dear Children of Janus Manhattan '45 : "If CO2 not at 350ppm by 2040, you'll tip us into a runaway disaster"

An Open Letter to my fellow members of the Boomer Generation:

(By 'boomer', I mean roughly all of us born after the initial start of what was to be the Manhattan Project and before the final implementation of the first Test Ban Treaty.)

Some of us, like myself, probably won't be alive when 2040 rolls around - we will never suffer the most severe consequences of our folly.

But we boomers currently rule the world and have done so since news of the 'hockey stick crisis' first hit the public media.

We are the boss in government and in the military, in finance, in intellectual and cultural circles.

We have heard the news, we are intelligent, highly educated people, we rule the world : we have no excuse, no barrier lay before us.

Only our selfish wills.

We are the children of Janus Manhattan '45 .

That janus year in the eternally janus city.

The New York City physicists of the Manhattan nuclear Project claimed that they had successfully bent even the most recalcitrant atoms to do Man's will: the signal triumph of 500 years of the Enlightenment Project.

By contrast, the New York City chemists of the Manhattan penicillin Project had admitted defeat : they had been unable to bend some very recalcitrant atoms into commercially viable synthetic penicillin.

Instead New York City biologists had shown how by working with Nature and not against her, humanity could produce abundant cheap natural penicillin-for-all : postmodern penicillin, Adorno's penicillin.

We boomers were given a choice : on one hand look backwards to the Manhattan nuclear Project with all its top down, anti-democratic secrecy and violence as a model of our relationship with the world and each other.

On the other hand, the Manhattan penicillin Project had involved tiny teams, even single individuals working on kitchen counters, using freely exchanged samples of penicillium spores.

With almost no government monies - often only hostility - they had proven to the rest of a doubting scientific world the clinical and economic value of freely-cooperating humanity and Nature working together around the commensal table.

We boomers had a choice : and some us became the classic boomer image of back to the land environmentalists - we got the message of natural penicillin.

But many others - like Prime Ministers Stephen Harper and Tony Abbott - spurned that trend among boomers, became instead rogue Boomers and drank deep from the tainted Kool-Aid of the myth of the Manhattan nuclear Project.

Now they are driving this planet , like a car with its emission controls removed, off a climatic cliff.

As long as we boomers control most of the world's governments, its wealth and its biggest media outlets, only us can stop them.

My part in this effort - as I see it - is to urge all of us to take a hard look again at the legacy we were left with from Janus Manhattan's twin - warring - Projects in the Fall of 1945 ...