22After - "This is our future"

H/T Robert Atack

Many of our worst fears were confirmed when Guy McPherson's book “Going Dark”, back in 2014.

The film "22 After" is even more hard-hitting.

Nothing that was said back then has proved inaccurate. In fact, things are a whole lot worse.

Going Dark

I have had several "off" days where I have felt unable to turn the computer on, still less to bring the latest news the media refuses to carry. This has also corresponded with days where there are less major headlines. That has made me want to come back to basics.

My knowledge of the world was largely shaped by an early exposure to the Population Bomb by Paul and Anne Ehrlich.  I went on to be interested in other things in the intervening years but have always come back to the same.

The "neo-Malthusianism" of the Ehrlichs was "disproved" by the green revolution which greatly increased the amount of food available while also contriщuting hugely to the further destruction of human habitat. 

At other times temporary fixes have been found to keep the inevitable at bay - through destruction of the environment  by fracking, tar oil etc and by printing money - all designed to put a bandaid on and keep the world economy" going for a bit longer. It is hard not to imagine that Donald Trump's assault on the living planet at every level, all to maintain the fiction of a functioning economy and society going for a while longer.

It is also not difficult to see that Trump and the American Deep State in general are not making things worse in a way that is almost beyond our imagination and actually accelerating the species' headlong rush to extinction.

Do I think that the near-term extinction of the human species (and by this I mean within one generation, probably sooner is inevitable?  

No, I don't - the human intellect and science cannot possibly see the entire web of causation.

However, I regard it as highly likely on the time line line presented, based on all the data available to us,

Through a discussion with a friend about  what we intended to do about our dependants, our horses etc. I discovered a video that I was unaware of.

The film 22After is excellent for concentrating the mind on some extremely unpalatable possibilities. I work well with the world of ideas and the printed word so this "in-your-face" presentation is a little too much for my sensibilities but I recognise  that people learn in very different ways so that if film and the audio-visual is your preferred medium then this is for you - if you have the stomach.

WARNING - this film is not for the faint-hearted.

Another version of this is available HERE

Here is a description from the filmmaker - 

A few weeks before Christmas last year my worst fears were confirmed when Guy McPherson's latest book “Going Dark” arrived in the mail as a present. Some present! In the book McPherson lays out a very convincing argument that humankind is doomed. As a student of politics, the environment, the environment of politics and maybe most importantly the politics of environment I had long suspected something was terribly wrong. I was filled with a deep sense of foreboding that grew by the day! Half-hearted efforts to increase automobile fuel mileage standards by a few percentage points over the next two decades while denying human driven climate change seemed the very definition of obscenity.

That's when it hit me! The reason politicians were doing virtually nothing to stop the headlong rush towards environmental catastrophe was because they knew nothing could be done. It was a huge, concerted effort at plausible deniability between government at the highest levels and big energy. If the asteroid is streaking towards Earth and there's nothing to be done...than why do anything?

Why indeed!

So I decided to make a movie about the fate that almost certainly awaits us. That movie is “22 After”. I realized early on that this topic, the end of all humanity in the next few decades (otherwise known as Near Term Human Extinction), is an absolute 'buzz kill' at parties, family get-togethers, around the water cooler, etc. And if even talking about NTHE is that toxic why waste precious time trying to find the investors that would be needed to hire professional actors, film crew, editors, etc.?

The answer was to do a zero-budget docu-drama. And that's what you see in “22 After”. I wrote the script in a few weeks, put out a call for volunteer actors, and handled the camera and editing myself. I spent most of my professional career as a TV News reporter so I have a fair amount of writing ability, can shoot and edit video in a pinch, and am not shy when it comes to asking favors.

We started weekend filming in February and were all wrapped up by May. I finished editing by the end of June and “22 After” was done. We entered in a couple of film festivals but after a two month wait to find out we didn't make it into the first of those I decided to pull the plug and make the movie public for the benefit of several hundred social media followers who had been supportive from the outset.

For the time being I have decided to keep the viewing of “22 After” completely free as it sounds somehow obscene to ask people for money to tell them the worst news they will ever hear. In the future I may change my mind but only to raise funds to spread the word; people need to wake up, plans need to be made.

But for now the best payment I can hope for is for you the viewer to tell everyone you know “watch this movie”.

Thank you,

Mark Thoma

http://22after.com

I have stopped posted basic articles on "climate change for beginners" so if this is is at all new for you, or if you want a lot of information in one place I can do no more than recommend Pauline Schneider's film "Going Dark", from about the same time as 22After.

Here is another more recent summary of our knowledge from Guy McPherson.

It is many years since I watched this series the Crash Course by Chris Martenson.  Here are two segments on why all this is inevitable. It can be summarised in one phrase "you can't have infinite growth on a finite planet"

You would have to be insane to think otherwise.

Exponential Growth

Compounding Is The Problem

Happy weekend viewing!