if they are lucky, manage to hold on in some odd protected sites.
And no, you won't be feeling rapturous, as the earth heats up. And no, there isn't anywhere else to go to witness the end of human time. And no, the Earth wasn't created by a god with a personal guarantee that if we broke it we could return it, money back, no questions asked. You break it, you are stuck with it, and boy, are we breaking it, big time.
So how is your imagination? Can you look up, just for a moment, from the Discovery Channel, and imagine everything you have been seeing there gone? Can you imagine a world totally different from the one you learnt about in school geography? Come on, just imagine, because if you can't, then the world of the future is coming to your backyard. If you can then let's try to imagine an alternative reality where disaster is averted. Conservatives can't imagine alternative worlds, we can, and it is our responsibility to act on that ability.