As you point out, there appear to be at least two major societal parameters that reached an inflection point this year; the world petroleum production and the effect of the Coronavirus infection. Inextricably linked with these is the overall condition of the world economy. I submit that there may be others.

This is the year where the Trump administration (with the gleeful aid of its Deplorable minions) finally broke from all constitutional constraints, where public opinion on global warming finally tipped, and where the decline of America as a global superpower was no longer deniable. It is the year when our global rivals realize just how vulnerable we are, and our allies realize we can no longer be depended on, believed or even taken seriously. Some of these events may be subtle, but I suggest they will become clearer with the perspective of history. To borrow once again from the terminology of differential equations, the change in slope of the line becomes more obvious as we take higher order derivatives.

I predict other inflection points will become clear this year. The increasing toll on Earth’s life forms through extinction will no longer be a subject for gloomy nature documentaries on PBS, as the rate increases it will become more and more obvious (and frightening) to the man on the street and the farmer on the land. The destruction of major global habitats (rain forest, icecap, coastal mangroves, tundra and coral reef) will no longer be deniable, and the pollution of major sectors of the global environment (such as floating plastic waste in mid-ocean basins) will be recognized as a fact of life. The composition of the atmosphere and the acidity of the seas is changing before our eyes. And I fear that the worst inflection point of all will be the beginning of the decline; the Peak, if you like, of Democracy as a social force in the history of humanity.

I could go on, but I’ll leave that as an exercise to the student. Can you think of any others? Some inflection points will be obvious immediately upon evaluating the first derivative, others will become clear only after additional differentiation.

No, the world is not coming to an end. The planet has endured greater catastrophes than this in its long and turbulent history. As in all complex systems subjected to stress, a system will tend to reconfigure itself in such a way as to eliminate (or at least minimize) the sources of that stress. But when that occurs, the system is profoundly changed, and many of its internal components and processes disappear altogether.