A common characteristic at the end of an empire is that many of the empires subjects and victims are aware of the coming collapse, whilst the hedonistic ‘Emperors’, rulers, dictators and those closest to them who benefit the most from the exploitation of their subjects, the living planet and all it’s species, seem oblivious or in denial.
The standard response after a civic official or a military commander works up the courage to tell the emperor of the impending chaos and the inability to sustain the unsustainable, is the knee jerk reaction to “Shoot the Messenger”.
The small community on the planet who have come to understand the severity of the multiple crises we are facing and accept our impending extinction, become the latest and soon to be last messengers to be shot. Many of the readers of this blog have “Taken one for the team” due to their commitment to pointing out the extinction elephant in the room. Don’t underestimate the role that you are playing, the youth deserve the truth.

The much vaunted IPCC has come out with their latest fantasy prognosis stating that we have ‘only’ 12 years to avoid irreversible, dangerous climate change.
Explain to me how 29 years after the U.N. said we had only 11 years, we still have 12? One of us is struggling with the maths of extinction. Check out Albert Bartletts presentation on the exponential function below which will go some way to explaining how quickly the unraveling will unfold and why most can’t seem to grasp where we’re at;
“One of the greatest shortcomings of the human race is it’s inability to understand the exponential function” Albert Bartlett.

How is it that just a few scientists like Meyer Hillman, James Lovelock, Malcolm Light, Sam Carana from the Arctic News Blog, Guy McPherson et al are prepared to speak about the unfolding 6th great extinction and that it involves our species as well as the 150 to 200 we exterminate daily?

All the scientists who have been appointed to the IPCC collect substantial salaries and research grants from either governments, corporations or tertiary institutions funded by the very same economic order that is literally grinding the living planet into dust. Only the most courageous and honest are capable of talking about the end of everything when the first thing they will lose is their salaries and research grants.
As a generalisation, another thing they have in common is being middle and upper class. You won’t find many class warriors in the IPCC with a few exceptions from the developing world who are bearing the brunt of the collapse now, not long off in the future.
The IPCC repeats the mantra “If we just start now” or some such nonsense that fails to understand the pathology of capitalism and the military industrial complex. The cognitive dissonance at the edge of extinction is an amazing case study in psychology.

Ok then, why wouldn’t the large NGO’s like the Rockerfeller funded 350.org and Greenpeace tell us the truth?
The two I have mentioned above and many more have been corporatised and employ legions of dedicated climate warriors both paid and unpaid. Maintaining ‘cash flow’ in an NGO requires them to make compromises to appease their funders, often at the expense of their supporters and their scientific knowledge. Remember the days they all warned us about crossing tipping points? We never hear the them mentioning them now that we have over 6 dozen in the rear view mirror!
Recently the Greenpeace UK offices suffered the indignity of being picketed by climate warriors disgusted by GP’s downplaying of the crises. “Time is running out for the planet and Greenpeace just got a massive wakeup call”.
Massive kudos to the amazing activists from Extinction Rebellion who confronted Greenpeace.( @ExtinctionRebellion on Twitter).

In 2016 Professor Guy McPherson and I toured Aotearoa N.Z. for the second time together speaking to the public about the true severity of the crises we face and Guy was interviewed by a local journalist named Rachel Stewart, she seems to have had an epithany since meeting the good professor;
“Hope is useful. It keeps us going, and preserves a measure of mental health. Without it, we suffer enormously. Have I given up hope? Yes, some time ago. Do I feel better for it? In a weird way, I do. It’s a relief of sorts. Not because I don’t need to try any more – I’ll always push for action – but because accepting the blindingly obvious feels more real, and breeds another emotion that will be useful in the days ahead. Bravery; You can go a long way on bravery, courage, heart. It can ensure a clarity of thought, and a willingness to embrace what Buddhists have banged on about for millennia. That is, living in the moment.“Don’t say I didn’t warn you”

My response to the issue of ‘hope’ and the merits of facing the true severity of our predicament is summed up wonderfully by the amazing Joanna Macy in her December 2017 article “The Greatest Danger;
“Because of social taboos, despair at the state of our world and fear for our future are rarely acknowledged. The suppression of despair, like that of any deep recurring response, contributes to the numbing of the psyche. Expressions of anguish or outrage are muted, deadened as if a nerve had been cut. This refusal to feel impoverishes our emotional and sensory life. Flowers are dimmer and less fragrant, our loves less ecstatic. We create diversions for ourselves as individuals and as nations, in the fights we pick, the aims we pursue, and the stuff we buy.”

Managing our grief and maintaining our sanity whilst incarcerated in the insane asylum known as industrial civilisation is and will continue to be one of our greatest challenges.
There are a number of courageous artists using their talents to deliver the news that none of us ever wanted to here. I’ll embed a few of them below, be sure to subscribe to these three You Tube channels venturing where few are courageous enough to go.
In no particular order;

How fast could this set of living arrangements disappear? A little known risk we face is that when industrial civilisation collapses we lose the “Global Dimming” or the  aerosol masking effect. Almost as much warming as we are experiencing today has been filtered out by the pollution we have ejaculated into the atmosphere blocking out solar radiation from reaching the earths surface. When Industrial civilisation collapses we lose that dimming effect and within about 6 weeks we will have a doubling of the present day warming, this will wipe out crop production almost immediately.
Patrick Farnsworth will be interviewing Truthout reporter and author Dahr Jamail on Last Born in the Wilderness in the next few days and I will be interviewing Dahr on my and Professor McPhersons radio show Natur Bats Last in January when his latest book “The End of Ice” is published on January 15th . Dahr will be touring Aotearoa N.Z. with me speaking about the book and the journey writing it in July 2019 assuming this set of living arrangements and still staggering along.
I’d also recomend following Patrick Farnsworth’s blog and Facade Book page “Last Born in the Wilderness”

Soon the living will envy the dead, get living while you still can and refrain from dumping on the last generation of youth the burden of trying to fix the unfixable. Doing so is both cruel and immoral imho.