When I was a young kid and about 7 years old I attended a school play, it was a Grimm Bross. story where the princess had somehow fallen asleep and a prince was trying to save her. That’s when I first encountered the concept of death even though I didn’t realize it. The prince had to make a deal with a devil to abdicate his royalty and this deal was ‘onherroepelijk’, a word I had not encountered before. It means ‘irrevocable’. It stuck with me until today, I had to really think about it. If I had understood the word right it meant something that is ‘onherroepelijk’ could never be undone. This was quite a shock to my playfull existence. The moment I was introduced to that word is still a mental picture of me sitting watching that play amongst the other pupils. A loss of innocence and the start of sensing the dreadfull possibility of irrevocable change. Of failure perhaps, of death.
Today I am reminded of that moment when I read about climate change. It is that concept of irrevocability that my mind uses to graps what is written about the current trajectory we are on. I learned enough about human nature to see that local, egocentric interests are likely to defeat communal interest and no that significant action will be initiated in time to withdraw from the treshold to a world of irrevocable climate change, and subsequent extinction of nearly all life on Earth. It seems today many are watching what goes on around them and imagine it to be a fairy tale, inconsequential. It seems most people do not grasp that things can go seriously wrong and that when they do there will be no way back. Something will have died, the soul of our planet will have been destroyed and even though it may take another thousand years, life as we know it will leave its stage forever.
We can read that scientist warn that there is no “technofix”, geoenigneering solution to reduce CO2. Even if CO2 levels where reduced by planting trees and burying the carbon by 2150 (extravagantly late to take action, but ok), the oceans would have absorbed so much CO2 that they would remain acidic = dead for centuries. It is the dead oceans, that become toxic and emit toxic H2S gas that will eventually kill us.
“It turns out that after ‘business as usual’ until 2150, even taking such enormous amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere wouldn’t help the deep ocean that much – after the acidified water has been transported by large-scale ocean circulation to great depths, it is out of reach for many centuries, no matter how much CO2 is removed from the atmosphere,”
We are no techno-optimists such as idiots like Ray Kurzweil and others quoting him. Let’s mention Bjorn Lomborg, just to remind us he’s an asshole that needs to get kicked in the nuts, but he also pleaded to not go all out on reducing emissions and simply trust there will be a solution. We also don’t agree with the scientists above that there is no technofix, there are several, and we have written about them. But we know that making them reality requires an organized society that can allocate resources to creating them. We still have that now, we won’t have that if f.i. the US is starving (as much of its food comes from now three year drought stricken California). Therein lies a serious risk. Tree planting should be a global ongoing activity right now, dedesertification, biomass plants on the oceans to grow seaweed and keep the water and fish stock alive should be build now. Instead the opposite is happening, a race to the bottom of depletable resources. If we reach a point where order collapses because of lack of food (imagine Greece without the bailouts) or water (California in a year or two) then there is no hope for organizing the kind of action we need. Our demise will be irrevocable.
“it won’t blow up and disappear, it’ll just look ugly for a thousand years…” (Zappa) Make that a million..
The last time our planet went to a CO2 global warming convulsion it erased all oxygen breathing life except some burrowing rodents and the reptiles that where to become the dinosaurs. The route through global warming events always leads through a period where the Earth returns to swamp like conditions and most animals die. The ocean and atmosphere turns toxic to oxygen breathing life for a million years or so. This is where we are NOW headed (if you don’t believe us watch the video below).
The death of humanity is at stake
We need to wake up to the possibility of our actions today having no undo option. We need to aquaint ourselves with the concept of the irrevocable consequences of our actions. Small things matter. We say “fuck it, lets fly”, we turn our planet over to a new generation species. If we find we are forced by our economic constraints, work to free yourself (not by making money as you do now, but by making having money unnecessary, even if it upsets some suits and lawmakers). Human history ends somewhere in the next fifty years, even if we won’t think it does. Nobody will care about our historic records until some future descendants of our rats or cats have developed the intelligence and interest to dig them up and reconstruct them.
OR you accept the meaning of the word irrevocable.