IMAGINE A FLOOD, IMAGINE A WAVE, IMAGINE AN AVALANCHE, imagine a storm. Imagine any disaster you please, but note that it always begins as one before it becomes many. What in singular expression seems simple, laughable, beneath your notice, becomes, in the plural, the last thing you notice before you die. This is the bleak magic of exponential growth. It is the difference between two grasshoppers on your screen door and the eighth plague of Egypt. And if you haven’t been paying attention to an uninhabitable swath of the Arabian desert when unseasonable cyclones drape the sands in blankets of
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