DENIAL AIN’T A RIVER IN AFRICA

Riverside Morning in Amarna – Egyptian Nile

 DENIAL AIN’T A RIVER IN AFRICA

10 Ways Mother Earth Will Strike Back If We Don’t Stop Our Wanton Destruction of the Environment By Scott Thill, Alternet, March 20, 2010.

Thanks to perfectly timed, premeditated reality assassinations like so-called ClimateGate, nearly half of Americans may now believe that the various threats of climate change are exaggerated. But there is good news: They’re on the wrong side of history and science, and Earth will still get the last laugh on all of them, and us for that matter.

We could stave off some of the more egregious probabilities of extinction, if we acted now to limit global warming’s inexorable rise to 2 degrees. But that means a determined destruction of the status quo, and that’s always messy for those who like things just the way they are. But they’ll still get theirs. Here’s how: 

1. Envirogees: Climate refugees (envirogees, as I call them) could hit 50 million this year and explode to 150 million over the next 50. Hordes will be turned out of their environmentally sensitive homes in China, India, the United States and elsewhere and set to roam (migrate). They will end in the backyards of disgruntled citizens who scream about things in their backyards. If you think immigration is a problem now, just wait until Mother Earth starts cleaning house.

2. Dead Zones: Hypoxic oceans and lakes, known as dead zones are increasing in frequency, making climate change worse, no matter the prime cause, as if there could ever be such a thing. From shrinking the sex organs of our planet’s fish to fucking up its food chain and escalating the ocean’s nitrous oxide emissions, dead zones are deep threats More nitrous oxide, a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, means more ozone depletion, which means more cancer, crop depletion and much worse. 

3. Rising Tides: Those who live near oceans will be busy fleeing the rising tide.

In 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fourth Assessment Report prophesied that global warming would increase sea levels by 190-580 millimeters by 2100. More recent research has doubled the bar to an upper limit of two meters. Which probably means that in another few years, the already catastrophic limit will be raised again, perhaps by another 100 percent, at which point there won’t be much point in measuring anything at all. Coastal metropoles like Los Angeles, Miami, London, Sydney and others will literally be drowning in data.

4. Fart Apocalypse! Methane, like nitrous oxide, is a killer greenhouse gas. It smells like the worst crap. Now imagine being choked by it as it belches from the oceans in a toxic feedback loop and dominates the atmosphere. It happened in a Triassic extinction event, scarily known as the Great Dying. It could be happening again, as permafrost melts and farts methane into sea and sky. Whether it’s factory beef farming or melting permafrost, the threat remains the same. Earth has serious gas and methane may stink up the future.

5. Droughts and Desertification:

Drought and desertification are surely the least glamorous ravages of global warming, but they are immediate. Parched rivers and declining precipitation, especially in once-fertile regions in America, India, China, Africa and elsewhere, are fueling everything from crop failure to gender inequality and “famine marriages.” If you think climate change is going to bring more water your way instead of less, I’ve got a subprime condo in Australia I’d like to sell you. It’s hot!

6. Ice Age Cometh? It’s hard for deniers tiny brains to comprehend that catastrophic climate change could simultaneously feature both deep freezes and ferocious firestorms. (They just can’t figure out why snow won’t make the words “global warming” go away.) The first decade of this still-new century was the hottest on record, yet our recent winter was wetter and colder than average. That dynamic flux is central to global warming, at least for now, as changing atmospheric flows remake the environmental map of the world. What we end up with could be another ice age, at least for some parts of the. It happened after the Medieval Warm Period, and it can happen again. 

7. Deforest Dystopia: What’s as bad as global carbon dioxide emissions from planes, trains and automobiles? Deforestation, accounting for 20 percent of the CO2, currently at an all-time high, belched into the air every year. Cutting down forests, which are carbon sinks, in order to build wood and paper crap like the Wall Street Journal is an unclassifiable kind of dumb. Yet we do it every year. At best, we may kill off our great forests, as well as our way of life. At worst, climate change turns trees from carbon sinks to emitters. And then deniers truly won’t be able to see the forests for the trees, because there won’t be any left. RELATED: MARIJUANA PAPERS – industrial hemp produces four times the yield on the same acre as pulp forest at less cost, and is a far better carbon sink, NOT a polluter.  Get the facts.

8. Magnetic Mourning: Earth’s protective magnetic field is 250 million years older than previously thought. Now a ripe age of 3.5 billion years, our magnetic field could be weakening, and that could turn us into Mars, or even lead to the type of geomagnetic reversal that terrorizes audiences in Roland Emmerich’s disaster porn movie, 2012. What’s this got to do with global warming? Some scientists believe that an already weakening magnetic field is causing global warming, but it’s probably only a matter of time before that is flipped: What does screwing with a planet’s stable temperature and atmospheric flows do to the Earth’s core? Who wants to find out? 

9. Give Us Demographics or Give Us Death! Demographics are against the deniers as well. The median age of network and cable viewers grows older, as those outlets avoid covering global warming or, like Fox News, glorify the deniers. Denier campaigns are led by global warming’s future losers, who eventually must bow to reality. Last year, ad revenue for newspapers and networks continued to decline, while it increased online, where the diversity of opinion and information on matters of great importance like global warming is much greater. Only Fox News survived the old media bloodbath, but its viewers are continually dumber than everyone else. The trend is clear: as global warming wears on, more evidence piles up, and more aging and irrelevant skeptics fall by the wayside. Now that climate-change believers in the White House are teaming up with Hollywood to spread the word, you can practically hear the skeptics aging by the minute. 

10. Cosmological Constant: Science-minded world citizens share one major commonality with deniers: the planet will outlive us, no matter what happens.  Now we must evolve enough to realize that no intelligent design can save us, that we’re lucky to be spinning on a green and blue rock through the void of space.

It’s just a question of time, which is ridiculous if you think about it: We wouldn’t even understand time were it not for the gravitational ballet of our solar system. But here we are, at the dawn of the 21st century, trying to avoid the revelation that we are not God’s lucky children, but Earth’s lucky children, and we should be taking much better care of our sandbox. Or else.  READ MORE: http://www.alternet.org/environment/146080/10_ways_mother_earth_will_strike_back_if_we_don%27t_stop_our_wanton_destruction_of_the_environment?page=3

 

The Wages of Walmart.

BORDER BADDIES

“Mexican criminals are just following the money and there’s a whole lot of money to be made selling drugs to American addicts who will pay anything for a “fix”. The war on drugs is killing a lot of Mexicans and it’s obviously not stopping drug addiction in the U.S. judging by the number of prisoners convicted of drug related crimes. There’s not a wall gonna stop the vendors when the demand is so voracious. Drug related crimes have created an entire industry, which includes our prison system. Seems like we could be sending our kids to college instead of to prison — If drugs were legalized in the U.S., the drug cartels would have to go back to selling Chicklets on the street.” – Tana C. Williams