The unbelievable number of maltreated fish bodies, which are still being salvaged and disposed of by the ton from the Oder, which has already been maltreated in itself, are all dead. Many are rotting, smelly for sure.

And yet in some scenes it seems as if their innocent corpses wanted to speak to us: complaints about the ecological derailments that led to the catastrophe and the causes of which are so difficult to grasp, about shame and guilt, and also, that above all , about the end.

About mass, simultaneous dying.

Joachim Müller-Jung

Editor in the feuilleton, responsible for the "Nature and Science" department.

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The term catastrophe is closely linked to mass suffering and death, which is why it was used as a matter of course for fish kills from the start.

In any case, it is much more informal than the catastrophe comes across the lips of many commentators when they deal with the extreme drought of the past few days.

Knowing the heat and drought certainly plays a role, and they always come back, even in their extremes.

But that at some point, perhaps in the not too distant future, both could lead to people dying away like fish, en masse and defenseless, is rarely enough to be imagined.

In the film yes, that's clear, also in the literature.

Doomsday fictions are an integral part of western culture.

But in life, in reality?

Astonishingly, even the sciences that systematically deal with the catastrophe of a “hot period” that has already been halfway realized are empirically only vaguely prepared for a mass extinction.

How?

The louder the siren sounded, the easier it was for climate researchers who have warned of the climate apocalypse over the past few decades to risk their reputation – and their credibility.

The end of the world was not a serious scientific scenario.

Now it is over.

Scientists as activists

Scientists like those of the "Scientist Rebellion" protest movement, who chain themselves to bridges or to the gates of banks or industrial headquarters, don't just want to draw attention to the climate crisis.

In view of the escalating reality of global warming, they see themselves on the brink of the greatest possible catastrophe.

This activism, like that of the climate youth movements, is fed from a rich pool of climate science facts and data.

But do the new certainties also justify the academic rebelliousness?

And is the escalation of the crisis into an apocalypse scientifically permissible at all?

That is doubted again and again.

In a notable publication in PNAS, the journal of the American National Academy of Sciences,

A group of leading climate scientists has now clearly stated: The possibility of a global social collapse, even a possible annihilation of humanity as a result of the climate catastrophe, is not only conceivable, but "dangerously unexplored".

In other words: We know very little about the consequences of a maximum catastrophe with global warming of more than five or six degrees.

In recent years, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) itself has increasingly focused on the political climate targets of 1.5 degrees and 2 degrees.

A radical failure of climate policy was therefore not even taken into account in environmental diplomacy.

And the authors also consider the "systemic risks" of the global climate to be criminally underrepresented in previous research work - domino effects,

which could drive the earth's temperature far beyond the previously considered temperature range in four or five generations.

What comes next is formulated clearly enough in the title of the article: "Endgame for the climate", the possible end times.