Ben-David’s return to Israel is front-page news. Not only is he the leading climate activist in the Jewish state and in fact the world, and thus the go-to talking head for the mounting eco-catastrophes, but also his involvement in the “LV murders” (called in Israel the Tzadikim Nistarim Killings) makes him above-the-fold fare and clickbait on every site on the web and social media. Among the Haredim, the ultra-Orthodox, this story is the only news.

I pull up a video on Israel Channel KAN 11. It’s Ben-David from two days ago, disembarking at Ben Gurion International. Reporters mob him, frantic to hear what he has to say about the imminent global climate calamity and to learn why he has returned now to Israel. “Are these extreme weather events the result of ‘natural’ phenomena?” a female journalist asks Ben-David. “Or is God’s hand behind them all?”

BEN-DAVID

Trust me, all such distinctions are irrelevant at this point.

The correspondents press Ben-David, demanding to know if the apocalyptic floods and firestorms are “real” or “biblical.”

BEN-DAVID

The concepts of “God” or “the devil” are not necessary to grasp the catastrophe that’s looming. That, the human race has produced all by itself.

The news cuts to insert-video of a massive drilling project amid melting glaciers.

BEN-DAVID

The Greenland ice cap, as we all know, has been functionally eradicated since 2031. What’s there now? A twenty-two-billion-dollar petroleum extraction effort financed by ExxonMobil.

The segment switches back to Ben-David.

BEN-DAVID

Baghdad hit 141˚ Fahrenheit yesterday. In Central Asia, temperatures are being recorded that have not been reached since the Cretaceous Period two and a half million years ago. We’re talking about an extinction-level reordering. Sub-Saharan Africa has virtually emptied out. Twenty-seven million dead in famine and war. Ninety million migrants on the move. The world knows all this. It’s on the news every night. Four hundred thousand are camped at Megiddo, here in Israel, right now, waiting to witness the End of Days. Believe me, we don’t need “God” or “Satan” to see that the curtain is coming down.

Our plane finally appears at dawn of the third day. After a six-hour delay due to atmospheric instability, Manning and I take off at last, but are compelled by a “weather anomaly” to set down barely three hours later at Narsarsuaq Airport in Greenland.

There we witness, on a scale even more dispiriting than Ben-David’s description, the harbor-, housing-, and road-construction operations of the ExxonMobil drilling enterprise preparatory to tapping the petroleum deposits beneath the vanished ice. Tens of thousands of roughnecks are pouring in to work this new field. Temperature in April is 93° Fahrenheit, twenty degrees above records from a decade earlier. Up this close to the Arctic Circle you can see the carbon accumulation in the upper atmosphere. It looks like a dirty windshield.