There’s a running joke about the Trump Administration on social media. It is a narrative about people wondering if World War III or some catastrophic event happened as they slept. Fate, it would appear, is not without a sense of irony. A report issued Oct. 8 by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), says the planet will reach the crucial threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels as early as 2030, precipitating the risk of extreme drought, wildfires, floods and food shortages for hundreds of millions of people. In other words, in 12 years or so we could possibly be living in a world reminiscent of “The Walking Dead.” Compounding the danger for the country and the rest of the world is that we are living in an era of incompetent leadership.

On the federal level, the Trump administration won’t act on climate change, scientific data be damned. We’ve had administrations in the past that were friendly with companies invested in pollution. But those past presidents had a modicum of experience and skill of incorporating research and lobbying together. The current administration doesn’t think the problem exists, let alone could they muster a solution if they believed it did exist. If scientists are sounding the alarm to a potential climate change crisis and you’ve got an anti-science POTUS at the helm, how long after he’s gone will we have to prepare? One can only hope we don’t end up in a survival of the fittest reality show — a moment when satire and reality will be indistinguishable from each other.