🗡️ Treason at the End of the World

The body has a limit, ice has a melting point, and the state has a duty. When a civilisation knowingly crosses those lines, what do we call it?

The Sea of Ice - Caspar David Friedrich

There are certain words polite society forbids.

Genocide.
Collapse.
Treason.

Say them, and you are hysterical. Extreme. Nuts.

But there comes a point in the life of a civilisation when refusing to use the correct word becomes the real extremism.

We are living through the greatest act of intergenerational violence in human history. The evidence is no longer scattered across obscure journals. It is in mainstream newspapers. Intelligence briefings. Government admissions.

The question is no longer whether the crisis is real. The question is whether we are prepared to describe what is happening with moral clarity.

Let me lay out the key pieces from the last month of news.

1. The Line Where the Body Dies

Here is the fundamental fact.

There is a cut-off point where the human body dies in around six hours. The Wet Bulb Effect. When heat and humidity combine so that sweat no longer cools you, your organs fail.

When people die, they do not come back. Unlike being ill.

The Guardian recently ran an interactive feature putting journalists inside an extreme heat lab to simulate the climate of the near future. It is not abstract. It is dizziness, nausea, confusion, and collapse.

This is not about polar bears. It is about basic mammal biology.

We are moving towards a threshold beyond which large regions of the Earth become intermittently uninhabitable. And we are doing so knowingly.

Nona Faustine. From Her Body Sprang a River. On the old slave block at Water Street, where bodies were once priced and sold, a naked Black woman stands at dawn — unseen by passing cars. Then as now, the body is the site of truth.

2. When Slow Violence Becomes Murder

Another Guardian article calls for suicides linked to domestic abuse to be treated as potential homicides.

In the past, if a man killed his partner directly, that was murder. If he abused her for years and she eventually killed herself, it was considered indirect. It did not count.

Now, rightly, we understand that accumulated harm can be lethal. Slow violence can be murderous. The pattern counts.

We congratulate ourselves on moral progress.

But here is the implication.

When you eat meat every day and fly because you can, you contribute to emissions. Those emissions accumulate. They intensify heatwaves, floods, crop failures. They kill.

The catastrophic climate event is the “suicide”. The emissions are the abuse.

The accumulation of harm is just as real as the single act.

You laugh. No one is going to court for eating steak or taking a flight.

Perhaps not.

The global north may ignore the deaths of brown and black people in the south.

But what about our own children?

They will grow up.

Partner abuse. Child abuse.

If you keep spitting in the wind, it comes back in your face.

3. One Death Is a Tragedy

What was it Stalin supposedly said?

"One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic.”

Which brings us to modelling.

An AI study reported in The Conversation suggests climate change could expose 1.1 billion people to hunger by 2100. There is “good news too”.

One point one billion.

The language of exposure, scenario ranges and adaptive capacity has an antiseptic quality. It turns suffering into curves.

This is not an attack on scientists. It is an observation about civilisation. When numbers get large enough, morality dissolves.

One death is a tragedy. A billion is a projection.

And projections do not make us weep.

Albrecht Dürer — *Melencolia I* (1514). A brooding, tedious genius surrounded by instruments — knowledge that does not save the world.

4. “Daunting but Doable”

The European Climate Advisory Board warns of 3°C global heating and describes the situation as “daunting but doable”.

Three degrees is not a tricky policy challenge.

It is lethal heat across large parts of the tropics. It is collapsing food systems. It is geopolitical instability. It is mass displacement.

Yet the tone remains managerial.

Daunting but doable.

Not only is this generation engaged in the greatest act of vandalism ever inflicted upon the lives of our children, it reassures itself with bureaucratic calm.

Psychosis drenched in obscenity.

5. Ice Does Not Negotiate

Consider Antarctica.

The Antarctic Ice Sheet contains enough ice to raise global sea levels by over 58 metres. Research from the Potsdam Climate Institute shows it is not a single tipping element but interacting basins with distinct thresholds. Around 40 percent of West Antarctic ice may already be committed to long-term loss. Parts of East Antarctica are vulnerable at 2–3°C.

This is where the comforting idea of the “model” meets physics.

Once ice shelves collapse and grounding lines retreat, parliamentary debates are irrelevant.

But the real issue is not climate per se. It is power.

Who delays action? Who profits from delay? Who pays the price?

Ice is physics.

Delay is politics.

6. TREASON – Case One

In January, Ireland’s environment minister Darragh O’Brien admitted the country will miss its 2030 climate targets by half.

Isn’t this treason?

In 2026, people will say calling it treason is nuts.

In 2036, won’t people say it was nuts that anyone failed to call it treason?

If you knowingly endanger the stability of your state, the safety of your citizens, the viability of your agriculture and water systems, what word applies?

We are watching governments publicly concede failure in the face of existential threat.

And it is treated as normal.

7. TREASON – Case Two

The UK’s Joint Intelligence Committee warns biodiversity collapse could begin “by 2030 or sooner”, threatening national security, food systems and public health. Yet only a partial version of the assessment is published.

Ecosystem collapse threatens the state itself.

And the public receives a sanitised fragment.

Again, what do we call that?

If the greatest threat to national security in modern history is managed through partial disclosure, is that prudence?

Or is it betrayal?

8. Liberal Media and the Hellish Earth

The Guardian reports on a “hellish hothouse Earth”.

What does “hellish” mean?

In the appendix of Professor Tim Lenton’s work, 2°C implies perhaps two billion deaths over coming decades.

Yet the article sits between lifestyle pieces and football coverage. Most people are “unaware”.

If liberal media truly wanted awareness, it could create it. But that would require risking finances, status and privilege.

And that, it seems, would not do.

Some things never change.

Conclusion: Two Universes

A few things are now certain.

“It” is going to happen. Largely because those in power do not want you to grasp what is going to happen.

When it does, there will be two divergent paths.

In one universe, hatred of the self and of life doubles down. Fear becomes authoritarianism. Collapse becomes extinction.

In the other, love of the self and of life creates rupture. Redemption. Forgiveness. Nonviolent revolution.

If you ask which path it will be, you are asking the wrong question.

The only question is how you want to live your life at the end of the world.

Will you collaborate in slow violence?

Or will you refuse?

Love has no aim other than itself.

And that, in the end, is the only politics that matters.

4 Billion Dead Launch

For 30 years, world leaders have failed to tell the truth and solve the existential climate crisis. We now know that 4 billion people are at risk of being killed.

Across the West, the far right is surging. There’s a general sense that nothing can be done. The question is not whether things will change; the question is who will shape the change when it arrives. Whoever is most prepared will win. And preparation calls for understanding the truth about climate breakdown. Who wins will have a massive impact on whether billions die.

We are a group of citizens who decided to take the arch of history and hand it over to ordinary people, who, guided by iteratively improving the science on the existential climate crisis, will determine the direction of the future, and the destiny of billions of people on the planet. This is a battle between forces of death, forces that seek to destroy our planet at the altar of greed, and forces of life, who will go to any nonviolent lengths, to preserve life.

Join me, Prof Bill McGuire and organiser Zain Haq on March 7th to be a part of this new chapter in history.

Join the Launch Call

Suicide Book Launch

Thank you to everyone who came to Bookhaus in Bristol for my book launch. If you couldn't make it, the tour continues online and in London over the next month. Look forward to seeing you there.

My main message of the event was this: Hobbes would be turning in his grave. Yes, the state may repress those who threaten public order — but there is one exception: when those who run the state themselves become an existential threat to public order through the destruction of the biosphere. Remember a certain trial after 1945. If you want to understand that argument in full, read the new book Suicide.

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