The Fatal Species by Andrew Y. Glikson

Author:Andrew Y. Glikson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030754686
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Psychological preparation of societies for war is conducted through the vilification of potential “enemies”. A new cycle of fascism and a potential world war is emerging late in the twentieth century and early in the twenty-first century, at the very time when the world needs to cooperate to try and save its planetary life support systems from a climate catastrophe as well as urgently dismantle its arsenal of nuclear weapons. Fascism, emerging from dark recesses of the human mind, criminal sociopathy and survival of the fittest fundamentalism (social Darwinism), coalesces in violent movements promoting death in all its forms.

Chaos reigns, while Homo “sapiens” continues with the suicidal transfer of every accessible molecule of carbon from the Earth crust to the atmosphere, the auto-da-fe of the living Earth (Fig. 8.​7) proceeds as the warming oceans are rising, flooding the cradles of civilization of the great river valleys—the Nile, Mesopotamia, the Hindus, Ganges, Mekong and Yellow River—history is nearing its nadir.

Sporting 4-wheel SUV1s and mobile Trailblazers allowing virtual escape, waving national flags, people disperse like ants before the rain, lost in a virtual world of Faceless Books and on-line Tweets. They jet around the world to frequent mass circuses where World-Number-One legends and celebrity Icons write themselves into history. A Commercial screams: See the world before it is too late.

Jo Star, an aerobatics ace pilot of right stuff fame prides himself in emitting thousands of tons of carbon dioxide each year, burning the liquid deposits of Jurassic plankton and microflora that populated the Tethys Sea. Self-righteous billionaires play with rockets, satellites and drones; relic semblances of democracy are hijacked by fossil fuel tycoons; snake oil merchants drug the young; human ascendancy supremacists perfect deception as a form of art; few thousand of the mega-rich amass greater wealth than 4.6 billion people in national systems referred to as democracies.

By the second decade of the 21st century the rates of greenhouse gas rise supersedes any since 66 million years ago, tracking above the stability limit of the Antarctic ice sheet. The base of the marine food chain and algal reefs are stressed by warming acid water. The rising oceans threaten coastal plains, low river valleys and urban hubs of civilization.

The writing has been on the wall ever since Homo erectus mastered fire, perhaps about 1.7–2.0 million years ago. Political and media heads debate global warming: A fat senator declares: “To be quite honest it’s a challenge, you know, we just need to grow the economy, going forward, you know, it is the twenty-first century, you know”. A 50,000-strong crowd at the MCG2 cheer, most of them oblivious to what their troops are doing, killing poor farmers in faraway lands, the demise of their home planet, and the fate of the species. How many of them care?

Primordial howls Shriek, what passes for music betrays an unconscious knowledge of what’s to come. Pompous hubris reverberates “Global warming is from the sun; the Earth is cooling; carbon dioxide is plant food; the greenhouse effect is a United

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