"Imagine a country. A royal command is issued to all the office-bearers and subjects, in short, to the whole population. A remarkable change comes over them all: they all become interpreters, the office-bearers become authors, every blessed day there comes out an interpretation more learned than the last, more acute, more elegant, more profound, more ingenious, more wonderful, more charming, and more wonderfully charming. Criticism which ought to survey the whole can hardly attain survey of this prodigious literature, indeed criticism itself has become a literature so prolix that it is impossible to attain a survey of the criticism. Everything became interpretation—but no one read the royal command with a view to acting in accordance with it. And it was not only that everything became interpretation, but at the same time the point of view for determining what seriousness is was altered, and to be busy about interpretation became real seriousness. Suppose that this king was not a human king—for though a human king would understand well enough that they were making a fool of him by giving the affair this turn, yet as a human king he is dependent, especially when he encounters the united front of office-bearers and subjects, and so would be compelled to put the best face on a bad game, to let it seem as if all this were a matter of course, so that the most elegant interpreter would be rewarded by elevation to the peerage, the most acute would be knighted, &c.—Suppose that this king was almighty, one therefore who is not put to embarrassment though all the office-bearers and all the subjects play him false. What do you suppose this almighty king would think about such a thing? Surely he would say, 'The fact that they do not comply with the commandment, even that I might forgive; moreover, if they united in a petition that I might have patience with them, or perhaps relieve them entirely of this commandment which seemed to them too hard—that I could forgive them. But this I cannot forgive, that they entirely alter the point of view for determining what seriousness is.' " --Kierkegaard, “For Self-Examination,” qtd in: Parables of Kierkegaard (1978)

CO2 reaches 400 ppm

the problem is not so much that life on earth won't adjust, as that our civilization, its agriculture, & its permanent habitations are all based on a climate that is already becoming a thing of the past.

we haven't given a thought to what we could do with our highly concentrated coastal populations that will become environmental refugees, or the substitution of heat- & drought-resistant crops for the ones that will be subject to failure in a different regime.

i'm not even going to bring up the worst possibilities such as buried clathrates or a runaway greenhouse effect: the fact is, our 25 years of inaction have already condemned our descendants to some harsh forced choices when we could have made some smart, gentle ones--but that's politics.

it's a wonderful luxury to be able to ignore what is happening. doubtless, those to come will be too busy scrambling to stay alive, to ever give a thought to our infinite, stupid selfishness. even the image of apocalypse itself is only another tiny glowing screen to rivet our eyes.

lucky us.