- Mankind is heading for extiction.
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- There is nothing we can now do about it.
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- Of course, if we'd have listened to those "hippie
types" thirty years ago and paid attention to organisations like Greenpeace
or Friends of the Earth, then things might be different. But we didn't
listen and now we must pay the price for our ignorance, arrogance and stupidity.
Unfortunately most people in the western world are stupid. We ignore anything
we hear or read that doesn't suit us or the lifestyles we envisage for
ourselves. We are running out of oil, a finite rescource, but we still
drive around in gas guzzling SUV's and "Off Road" vehicles.
-
- That's stupid.
-
- Global warming, for years something that was denied by
supposedly "intelligent" politicians and world leaders and still
is by George W Bush and the republican party, is now recognised as a reality.
Still we continue to burn fossil fuels, waste precious energy and allow
industry to continue to poison the already poisonous air.
-
- That's stupid.
-
- Scientists, many of them experts in their field, from
such respected organisations as the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change and NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies have been
telling anyone who would listen that ecologically and environmentally the
world is in deep trouble. But no-one is listening.
That's stupid.
In the last year I have written three articles describing the possible
extinction of the human race through natural disasters, some of which will
be precipitated by global warming. Mega Tsunamis, a supervolcano eruption
and a new Ice Age all pose an immediate threat to the world. No-one listened.
-
- That's stupid.
-
- In my book "The Cassandra Prophecy" published
in 1999, I wrote that "Climate change is accelerating at such an alarming
rate that within the next ten years we will be unable to sustain food production
in the Western world." My evidence for this proposition came not from
some crazed, delusional ideas of an environmental armageddon, or from the
pages of some "conspiracy theory" websites, but from scientific
evidence available to all. Still, nobody listened.
-
- That's stupid.
-
- Recently, a report commissioned by influential Pentagon
defence adviser Andrew Marshall and leaked to the UK's Observer newspaper
concluded that climate change will lead to nuclear war and global catastrophe
that will cost millions, perhaps billions of lives. It stated that global
warming was a far greater threat to the United States and the world than
terrorism. However, the report was suppressed by US defence chiefs Donald
Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz for four months.
-
- That's stupid.
-
- What will it take to make people wake up to the fact
that we are in very serious trouble. Within ten years global warming will
shut down the Gulf Stream, forcing North America, Britain and Northern
Europe into an ice age. We will no longer be able to grow our own food
or breed our own livestock. Nothing grows when the thermometer falls to
minus 50C. In the next four to five years global warming will raise sea
levels to such an extent that major flooding will occur over large parts
of the planet. Violent storms will smash coastal barriers making places
like the Netherlands and parts of low lying areas in the United Kingdom
and coastal areas of the United States uninhabitable.
-
- Mega-droughts will affect the world's major breadbaskets,
including America's Midwest, rising temparatures will force the necessary
evacuation of many of the places currently considered habitable, and by
2020 "catastrophic" shortages of water and energy supply will
become increasingly harder to overcome, plunging the planet into continual
war for control of these vital resources. But is anybody listening?
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- Perhaps May 28th. this year will finally be the time
when the world wakes up to the problems we are all going to face. It is
on this day that Roland Emmerich's new film "The Day After Tommorow"
is released world-wide. Emerich, the producer of the blockbuster "Independence
Day" has made a film that graphically depicts the horrific effects
of global warming. "While aliens were the enemy in Independence Day,
in The Day After Tomorrow, the enemy is us. The film is a nightmare story
not about what could happen but what will happen if global warming worsens
and world leaders look the other way", Emmerich says.
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- And so, in The Day After Tomorrow, tornadoes rip apart
Los Angeles; a snowstorm buries New Delhi; massive hailstones the size
of grapefruit batter Tokyo; a volcano erupts next to the Hollywood sign
in Los Angeles, San Fransisco Bay freezes over and in New York City, the
temperature swings from sweltering to freezing in one day as a massive
200 foot high tidal wave approaches the city at the speed of a jet airliner.
The special effects in the film are said to be "the best ever"
and those that have seen previews say they were "visibly shocked"
by the scale of the destruction and the realisation that the events being
portrayed in the film will happen unless we address the problems of climate
change and global warming.
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- Perhaps, with all the publicity surrounding the film,
those stupid people who deny global warming is a reality will wake up.
George W Bush and his fellow republicans should be forced to sit through
the entire film at least twice. Maybe then they'll be forced to aknowledged
the truth. (I realise that this is difficult for the Bush administration).
Unfortunately though, it may now be too late.
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- © Copyright Ian Gurney March 2004.
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