June 30th, 2006
I had this image in my mind of Deep Ironies arising from some near-simultaneous occurrences in the US the last few days. Here are the events:
- A contingent of scientists are going to show a cautionary presentation to the US Government, highlighting the imminent catastrophic changes to the world's environment
- But the presentation is to be held in Washington DC
- It is raining so hard and the rivers are flooding so high that the presentation may have to be delayed or perhaps canceled
- Gawd, the irony
- After a long period of safety retro-fits and an emotional taking of a deep breath (and probably a reliance on the fact that amorphous blobs of people have short attention spans), NASA is finally ready to launch its aging space shuttle again
- They launch from Florida
- Florida is right in Hurricane Territory
- Bad weather (luckily, of the non-hurricane variety) may prevent the launch of the shuttle
- Above-mentioned bad weather, including more and more hurricanes annually have been attributed to human-induced global warming trends
- Stephen Hawking has been running around America (well, not literally "running", just, um, wheeling around, I guess) pitching the idea that we should all focus our energies on colonizing the Earth's moon and Mars
- I hate to be critical [he lied] but that's not exactly a new concept, Mr. Hawking
- And your reason, that we should do it in case there's some sort of environmental disaster here on Earth, isn't the freshest, either
So it sort of looks like the American government can't communicate to itself the imminent danger of environmental devastation. Nobody needs to be warned that the people of the world (note I did not say, "people of America") are wreaking hell on the planet because the environmental disaster is already upon us. See? If you wait long enough, actions become unnecessary. In this case, the problem prevents you from even hearing people tell you about it. It's sort of like when the telephone gets cut off for non-payment of service: you can think to yourself, "Thank God, at least the collection agencies will stop phoning!"
Right, and to quote Roger Hodgson of Supertramp:
"Too late!"
The prophets (profits) cry
"The island's sinking
Let's take to the sky ..."Oh, but ... so sorry. It looks as though we haven't got enough time to "take to the skies." I mean, we couldn't move even the tiniest of percentages of humans into space, and even then they couldn't maintain themselves without regular supply runs from Earth. Maybe too late even for that: America's launch-pad to the stars—their escape route from destruction from killer weather, if you will—has been cut off by the very thing they might have used it to escape from. The weather has cut off their escape from the weather.
To put it in really unpleasant terms: We strapped Mother Nature down on the slab and have been injecting her with all kinds of toxic crud. We've been holding poison-infused rags to her nose, and using a siphon to force feed waste and carcinogens down her throat. And finally she rears her now-ugly mutated head and bursts the bonds we thought would always hold her. Finally she throws off the laboratory restraints and turns the claws and green drooling sharp-fanged mouth we manufactured for her towards us with a chemical-induced homicidal craze. The monster that once was our mother no longer loves her children; she wants to tear us apart limb from limb to stem our tide of poison and try to secure her own survival. Even a mother can be selfless for only so long.
* * *
I have already discussed this in my rant from May 15th, 2006, The Dog Explosion and the Church of Environmentalism, and it was there that I wondered out loud how much of the global warming was "natural" and how much was human-made. But, since then, a minor epiphany hit me when I suddenly realised, Who Cares? Whether the hurricanes and heat waves are "natural" or whether they are human-induced, we are facing the slow and steady destruction of our infrastructure, society, culture, and eventually even ourselves.
"Too late" or not, we are in some trouble here. Even acknowledging the problem is turning out to be difficult. But we have to do that quickly, because the next steps won't be possible until then. Those next steps?
- Stop producing the poisons
- Develop technologies to protect ourselves from the coming environmental disasters (i.e., find a way to live)
- Develop technologies to clean up what mess we made, and see about reversing the warming trend
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