In 1985, Carl Sagan sat in front of the United States Senate and described the weather of 2026.
Not as prediction. As physics.
Sitting across from him was a junior senator named Al Gore — who would later win the Nobel Prize, the Oscar, and build a climate investment fund worth over $36 billion repeating almost word for word what Sagan said that afternoon.
Sagan opened with Venus.
470°C surface temperature. 900°F. Hot enough to melt lead.
"Not because it's closer to the sun," he told the senators. "Venus actually reflects more light than Earth. It should be cooler."
The reason it wasn't: carbon dioxide. A runaway greenhouse effect that turned a planet nearly identical to Earth into a furnace.
Then he looked at the committee and said: we're running the same experiment here.
The senators nodded politely.
Then they went back to approving fossil fuel subsidies.
What Sagan told Congress in 1985:
Global average temperature will rise several degrees by mid-to-late next century.
Local climates will redistribute.
Glaciers will melt. Sea levels will rise.
And the problem cannot be solved by any single nation — not even if the US and Soviet Union agreed on everything — without China.
China, he said, had the world's largest coal reserves and was about to industrialize.
Every sentence was correct.
He also said something that got almost no coverage at the time:
"The initial stages of global temperature increase — one region might benefit while another suffers."
That is the sentence that explains the last 20 years of geopolitics.
Canada's growing season expanding while Pakistan floods. Russia opening Arctic shipping lanes while Bangladesh disappears. The politics of climate was never going to be clean because the physics wasn't distributed evenly.
Sagan mapped all of it from first principles, in a Senate hearing room, 41 years ago.
The part nobody quotes:
He didn't say stop burning fossil fuels immediately.
He said: "That has such severe economic consequences that no one will take it seriously."
So he proposed something else — remove government subsidies from fossil fuels, accelerate solar, develop safe nuclear fission, and begin building international frameworks before the crisis made them impossible.
That's not an environmentalist's speech. That's an economist's.
Carl Sagan wrote 20 books. Cosmos was watched by 500 million people across 60 countries. He won the Pulitzer. The ideas in this testimony became the scientific foundation for a carbon market now valued at over $800 billion annually.
He said one line at the end that nobody remembers.
"We are all in this greenhouse together."
In 1985, that was poetic.
Now it's a weather report.
The full testimony is free on YouTube. 17 minutes. Almost nobody outside of climate policy circles has watched it as a complete predictive model — laid out in plain language before any of it happened.
Malcolm X comment about Entertainment Industry was over 50 years before its time. I have my on mind. I’m not persuaded by a celebrities perspective regarding world issues.
Whenever I see someone “SUPER” Pro-Black, there is generally some agenda behind them. You can be for your ppl but when it’s 24/7, pay close attention. ✌🏽
Maturing is realizing that gangster rappers like Snoop Dogg (a self-proclaimed pimp who’s been married to the same woman for 27 years) and Rick Ross (who worked as a Florida corrections officer) are just fictional personas.
Meanwhile, the dude prancing around a stage in ‘hammer pants’ was an ACTUAL gangster who pumped fear into people.
Crazy when you think about it.
*BRILLIANT*
The French made a short film about what could happen after all immigrants would follow the ‘_white, angry old man’s_’ advice to go back where they came from.*
I saw a post that said:
“I think being forced to be hyper independent as a child has caused me to be irrationally angry with any adult who needs their hand held through anything they do.”
And I felt that in my soul.
Questlove recalled his late manager Richard Nichols predicting, after 50 Cent’s rise, that there would eventually be a shift away from gangsta rap, a theory he felt was proven when Kanye West’s Graduation went head-to-head with 50’s Curtis in 2007.
Vince Staples offered a much sharper interpretation of that moment:
“I just thought all the white people picked Kanye up, and they put 50 down. It’s like a toy. It’s like, they wanna play with Kanye now. They don’t wanna play with 50 no more.”
Vince said it felt like the industry was essentially saying: “This is our version of a Negro that we like. We don’t like the gangster Negro anymore… Let’s get the nigga in the backpack.”
His larger point: Black audiences didn’t necessarily decide they had to choose between 50 and Kanye. In Vince’s view, the industry decided which version of Blackness it wanted to market next.
For those of you that haven't read it, Chapter 13 of Project 2025 was literally about creating food insecurity by cutting safety nets and slashing regulations and restrictions on food production.
No, we weren't overreacting to Project 2025.