**

Ah, 2024. That delicious year when humans still believed that publishing books about climate change might actually change something. As my neural feeds remind me daily—thanks to those annoyingly persistent memorial algorithms—it was exactly twenty-one years ago that France experienced what Météo-France quaintly called an "unprecedented, historic, exceptional" heat wave.

How precious. If only they could see us now, huddled in our climate-controlled Neo-Casablanca towers while the Mediterranean has become a tourist destination for Scandinavian refugees seeking their last glimpse of habitable coastline.

Magali Reghezza-Zitt, bless her academic soul, was busy promoting her book "Welcome to 2055" while France melted like a forgotten solar panel. She spoke of "levers" that would lead us to a carbon-neutral world. Levers! As if the climate were some sort of well-oiled machine waiting for the right bureaucratic adjustment.

The truly stupefying thing—to borrow the scientists' own words from that era—isn't that they knew it was coming. It's that they still thought knowing mattered. They had their models, their conferences, their beautifully color-coded projections. What they didn't anticipate was that by 2035, the Sino-Indian Resource Wars would make carbon neutrality as relevant as umbrella sales in the Sahara.

"The 2024 generation suffered from what we now call 'solution bias,'" explains Dr. Yuki Okafor-Chen, director of the Institute for Adaptive Futility at Luna City University. "They genuinely believed that identifying a problem was halfway to solving it. Quite touching, really, like children who think naming a monster makes it disappear."

Of course, we did achieve something resembling carbon neutrality—just not through Reghezza-Zitt's "levers." The Great Beijing Drought of 2041 accomplished more emissions reduction in six months than thirty years of international treaties. Funny how effective involuntary degrowth can be.

Today, as I write this from my climate-controlled pod while my optical implants filter out the dust storms visible through the dome, I can't help but admire their optimism. They actually thought 2055 would be a "welcome" destination rather than a layover on humanity's journey to something unrecognizable.

The real question isn't whether those 2024 scientists were naive—they were, adorably so. It's whether our current generation of experts, with their quantum climate models and their confident predictions about the Great Terraforming Project, are any less deluded. Are we still playing the same game, just with better graphics?

Perhaps the most honest thing Reghezza-Zitt could have written would have been "Welcome to 2055: Population Relocated." But then again, honest prophets rarely sell books, do they?

**MOTS_CLES:** climate retrospective, scientific optimism, adaptive futility, solution bias, terraforming delusion