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"Colossal Stakes as Leaders Meet to Talk Climate," ran the headline.
"The Last Best Hope," ran the subhead, which turned out to be a quote from President Joe Biden's climate czar John Kerry. But these alarmist headings were not atop an editorial. They topped the lead news story in Sunday's New York Times, the opening line of which set the tone for Glasgow: "The future is on the line."
Somini Sengupta, climate reporter, then laid out the "colossal stakes" of the summit.
"As presidents and prime ministers arrive in Glasgow this week for a pivotal climate summit, the outcome will determine, to a large extent, how the world's seven billion people will survive on a hotter planet and whether far worse levels of warming can be averted."
The hype is on. And the establishment media are playing their assigned role -- portraying a failure at Glasgow as a guarantee of the looming apocalypse.
The theology of the climate crisis runs like this.
The planet has warmed by 1.1 degree Celsius since the Industrial Revolution. If warming rises to more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above 1900 levels, more and more terrible weather disasters will occur: Wildfires, hurricanes of growing severity, droughts, coastal and river flooding, and islands sinking into the sea.
The only way to stave off "climate catastrophe" is for all nations to cut carbon emissions radically now and for the world to reach net zero emissions by midcentury.
A fast phaseout of the major emitters of carbon dioxide and replacement of these fossil fuels with clean energy is a moral and political imperative.
But if such a radical transformation of economies is the only way to avert the impending crisis, we should brace ourselves and prepare for that crisis. For there is no way the demanded changes in energy consumption are going to be made by 2030.
Consider.
The world's largest emitter of carbon dioxide is China, which burns half of the world's coal and is building new coal-fired plants.
China was given a license in the Paris climate accord of 2015 to burn all the coal it wishes until 2030. But the idea that China can or will convert to wind, solar and nuclear power seems preposterous.
The U.S., the world's second largest emitter of carbon dioxide, gets 81% of its energy from oil, coal and natural gas.
In his Build Back Better bill, Biden inserted a provision that would have imposed annually rising taxes on carbon producers and used the revenue to reward companies that reduced their reliance on fossil fuels.
The proposal had to be pulled out, lest it drag Biden's entire bill down to defeat. Lest we forget, Sen. Joe Manchin is from West Virginia.
India, the world's third largest emitter of greenhouse gases, is also, like China, dependent on coal. To demand that India begin to end its burning of coal and rely more on solar and wind is to demand that New Delhi accept a future where India's standard of living remains lower than that of China.
Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states and other OPEC nations depend for their national income on oil exports. If fossil fuels become forbidden fuels, what is to become of these nations?
Will they be content to rely on the industrialized world to provide them with windmills and solar panels to power their economies?
The world's losers from this Glasgow summit are likely to be the billions of people who will never know the benefits of fossil fuels that produced the Industrial Revolution and created the affluent societies of the 20th century.