Dear Ms Greta Thunberg,

On the first of July you posted The Show is Over on Medium. I agree with you, especially in the light of the recent extreme events, Pacific North West Heat Dome, mega-fires in the Americas and in Russia, the flash floods in the EU, in China, all the way to New Zealand, and more… Even people the least attuned to the Climate Emergency are beginning to see through the empty words and acts of global elites, in business and governments… Yet, there remains a long way to effective action. So, denouncing the vacuity of present talks is an urgent necessity.

However, you are right in more ways than you possibly realise. You are right also on at least three more counts about which considerable evidence has accumulated since the 1970s:

1. Humankind is at the end of the road it has been on for some 270 years since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution;

2. Humankind is at the end of the road after some 10,000 years of agricultural development, urbanisation and hierarchical modes of social organisation;

3. Humankind is at the end of the road after some 3 Million years of development of the human psyche, that is how we think, make decisions and act.

On the above three counts we now find ourselves at the edge of a precipitous thermodynamic cliff. This is unprecedented. Numerous individual civilisations have collapsed before, regionally. This is the first time it is happening for the whole of humankind at once, so abruptly, and on the above three counts simultaneously. In what…