The world is changing.
It is doing it at such an accelerated pace that a huge portion of the
populace is actually willfully retreating into Dark Age levels of
ignorance. A recent poll showed that
more Americans hold firm to the belief that the world is six thousand years old
and that God created humanity out of a man who got tired of fucking the sheep
and one of his ribs then did ten years ago.
Young western women are campaigning for ‘women’s rights’ like the Hijab
and an end to fast legal access to abortions.
That is so fucked up I can’t even begin to wrap my head around it.
In the last two years the Peterman Glacier in Greenland has
calved ice islands several times larger than Manhattan Island, more than a
third of its floating ice. When they
calculate sea-level rise it is based on the waters rate of expansion due to the
incremental rising of global average temperatures. That’s why the number is always so small; it
totally doesn’t factor in water being
added due to glacial melt. That’s
because when something like the Peterman Glacier calving takes place it is the
loss of ‘floating ice’, which doesn’t actually change the amount of water in
the world’s oceans. Ice is water you see
and it matters not what state it is in, global ocean volume remains the
same. It is the miles and miles of
inland glacial mass that can change the sea-level in more dramatic and
catastrophic ways because it sits on the land and is not a factor on sea-level. Unless it melts.
The scientific community hasn’t worried over much about the
implications of the loss of land-bound glacial mass because they are far more
resilient in the face of our planets climate mood-swings. There is no warm liquid mass beneath them to
weaken their resolve, there are no rising and falling tides to fracture and
corrupt them. They are titans,
unshakeable.
Except, it turns out what happens to one end of a glacial
mass (the floating end) has a pronounced impact on the other end. The Arctic’s land-bound glacial masses are
literally running into the sea, buoyed on hidden rivers of melt-water that have
borrowed themselves through the glacier to the rock beneath. Apparently, scientists totally didn’t see
that one coming. If glacial ice loss
continues at its current rate than every drop of melt water by the end of this
decade will contribute directly to sea-level rise.
This deeply excites me, in an almost sexual way. The apocalypse will not just be a thing of
commerce and politics exclusively; it will remake the surface of the
planet. The Northwest Passage has been
clear for two years running; the ice bridge between Canada and Greenland is
officially no more. Sea’s now exist
where before there was only ice, the old maps now lie and must be re-charted, dragons now haunt their false outlines. The planet is being renewed, we as a species
have pushed it too far and it will compensate by fucking shit up, trying some
new stuff out. And the brave among us
will get to be explorers again, not just in blossoming scientific fields like
genetics or micro-processing or elaborate industrial fabrication techniques, in
the old sense of standing on a boat and staring into black uncharted waters. It is an age meant for someone like me and I
intend to fucking ball.
The present climate-change denial is really just the most
current iteration of the science-denial that has made the established
monotheist religions look stupid since the Renaissance. I am not even going to go there, really
what’s the point? If you subscribe to their dogma, you’re an idiot. There will be no
trotting out of archaic morality and the ‘it’s helpful to not be an ass’
arguments so common to these discussions (which cannot be dignified with the
term ‘debate’ as that term suggests both sides have a valid point,) because
that position is disingenuous at best and self-deceptive the rest (and most) of
the time. Christianity/Judaism/Islamic
world views do not make the world better and they do not make you better. They make you an idiot and a willful one at
that.
The old animists had it right, if there is a singular
creative force in the universe it doesn’t give a rats ass how often you
masturbate, how many abortions you have had or if you feel bad for hurting my
feelings. The world is possessed of a
spirit of its own and when that spirit is not respected it beats your ass
silly. So I congratulate you on your
abortion/gay-sex/stem-cell research, you are a child of the new world and you
are right, deeply and pervasively correct. Anyone that tells you otherwise is a
demonstrable fool. I am writing for you, to you because real debate is only possible when we have kicked the morons out of the room.
It had to be said.
