Well they projected it to take a few decades... a few decades ago

To my knowledge, there had been an understanding that scientists were being fairly conservative with their statements of how bad things were going to get, and how fast it was going to happen.

I know of two primary drivers for this (which I am somewhat oversimplifying for brevity):

1. Scientists really didn't want to get it wrong by saying X will definitely happen by year Y, and then be wrong, thus giving ammunition to climate deniers and vested interests running counter-PR such as oil companies.

2. Scientists didn't want to paint a picture of unstoppable, inevitable doom that no person could possibly imagine a way for them to fix, or contribute to fixing, thus leading to the mindset of 'if there's no way to stop it why even try?'.

That's the whole point. They're surprised that it's happening so fast. The acceleration at which things are happening has gone far beyond anything they predicted. My local area hit 40°C a couple of days ago, the highest recorded temperature on record since we started taking temperatures. We've had constant temperatures in the high 30s for the past 2 weeks. I can't remember temperatures this high and I'm almost in my fifth decade on our little blue dot. The icebergs that we see every year failed to show up this year because of the large amount of melt happening in the Arctic, something I can't remember seeing in my lifetime. I know what I'm saying is all anecdotal but there's also plenty of evidence supporting global atmospheric warming that's backed up by scientific data.

Emissions haven't been constant over those few decades; fossil fuel burning has been rising about 3% each year, so that half the cumulative CO2 emissions since the industrial revolution have happened since the early 1980s.. That's what took us from "predicted change" to "crisis" now instead of at some earlier time.

the climate changes greatly improve the likelyhood of extreme events, going from once in a million years to once every few years.

I bet you they are as surprised as you are...

Nothing gets me more depressed than climate crisis these days tbh...

This is what happens when the developed world spends 150 years rejecting the most advanced scientific theory for fear that if the working class gets hold of it they'll have a revolution.

The theory being dialectical materialism. It's unsurprising that China, one of the five states explicitly led by DiaMat, have been acting as fast as possible to wean off fossils.

The speed at which things are changing – and this year's changes won't be the last – makes perfect sense to dialectical materialists. The transformation of quantity into quality is built into this worldview. What's hard to predict is when a quantitative change will become a transformative leap in quality. The fact of the leap is not in question, however.

Meanwhile, in most of the rest of the world, most participants in the debate are still operating under the illusion that change is linear. For people who think that things will just get a bit worse every year, what's a little distracting war in the grand scheme of things, and what does it matter if a pandemic is left to run free?

Life is cheap and there will always be a little more time in the schedule – to get 'back to normal' – before we tackle emissions properly, think the decision-makers. Except it's precious and there is no spare time. Unless westerners get their act together and challenge imperialism, we better hope that dedollarisation leads to demilitarisation so people can concentrate on healing the world. Otherwise, we'll be looking back at this year's weather with the starry eyes of nostalgia.