FlamingText

Reasons to not be cheerful

  One of my loose cannon friends just forwarded me a lengthy missive about some impending disaster planned by the sinister forces at work within our government, "something big" it tells me by way of vague and ominous warning, bigger than 9/11, big enough to justify martial law, maybe nuclear big etc. etc. It will be happening later this week, the message assures me, following a round of speculation against the dollar by all the high-level conspirators who know what's coming. He says he's sending it as a warning to his friends in possible target cities, but I suspect he also wants to be able to say "I told you so" if it turns out to be true. Which, to be fair, is also mainly why I'm mentioning it.

  If it all goes down like it's supposed to, while you're reporting to your assigned food-distribution zone to receive your rations and whatever instructions your local commander has for you, you can be thinking "Wow, if only I'd listened to more crackpots on the internet, I might've seen this coming."
Meanwhile I suppose I'll be feeling very smug from inside my barbed wire enclosure at the Pacific Northwest Detention Facility for bloggers.

  A conspiracy theory is a bit like a fetish -- no matter how hot you may get about your own, everyone else's just seems silly. Trilateral Commission? Please. Spare me. Everyone knows that the Anunnaki are running the world from their subterranean base beneath Antarctica.

I don't need conspiracy theories this week in order to feel bummed about the state of the world. Not after reading this article about how the internet trade in endangered species is driving many species closer to extinction because apparently people want to buy chimpanzees just because they can. I don't know what they intend to do with the chimps and tigers and macaques and giraffes once they buy them, but I guess the fact that it's illegal makes it even more appealing for collector types. Forbidden fruit and all that. It's sort of like an exotic animal fetish.

  Note to the people on the buying end of these transactions: If you really think rhino horns make you virile, how come there aren't more rhinos running around? Shouldn't they be breeding like rabbits? Not that I wish to encourage the trade in rabbit-based virility cures. But at least it would make more sense. And there are enough rabbits to go around if it comes to that.

  This proposal to move endangered African animals like elephants and cheetas into the plains states of the U.S. didn't really cheer me up either, even though I support the idea based on its entertainment value alone.

  If the researchers quoted in this article are right, that might not be the only way that North America will come to more closely resemble equatorial Africa in the next century. It seems that most of the models projecting global temperature increases prior to now have been assuming a steady, incremental rise. But what that doesn't take in to account is threshold events like the one happening in Siberia. As the permafrost thaws, huge quantities of trapped methane are released into the atmosphere, thus accelerating global warming by 10% to 25%. Also, because ice reflects a lot of heat, as it melts the exposed ground absorbs even more heat, thus exacerbating warming even further.

So, the upshot is: we're even more fucked than we thought. Also, we're going to need to come with a new name for "permafrost." I propose "impermafrost."

What's next? Plagues of locusts?

I've never really believed that ignorance is bliss, but reading news stories like these is definitely the opposite of bliss.

Sigh.

Posted by flamingbanjo at August 18, 2005 12:51 PM