ESCAPE FROM EARTH DAY: Ecopocalypse

The apocalypse is coming! What form will it take and how will you survive the catastrophe? Read the scenarios and vote on how you would survive!
You wake up, as you usually do, in the middle of the night, and to the sound of miserable, abject sobbing, except this time, it’s not your own.
You are disturbed to find that you are not alone in your room. The sound–the sniffling, the snuffling, the occasional hiccupy snorple–is coming from a gray-haired, stoop-shouldered, middle-aged man. At first, you don’t know who it is; his face is buried in his hands.
You are about to do the sensible thing–scream, and then pass out–when he says, between mucusy gurgles, “The Greenland ice shelf.” The voice is familiar, but you can’t quite place it.
“The Antarctic ice coring data.” He sighs heavily. That sigh. You know that sigh.

And then he drops his hands and turns his face to the ceiling and roars, as if his very soul were raging to escape his despairing frame, “The permafrost!”
As soon as you recognize him, you are no longer terrified. You are, however, relieved that you didn’t turn on the lights. The bulbs are not compact fluorescents, and you’d be really embarrassed if he noticed.
You are also not sure how to console him. Tears are gathering in his eyes again, and his lower lip is trembling; he is like a proud glacier just about to melt.
You say the first stupid thing that comes to mind, and you sound unduly proud of yourself as you say it. “Mr. Vice-President, I voted for you in 2000.”
It has an effect, though you’re not sure if it’s exactly what you intended. He leaps to his feet, shakes his fist at the moon, which, for a moment, does actually seem to bear a passing resemblance to the dome-like visage of his successor. “Even then, I would have been too late!”
He deflates again, collapses back in the beanbag chair. You hand him the bottle of Wild Turkey you keep on your bedside table and he takes a good, healthy swig. “After all, we only had ten years. That’s all we had. Ten years. Even less than I thought.”
You keep hoping he’ll pass you back the bottle, but he doesn’t. He just keeps drinking. “Ten years?”
“Why do you think I’m here?” he shouts. You want to reply, um, actually, I have no idea, but he’s really quite agitated enough.
Then he says in a stagy whisper–the bourbon is making him melodramatic–”It’s happening tomorrow.”
You’re confused, but you’re not even sure what day of the week tomorrow is. After all, it’s always a good day to drink Wild Turkey in your beanbag chair.
Then it hits you. “No…it’s not…it’s not Man-Bear- Pig, is it?”
“It’s not that bad, thank goodness. But it’s still bad.” He heaves that unhappy sigh again. “A major ice sheet in Greenland has collapsed. The currents are disrupted. Global water temperatures are dropping, and the temperature in the Arctic has risen 6 Celsius…”
“Celsius.” You repeat it very seriously to give him the impression that you were listening carefully.
You weren’t. You’re not entirely sure what he’s talking about. You’ve had An Inconvenient Truth out from Netflix for a year or so, but you’ve never gotten around to watching it.
“I have a really great PowerPoint that explains it all…” he says, taking out his iPhone. Although it’s the first time all night that he seems happy, even excited, you stop him.
“With all due respect, Mr. Vice President, I know you’re pressed for time.”
“I do have a lot of other people to warn tonight.” He looks so unhappy, though, as he pockets the iPhone you wish you had let him give his little presentation. “About a hundred million, I estimate.”
“A hundred million…how…what…”
As the moonlight shines in from your window, and glints off the medal around his neck–his Nobel Prize?–he looks different, no longer but melancholy but powerful, even superheroic. “It’s my duty. I must save everyone!…There’s a catastrophic storm headed for New York City right now…and for London…and for Tokyo…You have just a few hours until Brooklyn is underwater.”
Your first thought is: I wonder if this means apartment prices will come down? Maybe I can finally move out of Bushwick.
Your next thought is, how to survive:
1. Run to the bodega on the corner and get some compact fluorescent bulbs. They’ll really help reduce your carbon footprint!
2. It’s a good thing your other Netflix was Waterworld…and it’s what you were watching when you passed out last night. In about eight hours, it will be Fishtar no longer, but instead a blueprint for the resurrection of civilization.
3. Make use of that M.A. in Cetacean Cultural Studies–and you said it was useless, Mom–and exploit your mastery of humpback language to befriend our new overlords: the whales.
4.Head for high ground right away: the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty’s torch, or other major landmark. According to every disaster movie you’ve ever seen, they’ll either be the first thing hit–or the last thing standing.
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