As the planet spirals toward environmental collapse, elders like Attenborough, Earle, Hansen and Suzuki have spent decades warning us – and offering hope. But the billionaires in bunkers aren’t listening. They are too busy getting rich off our destruction.

As human civilisation pursues its relentless march to oblivion, it is time to reflect on the many wise voices who have forewarned of it – and the many foolish ones that are inviting it.

“Right now, we’re facing a manmade disaster of global scale. Our greatest threat in thousands of years,” said British science broadcaster David Attenborough, 99, in  his final warning to humanity.

“If we don’t take action, the collapse of our civilisations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon. But the longer we leave it, the more difficult it’ll be to do something about it.”

“There’s a chance for us to make amends, to complete our journey of development, manage our impact, and once again become a species in balance with nature. All we need is the will to do so.”

The caveats of pioneer climatologist James Hansen, 84, who first warned the world of the risks of global overheating in 1988, have proven correct time and again. Recently Hansen tabled proofs that the climate crisis is worse, and moving much faster, than most people – including the IPCC – imagine.

His latest study, to evaluate climate sensitivity and the forces that underly climate change, found the world’s climate to be far more sensitive to a doubling in atmospheric CO2 than previously estimated, whereas the contrary cooling effect caused by atmospheric sulphate aerosols may have been overestimated.

The Earth’s oceans, our planet’s primary life support system, are now in crisis due to overheating and overfishing, and are perilously close to tipping into collapse, according to  pioneer oceanographer Sylvia Earle, 90.

Eminent Canadian geneticist  Dr David Suzuki, 89, has stated bluntly is that it is already too late to halt climate change. The question is what we can do next in the face of unfolding climate chaos – and politicians who cannot tell the truth about what is really happening.

Suzuki argues that the key flaw in our current system is the exclusion of nature from economic thought, leading to irrationality in how we value assets. “Nature, the air, the water, the soil, the biodiversity that allows us to live (are) not in the economic system.”

Underlining his point, he explains the Amazon, the greatest terrestrial ecosystem on the planet, has no economic value until it is logged, mined, dammed or used to grow soybeans and beef.

As far back as 2010, planetary biologist  James Lovelock – late author of the Gaia theory that the Earth functions as a self-regulating organism, wrote in  The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning: “The Earth’s population will be culled from today’s 6.6 billion to as few as 500 million, with most of the survivors living in the far latitudes – Canada, Iceland, Scandinavia, the Arctic Basin.”

In  1992 the Union of Concerned Scientists warned: “Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course. If not checked, many of our current practices put at serious risk the future we wish for human society and the plant and animal kingdoms.

“We may so alter the natural world that it will be unable to sustain life in the manner we know.”

In 2017, ecologist  William Ripple and  15,000 colleagues repeated the warning: “We are jeopardising our future by not reining in our intense material consumption and by not perceiving continued rapid population growth as a primary driver behind many threats.

“By failing to adequately limit population growth, reassess the role of an economy rooted in growth, reduce greenhouse gases, incentivise renewable energy, protect habitat, restore ecosystems, curb pollution, halt defaunation, and constrain invasive alien species, humanity is not taking the urgent steps needed to safeguard our imperilled biosphere

In 2020 they added: “We declare, with more than 11,000 scientist signatories from around the world, clearly and unequivocally that planet Earth is facing a climate emergency.”

In  the 2023 State of the Climate report, the scientists said: “We warn of potential collapse of natural and socioeconomic systems in a world where we will face unbearable heat, frequent extreme weather events, food and fresh water shortages, rising seas, more emerging diseases, and increased social unrest and geopolitical conflict,”

Despite such repeated admonitions by learned and responsible individuals founded on a colossal pile of hard evidence and tested proof, countries, corporations and political leaders have remained largely deaf, blind and heedless to the predicament facing humanity and the planet.

The influence of obscene wealth and selfish power over politics and government has never been plainer. Its transcendence over the fate of humanity was never more complete.

The wisdom of these elders stands in strident contrast to the unsated lust of the world’s ‘richest’ individuals, oligarchs, families and corporations for a substance that exists nowhere in the Universe outside the human imagination. Money.

That’s right, the art of being a billionaire is to own more of nothing than anyone else in the cosmos. If humanity lost confidence in the value of money, their ‘wealth’ would simply evaporate, as it did in the Weimar and Argentine hyperinflation episodes.

Yet these creatures who lust after a delusion hold their shallow insights into the human predicament superior to those who have devoted lifetimes to its study.

Inveterate fabulist Donald Trump informed the United Nations “This ‘climate change,’ it’s the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world, in my opinion.”

Arab prince Mohammad bin Salman Al Saud, sneakier than Trump but just as dangerous, pledged  $2.5 billion for ‘climate action’. Yet his country has led the fight in the COP conferences to  block, sabotage, and delay global climate action.

Global plutocrat Elon Musk, who in 2023 declared  AI as the greatest threat to civilisation has lately swivelled to targeting women, stating that  declining global fertility rates “will lead to mass extinction of entire nations.” (And thus, presumably, to lower profits for billionaires.)

But what do these tech bros actually think they know about the coming collapse of civilisation? Apparently, what terrifies them most of all is not so much climate catastrophe or nuclear holocaust – it’s AI apocalypse… they very thing they are building so profitably.

Consequently, like a bevy of little Hitlers, the tech bros are also busy excavating luxury hardshell bunkers in the remotest corners of the planet, costing $400m or more. (Or, as Stephen Klein eloquently puts it, ‘digging their own graves’.) Companies like  SAFE (Strategically Armoured & Fortified Environments) and Atlas Survival Shelters are arising to cater to the boom in timorous oligarchy.

The irony, of course, is that the end of the world is being engineered with our money. In easy monthly payments, tens of millions of gullible consumers worldwide are forking over their hard-earned cash for the very AI products that are enriching the tech bros and which, they themselves fear, could terminate our civilisation.

Having digested this abomination, please return to the first part of this article and review the wisdom of the elders, their care, their caution and ultimately, their conviction that hope is not dead. Provided we lose the monetary, energy systems and selfish people that are destroying our world.

And then reflect that the ultra-rich have one destination – and one alone.

To line their pockets with the blood of your grandchildren.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.

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