angels bowling in heaven

Today was the first thunderstorm I've seen since my childhood. Remember sitting with your mom or dad when the lights went out and drinking hot chocolate while counting seconds in between flash, and BOOM!...? That was pretty much me today. Couldn't sleep and was watching a movie when all of a sudden this huge crash above my head just rocked my socks off, and I looked out my window to see mean grey clouds rolling over head. All my neighbors were coming out onto their porch to watch, but just my luck, my apartment faces the opposite direction of where the lightning seemed to be. All I saw was a flash of slightly whiter light o nce in a while, whereupon I'd start counting. The closest was two miles away. That one was scary, because maybe a minute later I heard sirens start going, and I swear my heart took off.

On the brighter side, someone's internet connection likes me, considering I was able to get online at home today for the first time in AGES!

You know today scared me a lot. I've been reading about global warming theories and such, and the idea that all the atmospheric conditions required to precipitate an apocalyptic weather event are present and accounted for NOW has me looking at every raindrop. I know I'm being a bit alarmist at best, completely ridiculous at worst. But it still scares me. I mean, we've known long enough that our actions affect our environment, and have been for much longer than we really realize. We've taken steps, maybe steps big enough to affect the shitpile we've made for ourselves, but A) is it enough, B) can we keep it up without bringing our stupid human ambitions into it (obviously not, if the Bush administration is any example of the future of the human race), and C) have those steps come too late anyway?

Let me give you a synopsis of a book I read a little while ago (this is almost all I can think about lately and most of what I talk about so skip it if I've told you already). It's about the environmental study, the results of which inspired the movie The Day After Tomorrow. All amateur movie critics who hated that movie can just hold their tongue, because this isn't about the movie, it's about the theory behind the movie.

Basically, the book is about how the constantly record-breaking temperatures each season is evidence of a developing pattern of stronger weather. The stronger storms we see each season, the record-hot summers (2005, the hottest year ever recorded), and frequency and unprecedented strength of natural disasters are evidence of a coming climate shift and are caused by higher levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, which in turn are being pumped out of our cars, factories and industrial endeavors. In short the theory goes, we pump greenhouse gases into the earth's atmosphere through the burning of fossil feuls, which traps sun rays and heats up the atmosphere. As each year that passes gets hotter and hotter, the polar ice caps melt at an alarming rate. Glaciers are disappearing, polar habitats are vanishing, and ice shelfs so big they form land features visible from space are breaking away because they're melting. If we were continue as we do today for twenty five years, Antarctica will present a vastly different face, as the Larsen B ice shelf which has already broken away from the rest of the ice at the southern pole melts and melts. All this melting ice is pumping tons and tons of fresh water into the oceans of the world, fragile ecosystems that depend on chemical balance and temperature among other things to keep stable.

This is stuff most of us know, and think about and if it isn't, well Al Gore's new documentary will make you think about it, if you decide to watch it (which you should, in my opinion). This is where the theory begins that The Day After Tomorrow is based on. Apparently, all this fresh water in the oceans will dilute the salty water to an extreme degree, and possibly disrupt the North Atlantic Current, an oceanic current that runs from Florida all the way up to Greenland, and over to Atlantic Europe and back down again. It will cause the current to reverse, bringing not tropical warmth to the northern reaches, but instead polar cold to some of the most populated areas in North America. The concept is that weather fronts will stream down from the arctic bringing rain, sleet, snow, and ultimately extreme cold. A climate shift will occur, thrusting most of the northern hemisphere into another Ice Age, which will last for (depending on, among other things, which season it happens in) for either thousands or millions of years.

Ok, you go, Alleah learned that from listening to the freakin dialogue in that stupid weather movie. But the book goes into detail about how shifts like that which is described HAVE happened before and recently, geologically speaking. In the past ten thousand years in fact. It cites archaelogical evidence lending credibility to this theory, facts like the Egyptian Sphinx being much older than previously though because of the discovery of water damage at the base that places the date of it's construction at something like ten thousand years ago at a time when the climate of the area could possibly have sustained such phenomena. This means that there was a civilization that lived ten thousand years ago that had the means to build a structure that still baffles the engineers of today. And from other isolated archaelogical finds (for example a spear with a head made of steel, dated from a time during the Bronze Age), the evidence of ocean-venturing humans taking voyages out of sight of land (requiring skills of navigation, and obviously communication) thousands of years before it was previously thought our ancestors figured out how to float, and mythology that is now being reaffirmed by scientific findings, experts are deducing that we must have been WAY smarter way before we believed we were.

So what happened to child-prodigy-homo sapiens? Where did this super-intelligient civilization go? Well, judging from chemical analysis of layers of ice in polar ice shelfs (which behaves in a way similar to the layers of earth in a canyon, trapping atmospheric elements like carbon dioxide in the snow falling that turns into packed ice) these overdeveloped humans were living at a time the last climate dip occured. They seem to have been destroyed by the onslaught of the last Ice Age.

So how exactly does the climate shift happen? According the the authors of this Doomsday Book, the first few conditions needed for a global superstorm are in place. Rising CO2 levels result in trapped greenhouse gases, resulting in the overheating of the earth. Now if these elements combined to create a "warm snap" as the book calls it--weather warm enough to heat up the Arctic Ocean by just a few degrees. All this heat will trap cold air at the pole. The fresh water flowing into the Arctic Ocean will take on even more heat and warm the Arctic Ocean further. This is where the North Atlantic Current reverses, swinging south, bringing with it, all of the super-cooled air down from the pole in a vicious weather front. The warmed ocean combined with super cool air in the stratosphere will create an imbalance, causing a storm so intense, it would rage for weeks, bringing unprecedented weather conditions to areas completely unprepared for them. The system (or systems, possibly) would bring weeks of snow, and intense arctic cold. The storm would rage on until the imbalance that created was restored (that is until the oceans cool enough for the reversed current to resume it's normal pattern), and by that time, so much snow would have been dumped on the Northern Hemisphere, it would cause a dramatic change in how much sunlight was reflected away from the earth, which would cause worldwide temperatures to drop dramatically. If this storm occurs in summertime, there's a chance the snow might melt, depending on how much has been dropped and how tightly it's packed down already. Given enough tightly packed snow that forms into ice, a cooling trend would start. Remember in geological terms a trend might last anywhere from centuries to millenia. If this superstorm occured in the Northern Hemisphere's winter, and the sun didn't get enough light and warmth to the earth's surface to melt the ice and snow in the next years, humanity would be looking at a lifetime of ice, if we survived at all.

For this superstorm to even occur, it needs enough water vapor rising off the superheated oceans, combined with super-cool air from the stratosphere, and needs to become so large, it's fed simultaneously by intense arctic cold, and tropical heat. Judging from the strength of the storms we see each year, this is beginning to look even more possible than ever before. In my lifetime so far, the world has seen the worst storms in mankind's recorded history. Each year, there's a new "Hottest;" each hurricane flaunts the "highest wind speed ever recorded." With natural disasters growing ever more disastrous, other signs pop up and combine to make a sickening point.

Each period of the Earth's history, (Cretaceous, etc) ended with a massive extinction level event. Ice-Age-heralding superstorms freezing mammoths instantaneously, and comets smashing into a fragile ecosystem causing the extinction of the greatest predators the world has ever seen. Each extinction event has been preceded by a period of decline, most of them millions of years long. If we are within a quarter century of the next extinction level event, than it sheds a chilling light of comparison on our past one hundred years. The pollution and grit we've been sending into the atmosphere since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, is eerily reminiscient of the dust and choking air pollution sent wheeling into the atmosphere by the comet that claimed the lives of the dinosaurs. To quote the occasionally morbid authors of this book, mankind is becoming it's own extinction event.

We've always arrogantly considered ourselves our own worst enemy. Aliens? Asteroids? Lucifer and all the temptaion he can throw at you? Nothing compared to the valour, the ingenuity, the salvation of faith the human race can dredge up--or at least according to the movies. The only thing we've never been able to come up with an answer to is our own folly, our own greed, our own ambition and lust, and envy, our ostrich-like avoidance of true problems until our problems come right up to us and demand to be addressed.

Well, now we have the proof, don't we? Archaelogical, metereological, geological, incontrovertible proof that we are standing on the edge of the abyss, staring at the demise of our species, a fate we determined for ourselves.






Or not...

In true, ever-redeemable human fashion, the authors of this apocalyptic book give the reader an out. They say, 'come on if this is a decline preceeding our extinction, it's been going on for three million years' and 'these ice ages have happened before and probably will again in the billions of years the earth has left in her life, with or without us, so how could this one be all our fault?'

And this is true. But no matter what's true, we have to live with the fact, that we know these things now, and what little we're doing to try and prevent it is never going to be enough. If the science and the theory is correct, we'll all know within our lifetimes. So are we going to sit back and find out if we win or lose? Or are we going to at least try and make the time we have left (for each of us is constantly racing against their own silent, terminal alarm clock) count for something? Why should we put up with a cretin politician leading us into danger for what? A resource that is, in it's own way helping to bring about the end of mankind?

...

So I reread this. It sounds like an anarchist, uninformed pontification. But I like it. I mean, reading this book really scared me deep down. Down in a place more primal than anything I experience even once in a while. I mean this goes beyond societal convention, beyond civilization itself, beyond even the basis of human interaction. This is about the one thing every human has, every human in history has had: our planet. Our home. Our modest ball of molten rock is a beautiful accident, Our Mother Earth by virtue of nothing more miraculous than a fortuitous happenstance of the right size mass being the right distance from the right size star; made fertile by the ironic incident of a massive massive asteroid smashing into it, forming a crater so large, we now call it the Pacific Ocean, and then miraculously staying with the Earth to become what we know as the moon, a presence which both comforts us on a primal level and makes it possible for life as we know it to continue, by regulating the tides.

Now that's a pretty lucky accident, don't you think?

So why does humankind, in it's infinite arrogance think it has the right to fuck with something like that?