Our Changing World

O.K., my link thingie is apparently broken, or else wordpress.com is fucking around again, changing stuff up that doesn’t need to be changed.  I was going to write about a poem called ‘Look Up’ which I saw on facebook, but without offering you a link to it, that’s not much of a topic.  I liked it because it rhymed and far too few poets do that any more (which, I am more and more convinced, is because they can’t) and it had a consistent meter throughout and it actually made sense, but I actually thought the message of the poem was a bit trite, that we all spend too much time on facebook and staring at our phones and not interacting with other people and it seemed ironic to me that I saw the poem on facebook, which pretty much undermined its entire message.  It’s like watching a TV program about how horrible television is, or calling up a friend to say how much you hate talking on the phone.  The medium is the message so when you use the medium,  you are endorsing the message.

So, I considered switching topics and writing about another thing I saw on facebook, a list of bizarre correlations, completely unrelated things where the charts lined up exactly, like the number of films Nicolas Cage has been in and the number of people who drowned in backyard swimming pools.  Year on year, 99% correlation.  It was comical, but it just stood as proof that correlation is not the same as causation, if you compare thousands of charts, some of them  are going to be identical, they are actually less random than snowflakes, probably because of fewer variables.

So, I’m going to write about the NASA report that all the ice on the western side of Antarctica is going to melt, mostly from below so one huge iceberg is going to plop into the ocean in a few years and there isn’t a goddamned thing anybody can do about it, we’ve already passed the tipping point, pumped too much carbon dioxide into the air, loved our cars too much and voted for too many ignorant, corrupt, oil friendly politicians.  As it melts, the level of the world’s oceans will rise a whopping 4 feet, that’s about a meter and a third, which means we could very well lose Florida, which is a brutal kind of poetic justice as no place on Earth has a higher concentration of global warming denying politicians, and the Seychelles and the Netherlands, which is just fucked up.

I have, of course, a solution.  It may  be too late to stop an iceberg the size of New Zealand from falling into the ocean, but maybe by putting some powerful ships to use, we could noodge it in the direction we would like it to go, i.e. some southern location which could use a massive source of fresh water, put it to good use, like maybe Australia, or Chile’s Atacama Desert, driest place on Earth. 

Of course, it’s massive and I haven’t done the math and  know little about the physics, but it’s size would be somewhat mitigated by the fact that it’s bobbing around in the ocean and it’s going to float one way or another even if left alone.  So, it’s a thought. 

In any event, if the ice shelf’s collapse is inevitable, we need to shift our thinking from how to prevent it to what to do about it.

p.s. can’t add a photo, either.  hope to have this problem fixed tomorrow