The 48th annual Earth Day has come and gone without causing a ripple on America’s collective consciousness. Stormy Daniels, yes. Russians and the election, a little, The environment, who cares?

Don’t trust me. A Pew poll conducted about the time of the State of the Union in January asked people what the top priorities for Congress and the President should be for 2018. Terrorism topped the list, followed by Education, Health Care Costs, Social Security, and Medicare.

The Environment came in eighth, but that appeared to mean air and water pollution in a local sense — coal ash in the river, lead in Flint’s drinking water. It wasn’t until number eighteen on the priority list that Climate Change appeared — after Jobs, the Poor, Crime, Race, Transportation, Drug Addiction, Deficits, Immigration, Lobbyists and the Military.

Since politicians take their marching orders from polls like these, from lobbyists for special interests, and the donors behind those special interests, it’s no wonder legislation concerning the environment and climate change gets short shrift. Especially at a time when Republicans are in charge. Sixty-eight percent of Democrats call climate change a top priority, but only 18% of Republicans do.

Mass media news organizations also choose, in part, to cover stories that will attract eyeballs or clicks, which means climate change is well down the priority list for them. Such stories are complicated, technical, slow moving, all but invisible, and therefore unphotographable compared to a war, a mass murder, a tornado, a protest, a porn star, an insult comedian president.

Yet little by little the effects of climate change are becoming apparent and the shape of things to come can be discerned. Those required to think about long-range planning, including the military and global corporations, are beginning to get freaked.

Large fractions of the polar ice sheets and of glaciers are melting, changing ocean salinity, altering the habitat for billions of creatures and promising a rise in sea level. At first a few feet were forecast, then a half dozen, but if more of the ice vanishes the sea rise could be several times that with huge consequences for coastal cities, and food supplies.

My father was stationed during WWII on the Kwajalein atoll in the Marshall Islands. There, for a few months in 1945, the bombing of Japan made it the busiest airport in the world. A recent report reveals the Marshalls are about to vanish beneath the waves. Another announces that fifty percent of the Great Barrier Reef, the planet’s largest ecosystem, has died in just two years, due to rising ocean temperatures.

This isn’t just a blow to tourism — no need to go diving to see that underwater wonderland now that it’s a bleached wasteland. Besides, who cares about coral half a world away However, the same temperature changes are beginning to kill sea life that several billion people depend on for survival.

Another recent report also addresses the little issue of the AMOC — that’s the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, a fancy way of describing the flow of warm water from the latitudes of the Caribbean north and east past Iceland, looping back past Greenland and down the eastern shore of North America.

The great conveyor belt of the AMOC has the effect of keeping everything from New York north on our side of the Atlantic and from Spain north on the European side much more temperate than their latitudes would otherwise predict. It’s also why a coastal city like Derry in Northern Ireland has an average January high of 43, while an interior city at the same latitude of 55 degrees N, like Moscow, has a January high of 23.

A few years ago, climate scientists suggested melting polar snow could reduce salinity and slow or stop altogether the AMOC, leading to warmer temperatures in parts of the North Atlantic that could kill or cause the extinctions of many sea species on which the ocean ecosystems depends. Simultaneously it would cause temperatures to plunge in continental Europe affecting crops and human habitation. Now, a study published in the journal “Nature” shows it has begun. The AMOC flow has weakened by 15% and might cease altogether.

While we worry about Trump and hookers, a Muslim ban, a trade war with China, crony capitalists heading cabinet departments, the Paris Climate Accord is abandoned and the issue of climate change is ignored.

But the climate is changing, perhaps faster than predicted, and in ways that will not permit business as usual. Diseases will spread or mutate under changed condition. Coastal cities will become too expense to save, and immense migrations and refugees crises will ensue. Agricultural, animal and ocean foods will be threatened. Drought, plague, famine and flooding will cause threats to life on the planet on a scale not seen since the Black Death, or the collision that produced the great Mesozoic die off.

And we are letting it happen as time runs out for meaningful action. We are treating an alarming, potentially apocalyptic, scientifically plausible threat as if it was a cartoon street corner prophet in sandals, robes and beard crying, “The End is Near. Repent!” By the time we realize the error of our ways, and of our votes, repentance will not keep our civilization’s head above water, no matter how fast it paddles.