–Yes, earthquakes with unimaginable impacts are predicted all the time. So too are other disasters and doing so is no more oxymoronic than “thinking the unthinkable.”
There is also the predictably unimaginable that comes with the open faucet of new categories and concepts. Think of “violent crime” as a legal category in the US that didn’t by and large exist prior to the 1970s (Sklansky 2021). “Talking about ‘political prisoners’ had become such an important political criticism that it was no longer possible to imagine it as a legal category,” concludes another (Hermann 2020).
So too hitherto-unthought-of analogies are always being used to redescribe current policy problems. Not only was Green New Deal, in its fleeting notoriety, likened to Roosevelt’s New Deal; it was also compared to the Civil Rights Movement, 19th century abolitionism, and the war economy of the Bolshevik Revolution. There should be no doubt that the Climate Emergency and responses will be compared to many other events you and I won’t imagine until those comparisons have been made.
–So what? In answer, turn to an insight of literary critic, Christopher Ricks, drawn from the Oxford English Dictionary (OED):
‘Many adjectives in -ABLE suffix have negative counterparts in UN- prefix, and some of these are attested much earlier than their positive counterparts, the chronological difference being especially great in the case of UNTHINKABLE.’ The OED at this point withholds the dates, but here they are: unthinkable, c. 1430; thinkable, 1805.
Christopher Ricks (2021). Along Heroic Lines. Oxford University Press, Oxford, p. 240
The notion that some humans started with “unthinkable” is suggestive: We first confront unthinkable disasters and then think our way to making them more or less imaginable.
Current practice is we start with the worse-ever floods and earthquakes in the US and then argue that the Magnitude 9 earthquake off of the Pacific Northwest will be unimaginably worse. In this way, we end up with disproportionate contingencies and aftermaths about which we have no real causal understanding.
Let’s suppose, however, we started with disasters so indescribably catastrophic that we need to narrow our focus to something like a M9 earthquake in order even to think about the worse-ever floods and earthquakes that have happened. Here we can end up with possibilities, instead of contingencies, and impacts instead of aftermaths, about which we have some knowledge even if little causal understanding. Possibilities and impacts aren’t equivalent to risks and uncertainties, but closer nevertheless.
–Again, so what?
It’s one thing to say a catastrophe today is “the unimaginability of an alternative to the neoliberal status quo.” It is quite another thing to say this complex tangle called neoliberalism generates such contingency and side-effect as to undermine any status quo. If we are meant to suppose the absence of a status quo or status quo ante is dangerous or even catastrophic, then to paraphrase the international relations theorist, Hans Morgenthau: Excuse me, but just what status quo have the people committed themselves to?
Sources
Hermann, L. (2020). 50 Unimaginable Criminals: The Disappearance of “Political Prisoners” in Spain and the West after 1945 (accessed online at https://ruidera.uclm.es/items/011230ff-b807-4fdc-9b14-273f83590066)
Sklansky, D.A. (2021). “An American Invention” (accessed online at https://inquest.org/an-american-invention/)
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 
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