Quotidien ... Or on reaching 2800

quotidien
[kɔtidjɛ̃  ]
Word forms: quotidien, quotidienne
adjective
1. (= journalier) daily
Il est parti faire sa promenade quotidienne. He’s gone for his daily walk.
2. (= banal) everyday
la vie quotidienne everyday life
masculine noun
1. (= journal) daily ⧫ daily paper
Le Monde est un quotidien. Le Monde is a daily paper.
les grands quotidiens the big dailies ⧫ the big national dailies

2. (= vie quotidienne) daily life ⧫ day-to-day existence
Son quotidien est différent du leur. His life is different from theirs.

An elegant French word describing the day to day, bespeaks of the mundane and the extraordinary,  entities ranging from, as seen by the definition above, a daily walk, to novels like Anniversaries, a masterpiece by Uwe Johnson spanning  a year, from August 20, 1967, to August 20, 1968, with a chapter for each day.

August 24, 1967 Thursday

Five American war planes have been shot down in North Vietnam. Seventeen military personnel were killed in combat in the South, among them Anthony M. Galeno of the Bronx.

Police in the Bronx have discovered a cache of weapons: submachine guns, an antitank gun, dynamite, ammunition, hand grenades, rifles, shotguns, pistols, detonators. The four collectors—private citizens, patriots, John Birch Society members—had planned to kill the Com- munist Herbert Aptheker first, then protect the nation from its other enemies.

With this in mind, quotidien also indirectly describes the day to day acceleration of Climate Change, the one true existential event of our own making.

Describing the current state of the planet, Jamail likens it to someone in hospice care. The global mean temperature is already 1 degree Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Not half a decade ago, leading climate scientist James Hansen warned that that one degree would usher in a crisis of sea level rise, melting Arctic ice, and extreme weather. He concluded that the goal of limiting global warming to only 2 degrees was “very dangerous.” Accelerated melting in the Arctic continues to surpass conservative predictions. Jamail reminds us that “as rapidly as global temperatures are increasing, so are temperature predictions. The conservative International Energy Agency has predicted a possible worst-case scenario of a 3.5°C increase by 2035.”

It gets "better" ...

Landmark UN Report to Show We Are in a Human-Induced Extinction Crisis

 A new landmark United Nations report on biodiversity set for release on Monday will say that a perilous and miserable future awaits the natural world and human civilization unless we rapidly bring an end to humanity’s destructive “business as usual” approach to the economy, food production, and energy usage.

Signaling the need for urgent “transformative changes” in order to save humanity and the natural world, the 1,800-page report and a separate executive summary will represent the first time the UN has published such an exhaustive report on the state of nature.

As Agence France-Presse, which obtained a draft of the conclusions, reports Saturday that “The bombshell Summary for Policymakers … makes for very grim reading.”

The clock is ticking and time ... is running out.

Addendum: Click IPBES report to get the summary. The report itself will be out later this year.