Blog December 2019:
Are we cooking the planet?
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I don’t know if you all noticed something curious, with the world climate change follow up sessions [COP] in Madrid this past week… It was broadly ignored.
If you didn’t know it was happening that is not surprising, given that it was almost completely passed over by what is loosely called “the mainstream media”: i.e. radio, TV and newspapers… to the extent that such things still functionally exist. There was some remonstrating about non-compliance and one of the few in depth explorations: an interview with veteran spokesperson Jane Fonda drew a complete blank regarding the rationale for what the interviewer regarded as a panic driven “Consequence Management” programme.
So when I Listened to Antonio Guterres [UNSecGen] making a deeply hedged and fudged plea to signatories in Madrid this week, I couldn’t help wondering if he would have had more impact had he simply said what I have put together below. Now that I am finally liberated from the creative stage of of my [4part] Azanian Quartet… I have had time to explore ALL the dots that I have assembled over the past 25 years: since I started the venture.I have used the result to konstrukt his ‘fairy tale’ response.
I warn you that this is not cool, and I understand why no one wants to present, what may well be an endgame full story. I have however been saying this [assuming it to be fiction] for ten years now on my website; and for longer in blogs… I do not expect you to LIKE! What you read: and sharing it is not an option I want you to take. You are my reader… This is for your eyes only. What I learned from my two-week exposure to Boys Scouts, as a onetime teenager, that helped me survive to become today’s “YES… BOOMER”: was the motto “Be Prepared”.
What follows is what I would have preferred the United Nations Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, to say last week: at the start of the Madrid talkfest… This means that the “quote marks” are imaginary: –
“Including this week’s Albanian earthquake, slightly more than 55% of all Hiroshima scale catastrophic earthquakes, of which we have any record over the past TWO AND A HALF MILLENIA: have happened in the past TWENTY ONE years.
We had more such catastrophic earthquakes this year [2019], for instance, than we recorded through the whole 100 years of the 19th century…. We have gone; over the past few hundred years, from a time when we had one catastrophe level earthquake every 36 YEARS; to one every 1,000 days and then: shortening, shortening, shortening… time spans: To now ONE every NINE days… Within 10 years, at the present rate of seemingly exponential increase it will be: 1 somewhere every 30 minutes.
Now there is obviously something happening there that we can’t do much about: but here’s the problem….
The friction caused by repetitive earthquakes seems set on becoming self-reinforcing: thereby heating up the planet from the inside. This is exacerbated by what researchers at Washington University, supported by MIT, call the “Tanning Oil”… of what would be more loosely called a warm snug canopy of CO2.
So if we don’t do something about this load of CO2 trapping the heat inside our home: we are facing an extinction event: that may well include us.
What the two days could more usefully employed doing then would be to explore what kind of prize money we can give to the first person or organisation that comes up with a ‘fast eating’ method of disposing with CO2 permanently; instead of wasting precious time with Carbon sharing schemes that simply lather more ‘tanning oil’ onto the fast warming planetary system.
So apart from apologising for a clutch of mixed metaphors; and giving congratulations to the doctrinal students concerned, for their METAPHOR OF THE YEAR, that is what I what I recommend we do, over this fast evolving dilemma during these two days.”
End of fairy tale quote.
Do you think that may have got more attention from a deeply distracted world with that scary although factually accurate true statement: than the stifled yawns he did get from yet another round of YAA YA YAA?… His blah blah speech; and the entire exercise in Madrid: barely merited a by-line from the world’s media. He has implicitly failed in his duty… Either because he wants to… or because he does not understand the problem… Which I find to be improbable…
Unless of course, I’m seriously missing something… unspoken… about the current malaise of global disinterest by the political managers in actually managing anything but the consequence of previous inaction.
Frankly; If the world is so perilously close to an apocalyptic moment as he suggests,then it is time to start treating the actual evidence with hugely more respect than is currently happening. [As I’m loading this there is a report of a fatal Volcanic eruption in a place ironically called “White Island”, off New Zealand… I will deal more with volcanos in my following blog].
So: Does the UN need to offer a glittering prize to the person or business that invents a way of eating CO2… FAST? The way Elon Musk offers a prize for the first functional Hyperloop.
Perhaps we are ignoring a critical part of the evidence. Maybe we are so focussed on the smoke and mirrors of Apocryphal rhetoric that we are mistaking the outcome for cause. Worst case: the planet’s leadership understands the problem only too well and has no answer… hence the apparent collapse of initiative amongst them all… and accounting for the “Eat, drink and be merry… For…” mindset that seems at large on the planet.
Of course it may be that the Apocalyptic ‘moment’ already happened 21 years ago: and no one wants to be the first to say so. Naturally that doesn’t include me. So as long as you remember that I write fiction, fiction as you know means imaginery. This means that you can ignore this blog; and call what i’m saying to be an amateur’s figment of the imagination…. after all i am not a kleva scientist; simply a retired economist with a bent for history: And a creative imagination.
Which it was in spades … 21 years ago… At that time, I hypothesised what I called a “Nuclear Triple Double Tap”: a Tambora* scale event, that took place during 1998, underground; and was contained: inside the planet. I speculated then, for fictional purposes, that the resultant ‘pulse’ created a “Ringing” discord in the planet’s natural rhythms: sending shock waves resounding through it… Triggering planet change. The catastrophe enabled me to introduce what is now being called UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME as part of the backstory to my plot.
You’ll remember what has been written on my website, with its symbolic ‘Planet burning’ image, for the past decade: “What if we accidentally disrupted the planet: and the magma is still moving…? Much like the way the coffee keep slopping around in my cup when I inadvertently bump it.” It was always intended to be fiction.
21 years later I have come, with incredulous reluctance, to believe the possibility that we did actually have a culminating, Tambora* scale explosion inside the planet. That it has triggered a self- reinforcing pattern of friction, inside the planet, along all the tectonic boundaries; and that the lathering of tanning oil represented by the mantle of CO2 covering the planet: is creating a pressure cooker effect.
As a poet I would see a metaphor of a planet rubbing its hands in gleeful rage; as it shakes the fleas upon its back. And in the same way that we rub our hands together to warm ourselves via the friction… on a cold winters morning… So through rapidly expanding, almost exponential friction inside the planet, Gaia is thus warming up: and the ice is melting at the bottom of the ocean’s frozen parts.in other words: The planet has become a giant pot-roast in space.
The question that should then have been posed by Antonio Guterres to the assembly and, by extension, WE [the people] was: “We have to find something that feasts on CarbonDioxide. Without the pressure release of lowering CO2… Planet earth may well start to explode: In other words: it will blow… So ask yourself: ‘Where do you want to be when it does’?”
Make my day. Prove to me that I am wrong. That I am still, no more than the ‘tickey-line’ writer of cheap pulp fiction Sci-Fi, that I lay claim to being. Tell me that writing this blog is just a manoeuvre to sell my upcoming work on Amazon… and that i am … whatever.
I certainly hope, fervently, in spite of the evidence… that it is no more than that.
Luvs ya all
!NiK[Dec’19]
*Tambora… See Google for detail. A volcanic explosion [1815 AD] in the former Dutch East Indies that created what many believed was a sign for the “End Times” in Europe. The cause of the damage to both northern Europe, the northern USA and China: was not understood for another 150 years. It will be the subject of a future blog; that will explore the previously ignored consequences of that show of Nature’s inherently brutal response: to our ignorant temerity.
COP25/Google’s Wikipedia is the source for the record of earthquake events… also included was a report from Washington University, and another from Northumbria University.