To panic unless you have to is a terrible idea.
But when your house is on FIRE and you want to keep your house from burning to the ground, then that does require some level of panic.
Our civilization is so fragile. It is almost like a castle built in the sand.
The facade is so beautiful. But the foundations are far from solid.
We have been cutting so many corners.
Yesterday the world watched with despair and enormous sorrow how the Notre Dame burnt in Paris.
Some buildings are much more than just buildings.
But the Notre Dame will be rebuilt.
I hope that its foundations are strong.
I hope that our foundations are even stronger. But I fear that they are not.
Around the year 2030. Ten years 259 days and ten hours way from now. We will be in a
position where we set off an irreversible chain reaction that will most likely lead to the end of our civilization as we know it.
That is unless in that time, permanent and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society have taken place. Including a reduction of CO2 emissions by at least 50%.
And please note that these calculations are depending on inventions that have not yet been invented at scale, inventions that are supposed to clear our atmosphere of astronomical amounts of carbon dioxide.
Furthermore do these calculations not include unforeseen tipping points and feedback loops like the extremely powerful methane gas escaping from rapidly thawing arctic permafrost.
Nor do they include already locked in warming hidden by air pollution. Nor the aspect of equity — or climate justice — clearly stated throughout the Paris Agreement, which is absolutely necessary to make it work on a global scale.
We must also bear in mind that these are just calculations. Estimations. That means that these “points of no return” may occur a bit sooner or later than that. No one can know for sure.
We can however be certain that they will occur approximately in these time frames.
Because these calculations are not opinions or wild guesses.
These projections are backed up by scientific facts, concluded by all nations through the IPCC. Nearly every major national scientific body around the world unreservedly supports the work and findings of the IPCC.
We are in the midst of the sixth mass extinction and the extinction rate is up to ten thousand times faster than what is considered normal, with up to 200 species becoming extinct every single day.
Erosion of fertile topsoil, deforestation of our great forests, toxic air pollution, loss of insects and wildlife, the acidification of our oceans — these are all disastrous trends being accelerated by a way of life that we, here in our financially-fortunate part of the world, see as our right to simply carry on.
But hardly anyone knows about these catastrophes — or understand how they are just the
first few symptoms of climate — and ecological breakdown.
Because how could they? They have not been told. Or more importantly: they have not
been told by the right people, and in the right way.