I don't think that anyone who understands science, reads about science, or has any kind of ability to think rationally really needs to be convinced that things aren't going well right now.
That said, climate change is one thing, yet maybe the doomsday trip is a bit harsh. Life goes on, right? So the farmland turns into desert, so the ocean loses some biodiversity, so a bunch of non-white people on some shitty little island somewhere sink into the water... we'll get over it.
Let's just focus on this: animal populations in a state of ecological escape usually have a hard time ahead of them.
The rabbits eat the grass, make more rabbits, more rabbits eat more grass and make more rabbits. Then there's no grass and a bunch of rabbits die. It's not the hardest math I've ever done.
About 3 billion of the 7 billion people alive right now depend on the aforementioned soon-to-be-desert farmland for food. Nevermind the fish.
The distribution network that allows that food to feed all those people uses a lot of oil. There's enough oil to last forever, yah? Oil will never go up in price, right?
A lot of people are gonna die. We can see it coming, but we it's like telling a pack-a-day smoker with a cough about lung cancer, he just tunes you out and hears blah blah blah.
You know this hoopla over the oil spill down south is going to die down as soon as some dumbshit kid shoots up a school or falls down a well. Attention spans are short.
Did you know the biggest oil spill in history actually was in 1991 in the Persian Gulf? The one down south doesn't even touch it. (*warning: I offer no guarantees that the facts I mention here aren't bullshit. I acknowledge that I am a dilettante.) Mind you, we have no guarantee this one won't persist for a few years. I hear we're also sort of worried about a cataclysmic methane belch blasting the continental shelf with a big greasy shitsmear oil tsunami.
You know who I feel for? You just know that somewhere in the world is some poor sad sack that closed the deal on a Louisiana beachfront home two days before the rig blew. Must suck to be that guy.
The good news is I live in Canada, and I figure we'll continue to have a pretty good life until the water wars and the Chinese invasion of the Americas. Sorry, Bahamas.
I don't know if the actual oil spill sickens me as much as it sickens me to think that there are a bunch of douchebags out there who aren't sickened by it.
Bentley here. Yeah, read an article the other day about what will eventually be viewed as man's feckless attempt to deny or ignore Reality's mandate. Describes the Age as good as anything else. I live in Calgary. Oil Town. Mention the name of Gore around here and a dirty look may well be the least of your worries. Witnessed the huge efforts at self deception by otherwise intelligent people to deny what in the end is just Science and only truly deniable by Scientists. In the End, we live in a time of immense Change and the thought doesn't depress me.
ReplyDeleteHistory may indeed record this as an age of folly, except that it's really going to be remarkable if history is around at all much longer. Looking forward a few hundred years it's not a stretch to imagine a day when all the metals in easy reach of the surface have been mined, the tunnelers and drillbits have rusted, the oceans are swollen with particalized plastic, the methane trapped in the ground has all been released into the atmosphere killing off a good number of the plants and animals... and the planet will maybe recover some of its biodiversity again a few hundred million years down the road? I don't know if I'd call that 'change' so much as 'burnout'.
ReplyDeleteA few hundred million years is the blink of an eye for a planet. Hey, you hear of something called the Ocean Garbage Vortex? Weird, weird shit
ReplyDeleteIt's not quite the blink of an eye, but I agree in principle that it's not an eternity either.
ReplyDeleteYeah, that big island of plastic bottles in the middle of the Pacific, I know of it. The plastics are starting to break down now and the fish are ingesting it.