PARIS — Okay, enough now. Climate scientists wring their hands but are not yet without hope. America’s Constitution, if fraying, is still intact. Paris is torn up and choked with traffic, but it’s not burning. We can save the world, but we had damned well better get started.

As it turns out, Chicken Little was right; the sky is falling. Particulates poison the atmosphere. And herd impunity allows governments, industry and individuals to ravage what’s left down below. We face the unthinkable if enough sensible people cannot get a grip and take action.

The Ship of Fools, as Plato labeled humanity, is sinking fast. Rather than bail hard and head toward a safe harbor, we gouge yet more holes in the hull. Millions go hungry as a feckless few hoard dwindling food stocks. Each year, more turn violent in desperation.

I took a break from the Mort Report to ponder my last 40 years in the wilderness watching the world fall on its axis. Sorting out thoughts on how we benighted shipmates can get back on course, I realized the answer is embroidered in faux-Latin on my canvas desk chair.

In 1981, when a new breed of “media” executives began sacrificing principle for profit, Paul Theroux’s whimsical son Marcel was studying classics. I asked him to translate a maxim for reporters not willing to play piano in whorehouses: Make the Assholes Pay.

Marcel came up with “Facete Rectos Pagare,” which back then was mostly for laughs. The news business, though flawed, was self-correcting. Profit still depended on credibility. That suffered when competitors called out honest mistakes, let alone blatant lies.

Today, the assholes aren’t paying; the rest of us are. Partisan “news outlets” spew cesspools of falsehoods that enable faithless politicians and tax-averse moguls to replace democracy with small-f fascism. Just hold your nose and reflect on, say, Tucker Carlson.

MORE

PARIS — The Glasgow climate summit, likely humanity’s last shot at averting the unthinkable, is nearly upon us with a tidal wave of harrowing data and a backwash of deluded denial. For a quick look at why the outlook is so troubling, take a paddle up Schitt’s Creek.

One exchange in that incisive Canadian TV series says it all. When her veterinarian flame tells Alexis Rose (the spoiled diva who turns cool) he has a research grant to the Galapagos, she asks: “Can’t we go someplace less spooky and scary, like the Maldives?”

The Galapagos aren’t scary. Neither is Maldives if you pay resort costs — up to $30,000 a night. But the hyper-spooky string of Indian Ocean atolls exports more jihadists per capita than the Mideast or Afghanistan. And it is likely to be the first state lost under rising seas.

Ignorance is hardly bliss. Only informed public pressure can force governments to think beyond short-term political survival and take urgent joint action. Yet too many Alexis Roses tune out what they can’t wear, eat, bed or talk about with friends.

Maldives illustrates why so much has gone wrong since 2009 when President Mohamed Nasheed nearly united world leaders to avert climate collapse, confront Islamist extremism and nudge despots toward democracy. It is a long story; first some background.

COP-26 in Glasgow is the latest “conference of the parties” to a U.N. framework set up in the 1990s. I covered the last big one here in Paris in 2015 and labeled it COPout-21. Most delegates’ pledges dissipated not long after the exhaust clouds from jets that flew them home.

Planned fossil fuel use through 2030, largely in China and India, is twice the level agreed in Paris to limit temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Since then, heat is up by 1.1 degrees. At 2 degrees, scientists say, floods, fires and storms will overwhelm our ecosystem.

Climate is only part of it. Fresh U.S. intelligence and defense estimates warn of massive migration, financial breakdown and armed conflicts over territory, food supply and water. Major powers already face showdowns over resources as ice melts in the Arctic and Antarctic.

All this was unimaginable when I visited Maldives in 1972.

MORE

BAYEUX, France — The Prix Bayeux jury was somewhere between Afghanistan and Gaza, deliberating over war coverage as we do each year, when my phone buzzed news as crucial to the world’s fate as those noisier battles on Normandy beaches up the road a lifetime ago.

With tepid understatement, the Nobel Peace Prize committee cited “increasingly adverse conditions” for newsgathering, as it singled out Maria Ressa, the fearless Filipina who runs Rappler, and Dmitry Muratov, the Russian editor who has buried seven reporters since 2000.

A growing penchant to silence journalists has finally made headlines. In separate responses, both laureates made the same point: If trusted, truthful reporters cannot hold autocrats to account, we are all toast. And we are fast running out of time to react.

Those endless rows of graves near here, dug during my lifespan, make clear what havoc a self-obsessed megalomaniac can wreak. That war killed millions. If we get climate collapse, peaceful coexistence and runaway pandemics wrong, the likely toll defies imagination.

Over a photo of his newsroom, Muratov wrote: “The whole Novaya Gazeta and everyone who worked and works there. Alive and dead. This is their prize.” He started the paper in 1993, helped by Mikhail Gorbachev. His bloodhounds still pursue the culprit who ordered the 2006 poisoning of Anna Polikovskaya, whose Chechnya reporting infuriated Vladimir Putin.

Maria Ressa’s online Rappler has dogged Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines since he took power, fending off 10 arrest orders, brutal harassment and countless death threats. Among independent journalists worldwide, she is Joan of Arc without the political-religious baggage.

They are two among many determined to get the story straight at any cost to keep the rest of us from being blind, deaf — and dumb — as our world spins out of control.

MORE

PARIS — Last week I watched 16 hours of back-to-back Senate and House hearings on Afghanistan in stunned disbelief as Republicans displayed stone stupidity, treacherous truth-twisting, or both at the same time. Most harangued, few questioned. Then there was worse.

Some insightful reporters captured the essence. Mostly, Washington watchdogs snuffled around the surface, hounding the wrong quarry. Overall coverage blamed a doddering old Joe for a shameful debacle of historic proportions because he rejected military advice.

The Afghanistan story reverberates around the world all the louder because so many Americans overlook its implications.

Unless a failsafe “fourth estate” gets stories straight and focuses harsh light on politicians with the morality of rabid jackals, Republicans may soon control Congress and more statehouses. A madman could be back in the White House, unbound by checks or balances.

U.S. forces pulled off a masterful evacuation despite circumstances created by Donald Trump’s abject capitulation. Until Gen. Mark Milley convinced him to delay, he planned to withdraw all troops by Jan. 15, with no evacuation plan and few visas for vulnerable Afghans.

Republicans savaged Biden because a suicide bomber killed 11 Marines, a soldier and sailor. Few of them had lamented losses over the years as U.S. defense contractors amassed fortunes, and American casualties rose steadily to far surpass Osama bin Laden’s 9/11 toll.

Whether or not Americans grasp the enormity of the real debacle, terrorist groups do. This was no carefully planned blitzkrieg behind overwhelming armor and artillery. Ragtag zealots on motorcycles overran the proxy army of a space-age superpower, hardly firing a shot.

Republicans say Biden diminished the United States in its allies’ eyes. In fact, allies see them as the problem: venal politicians who parrot fabulist insanities of a defeated president intent on a creeping coup d’etat. In much of the world, America is scorned and pitied, if not hated.

MORE

WILD OLIVES, France — Whether on battlefields or in backwoods Provence, reality bites up close. “Over the horizon,” America’s catchphrase du jour, smacks of the over-the-rainbow fantasia that little Dorothy imagined on a bad day in Kansas. Red shoes won’t save us.

Timeless groves here face new pests and pestilence, and so do the struggling families who live among them. Olives and people have fed one another around here since Romans built an empire meant to last. This is not breaking news, but it is heartbreaking.

During six decades of reporting, I’ve found the proverbial cup is always part full and part empty. What counts is whether it is being replenished or drained. Because boundless human ingenuity is so seldom matched with human empathy, we are fast nearing the dregs.

In truth, today is glorious. I feel like that New Yorker cartoon guy who ignores a flower-flecked hillside meadow and mutters that the world is crap. Yet CNN drones on in the background, and the Afghan rug by my desk is a map of warring provinces with a tank motif.

Climate collapse and runaway pandemics demand a cohesive global response. Yet reaction to the Afghanistan debacle suggests that America is too wrapped up in itself and misguided by partisan truth-twisting to be of much help. What we don’t know is killing us.

Firsthand facts and ground truth matter less these days when journalists can cover news the way modern armies prefer to fight wars — from a safe distance over the horizon. With new technology, they can get things wrong at the speed of light.

The new tools help. From a distance, smart reporters sensed something suspicious about the Aug. 29 drone strike that killed an aid worker and nine others, including young kids playing around his car. Without leaving their desks, they revealed an accidental tragedy. But still.

A young New York Times tech-equipped sleuth asserts that new methods allow her team to expose travesties that would otherwise go unnoticed. Not really. Reporters on the spot cover “collateral damage” and add in crucial elements about its impact. If they are there.

MORE