How
I learned to quit worrying and embrace Global Warming
George Glasser
‘Ain’t any use whinging and whining because all the scientists that governments can hire and all the recycling you can do ain’t going to stop Global Warming anyway.’
Whether you want to believe it or not, climate change is barrelling down on us like a runaway locomotive with a full head of steam. Presently, we are experiencing the rumblings, and possibly in our lifetimes, we will experience a major impact.
However, in the context of Earth history, Global Warming as a catastrophic event is just another episode in a long string of catastrophic events.
For the past twenty-thousand years, with few fluctuations, temperatures and sea levels have been rising steadily. Some ten-thousand ago, at the beginning of the Pleistocene era, the sea level was between 150 meters (450 feet) lower than today.
Only ten thousand-years ago, mastodon, giant sloth, sabre toothed tigers and many other creatures roamed the earth, and today, they remain scattered about only as fossilised bones.
The bottom line is that all life forms on this planet are of a transitory nature – they come and they go, or they evolve and adapt to the changes. In the scheme of things, even man is just another species in a chain of ever evolving life forms originating from the primal ooze.
The extinction of various life forms has been a fact of life since the life appeared on this planet – extinction or evolutionary adaptation is the only constant in the law of nature.
So, what effects will climate change and rising sea levels have? Well, for one, countries tend to build nuclear power plants a few feet above the sea level in coastal regions. So that’s going to be one big unresolvable pollution problem as the seas rise.
The next problem is population displacement because of rising sea levels. In India and China alone there could be several billion people displaced.
Then we have the changing and unpredictable weather patterns which mean potential global food shortages, disruptions in communications, transport of goods, etc., etc.
So, instead of contemplating the dire predictions and falling into a manic depressive state, I began viewing it from an anthropological and evolutionary perspective with a healthy dose of imaginative speculation and dash of metaphysics. For myself, I turned the situation into an epoch Darwinian adventure about survival of the human species.
Subsequently, first, I posed the question to myself: What is the world going to look like after the dust begins to settle in twenty-thousand or so years down the road?
Well, there is little doubt that there will be humans around. Humans are resourceful and omnivorous, predatory creatures. Subsequently, envisioning man surviving as a species is not out of the question.
However, out of necessity, humans will probably revert to hunter-gathers, and more than likely, find themselves forced inland because coastal pollution caused by industrial toxicants polluting the seas, i.e. radioactive pollution.
Also, in the next ten or twenty-thousand years, humans may be only vaguely recognisable as our descendants. If ecozones come to be, several different species of humans could evolve adapted to and dependent upon living in those specific environments.
For me, the most interesting aspect is what sorts of creatures and plant life will emerge. For instance, in regions around abandoned nuclear facilities that will be uninhabitable by humans; however, other animals and plants may well adapt, evolve and thrive as new species.
It’s highly possibly that fascinating new life forms, beyond anyone’s imaginative speculation, will evolve in those toxic ecozones.
Curiously, while humans take the wrap for climate change, we may also insured survival of many plants and animals that in the course of natural evolution would have become extinct anyway. By our ‘interference’, inadvertently, we set about in creating a Noah’s Ark scenario. All one has to do is look around. Humans are responsible for the greatest geographical displacement of life forms than any other creature or event in the Earth’s history.
By the helter-skelter dispersing life forms and gene pools around the globe, as the climate changes, many of those life forms will flourish which may also insure the survival of mankind.
After the dust begins to settle, it is highly possible that man will once again emerge from the shadows to start the creative process all over again.
With Mother Nature’s creative agenda, the most possible scenario is that we are simply doing her bidding in facilitating change – bringing about a new epoch in the history of the planet.
If there is such a thing as reincarnation, I would like to drop in for a visit from time to time – just to see how things are evolving. But in the meantime, when I am out for a walk in the countryside, I tend to take a look around and contemplate how snails would taste with wild garlic in a dock weed and root stew. (ends)
