"Imminent" depends a lot on the nature of the situation.
Suppose you're in a car travelling at 50 mph, and a child suddenly dashes into the street 200 feet in front of you. If no action is taken, there will be an accident in a little over 2 seconds. Fairly imminent.
But with a normal reaction time, the stopping distance is about
175 feet.
So disaster can be avoided.
But suppose you're the engineer of a cargo train travelling at 50 mph, and a child suddenly dashes onto the tracks
half a mile in front of you.
Disaster is 30 seconds away, but in fact it is unavoidable. Because of its greater weight and inertia, it takes a mile for such a train to stop.
If we're talking a ship, the stopping distance might be a couple nautical miles, and the time it takes to stop might be 12 minutes.
View attachment 348160
The overall climate has even greater inertia. It may not seem to be moving 'fast' at less than a degree per decade. But the time it takes to stop it (much less reverse it) is also measured in decades. And some significant effects are decades away. And billions are already being spent to ameliorate them. The opportunity is now to start applying the brakes. We've already used up our "reaction time".
“Presently, sea level is tracking in the intermediate-high to high, the two fastest [future scenarios],” said Randall Parkinson, a coastal geologist with Florida International University. “The other three scenarios, you might not even think about because we’re already rising faster than that.”
Two feet of sea rise by 2060, compared to present-day levels, would be a shock to the system for Miami, where the average elevation is three feet. That’s why local governments — and the state — are spending billions to keep streets dry.