Most publications on sustainability conclude that if humankind continues business as usual biosphere WILL collapse and this WILL have negative counter-effects on humankind. For example, the Summary for Policymakers of the IPCC report on Climate Change and Land (IPCC 2019) uses eleven times the term “will” referring to potential negative consequences of climate change. Similarly, the review of human impacts on biodiversity by Sage (2020) uses more than thirty times the term “will”.

Most of these worrying statements are based on forecastings by models at biosphere scale that make use of numerous assumptions and still have a considerable degree of uncertainty. Therefore, many decision-makers disregard them with skepticism, and the repeated calls for urgent sustainability action (e.g., Ripple et al. 2020, 2021) are failing to influence both decision-makers and general public. Some authors address unsustainability based on running facts, strong evidence (e.g., Bradshaw et al. 2021; Chure et al. 2021; Ripple et al. 2021) but they are the exception, not the rule.

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The use of disputable forecasts of future calamities to call the attention on unsustainability is avoidable, because there already exists a huge amount of evidence on the PRESENT disintegration of the biosphere and on the ALREADY running negative counter-effects on humankind. This is not a forecasted possibility but a tangible reality as summarized in Table 1 and Figures 1 to 4.

The combination of factual data on present conditions with forecasted data is negative, because factual data and forecastings are put in the same level of reliability.

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The report by IPCC (2021) separates present factual situation from forecastings, but factual situation is presented with a technical wording that -again- resembles uncertain forecastings, confuse everybody and convince nobody (likely, very likely, medium confidence, virtually certain, ...).

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