Time to die

"Åtta steg mot avgrunden. Vårt framtida liv på planeten" is a book by Jonathan Jeppson, an editor at the Swedish daily Aftonbladet and a reporter covering topics related to climate change. In translation, the main title reads "Eight steps towards the abyss." The book combines factual descriptions of the climate emergency with reflections rooted in the author´s own personal and professional crises (including the suicide of a sibling at the age of 17). Jeppson forthrightly says that he wrote it as a kind of personal therapy. If the author is right, the rest of us will need something much stronger than therapy during the decades ahead! 

The book is extremely dismaying, and essentially says that humanity is screwed. We´re not going to make it. Melting glaciers, rises in sea level, extreme weather events, more tsunamis, the return of smallpox (when the corpses of buried victims in Siberia reemerge due to the thawing of the permafrost), more and larger forest fires...the list of problems or potential problems triggered by global warming seems almost endless. Add to this peak oil, peak fish, general limits to growth, and the idiot optimism of the establishment!

Jeppson tears apart the late Hans Rosling´s book "Factfulness" (Rosling was a Danish professor), a typical example of official optimism. Rosling seems to think that increased consumption is a good thing, oblivious to the fact that this is connected to environmental degradation and climate change. Some of Rosling´s factoids proving eternal capitalist progress are downright comic, such as a graph about "the number of guitars per capita". It turns out that the guitars are made by illegally harvested timber, often from threatened species of trees! Rosling also gleefully points to Mozambique (sic) as a nation with a bright future - after all, its long coast at the Indian Ocean must be excellent for a thriving tourist industry. Jeppson points out that Mozambique was hit by a cyclon when Rosling´s book was published, killing thousands and making 1.9 million people dependent on foreign aid. Tropical storms are believed to be more abundant due to climate change. The tourists probably won´t go to Mozambique...

Our splendid politicians do nothing, the global usage of coal actually *increases* (largely due to China), CCS is a "zombie technology" (it´s been disproven many times but nevertheless raises from the grave at a semi-regular basis), and so-called green energy is dependent on rare earth minerals (many mined in China) and produces enormous amounts of waste. Add to this about one billion climate refugees within a couple of decades. Small wonder Jeppson believes that humanity is, more or less, on the verge of extinction. In about 150 years, we might even get a new "Permian mass extinction" in which 90% of all species of living organisms will simply die out due to global warming in overdrive.

The only thing I can say after reading "Åtta steg mot avgrunden" is that I sincerely hope the climate change denialists will be proven right, and we can all go home around 2030. Don´t count on it, however. If Jeppson is right, not even dragon ships might save us in the end...