The decline of Rome (150 years), the Migration Period (200 years), the Apostolic Poverty (100 years), even the Classic Maya collapse (100 years) all suggest that "end times" are *never* quick breakdowns but on the contrary long periods of widespread decline and ascent. To me the interesting thing is less how long in fact such "apocalypses" take but rather that the past 300 years since the beginning of the Industrial Revoulution and formation of modern societies may itself be seen as a period of "apocalpyse" and end time. Not only in the sense that "Modernity" (for lack of a better catch phrase) can be seen as the end time and apocalypse of the peasant societies that came before, but that only lately in this period (for about the past 60 years) did we realise that such a passage occurs.

This realisation is independent of climate change.

Climate change and the feeling of end time it provokes are less a sign of factual changes but a projection surface for our need to have a measure for and estimate of the period in play. To know how long the catastrophe may take is part of the urge to know what contours the catastrophe has. In that way, the feeling of open-endedness of what people call the climate crisis is part of what makes it the terrifying thing it is, less the factual changes it may or may not induce.

cc @tinydoctor @band @woodbark @es0mhi