The beginnings
Equilibrium? In nature? Forget it. The only “thing” that ever is in equilibrium is nothing. I can't point definitively to our world heating up due to anthropomorphic changes, changes like this have happened in the past. But to give you a feel of how things “happened”, we have to look at global warming, and we have to look off-planet for the reason.
The following are excerpts from a hand-printed manuscript found thirty years ago, and what were written approximately fifty years ago, just prior to the upheaval that changed our world....
A word of warning people, I am not a straight thinker, I am shotgun and all over, so bear that in mind as you follow this. We have a number of interlocking causes, and while you may be comfortable trying to delineate one cause and then the next in nice neat descriptions and chapters, it ain't a gonna happen here. Each reinforces the other and we'll be bouncing back and for hither and yon as we look at them and the causes of our society's crash. Nothing ever happens in a straight line. So hang onto your butts, let's ride.
- According to our government, there was one cause for all our problems, global wamring caused by man spewing millions of tons of Carbon into the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide is a 'greenhouse gas', one that traps energy radiating from the earth and doesn't allow it to dissipate into space. So the earth warmed up, and the ice caps melted and we flooded ourselves out of house and home. But that's only part of the story.
Global warming did happen, and we did flood out of house and home anything that was below two hundred feet or less above mean sea level of 1980. We lost a LOT of land, approximately 4% of our land surface, that doesn't sound like much, but most of that was prime farming grounds and major seaports. We lost two states too, Louisiana and Florida, both are now mostly one hundred feet under water, with only a bare section of each still dry.... relatively. The coasts moved inland up to two hundred miles in the case of the Mississippi river, and Dallas is now a near-coastal town.
Everything happened a lot faster than people thought, and that's because of positive feedback. Watch an ice cube melt some time. At first it barely looks to be affected, but as the ice melts there is less of it to maintain itself and it falls apart ever faster until it finally disappears. Same thing happened to the ice caps, once they reach a certain point, that was all she wrote and in twenty years they were gone.
Temperature at this time rose about ten degrees on the average in the area beyond sixty degrees north and south latitude. Temperature increases were lower closer to the equator, about three to four degrees celsius, but that's simply because they were already warm, and heat affects the coldest spots the most. This change created the huge superstorms that devastated much of Europe and Asia, causing food shortages in a world already populated beyond what the earth could sustain.
Wars broke out over food, and the world population thinned itself some that way. This disruption in people caused further troubles as it gave disease a foothold, and we had a tremendous series of pandemics that swept over the world, illnesses that did not respond to the antibiotics available. The first pandemic, “Milton's plague”, killed four percent of the world population in eight months, a testament to the virulent airborne pathogen. It's extreme mutability was mankind's savior, as it disappeared as quickly as it appeared, evolving back into a virus that affected only birds. However the high death rate in some areas allowed 'old friends' like cholera to reappear and rage in pockets of humanity.
The following are excerpts from a hand-printed manuscript found thirty years ago, and what were written approximately fifty years ago, just prior to the upheaval that changed our world....
A word of warning people, I am not a straight thinker, I am shotgun and all over, so bear that in mind as you follow this. We have a number of interlocking causes, and while you may be comfortable trying to delineate one cause and then the next in nice neat descriptions and chapters, it ain't a gonna happen here. Each reinforces the other and we'll be bouncing back and for hither and yon as we look at them and the causes of our society's crash. Nothing ever happens in a straight line. So hang onto your butts, let's ride.
- According to our government, there was one cause for all our problems, global wamring caused by man spewing millions of tons of Carbon into the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide is a 'greenhouse gas', one that traps energy radiating from the earth and doesn't allow it to dissipate into space. So the earth warmed up, and the ice caps melted and we flooded ourselves out of house and home. But that's only part of the story.
Global warming did happen, and we did flood out of house and home anything that was below two hundred feet or less above mean sea level of 1980. We lost a LOT of land, approximately 4% of our land surface, that doesn't sound like much, but most of that was prime farming grounds and major seaports. We lost two states too, Louisiana and Florida, both are now mostly one hundred feet under water, with only a bare section of each still dry.... relatively. The coasts moved inland up to two hundred miles in the case of the Mississippi river, and Dallas is now a near-coastal town.
Everything happened a lot faster than people thought, and that's because of positive feedback. Watch an ice cube melt some time. At first it barely looks to be affected, but as the ice melts there is less of it to maintain itself and it falls apart ever faster until it finally disappears. Same thing happened to the ice caps, once they reach a certain point, that was all she wrote and in twenty years they were gone.
Temperature at this time rose about ten degrees on the average in the area beyond sixty degrees north and south latitude. Temperature increases were lower closer to the equator, about three to four degrees celsius, but that's simply because they were already warm, and heat affects the coldest spots the most. This change created the huge superstorms that devastated much of Europe and Asia, causing food shortages in a world already populated beyond what the earth could sustain.
Wars broke out over food, and the world population thinned itself some that way. This disruption in people caused further troubles as it gave disease a foothold, and we had a tremendous series of pandemics that swept over the world, illnesses that did not respond to the antibiotics available. The first pandemic, “Milton's plague”, killed four percent of the world population in eight months, a testament to the virulent airborne pathogen. It's extreme mutability was mankind's savior, as it disappeared as quickly as it appeared, evolving back into a virus that affected only birds. However the high death rate in some areas allowed 'old friends' like cholera to reappear and rage in pockets of humanity.
posted by JD at
9:09:00 PM
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