Fires detected over the past year, 2018-2019: ...Continued from yesterday: Dear Future Cyberchivist: By the year 2019 the world has become too hot. Human's excessive burning of fossil fuels - oil, coal, natural gas - over the last few decades to inexpensively feed our existence such as it is has caused the formation of a layer of carbon gases called greenhouse gases that traps too much heat of the sun in our lower atmosphere. This has subsequently raised the temperature of the earth to a dangerous level.
And while coastal areas and islands in the sea are being ravaged by hurricanes and floods, fires of historic proportions are burning around the world. Over the past few weeks, monster wild fires have been raging across Europe, in France, ...Spain, ...Greece, ...Turkey, ...and Russia. Fires are flaming in the jungles of Indonesia and across the African Savanna. Wildfires are raging in cold places where fires rarely burn: Greenland, Alaska, Siberia, the Arctic Circle. Meanwhile the layer of ice at the top of the world known as the Polar Ice Cap is melting. The sea-ice of the Arctic Ocean is melting. The glaciers, moving frozen rivers of ice in polar regions, are melting. All the ice in the world is melting. And here in the United States of America, my country, while Hurricane Dorian besieges our East Coast (see yesterday's post), our West Coast burst into flames yesterday from a new wild fire in the city of Murrieta, south of Los Angeles in the state of California. 1,000 acres have already been destroyed by that fire. Scientists see this plague of fire as being driven by the earth's rising temperature; but the fires are in turn exacerbating the heating of the earth by releasing more heat-trapping greenhouse gases and killing the trees that help remove those climate-warming gases from the air. And so its a vicious circle: the global warming causes the fires which cause more global warming. But the most tragic and destructive fire currently ravaging the planet is, ironically, not one that has been cause by global warming, but one that has been set by humans. The Amazon, the world's largest tropical rain forest, ...covers much of South America and has been called "The Lungs of the Earth" because its two-million square-miles of cooling trees and plant life release oxygen into the atmosphere, ...and remove carbon dioxide, the heat-trapping greenhouse gas that is a major cause of global warming. The thousands of rivers that flow through the Amazon bring cooling humidity to the planet and rain to the surrounding areas. However in recent years cattle and soybean farmers in the country of Brazil, where most of the Amazon rain forest is located, have been deforesting the Amazon, cutting down the vegetation then burning the area to turn it from jungle to cattle grazing and farmland, ...to feed the world's voracious appetite for beef and soy. Brazil is the world's largest exporter of beef cattle. The United States used to be the world's largest exporter of soy beans, which thrive on the fertile plains of the American West and Midwest. However the current President of the United States of America, .a foolish, greedy, power-hungry rich old man named Donald Trump (see yesterday's post), ...has plunged our country into a reckless trade war with China, to the end that China, the former consumer of a quarter of all soybeans produced in the United States, no longer buys soybeans from our farmers, but has turned to Brazil for its soy bean imports. Subsequently American soy bean farmers are going bankrupt while their fertile fields lie fallow and Brazilian farmers are burning down more of the Amazon rain forest to produce more soy beans to send to China. The fires set in the Amazon are up by 80% this year over previous years and the Amazon is being destroyed at a record-breaking rate.. Scientist warn that if the loss of the Amazon passes a certain threshold it may never recover and will no longer be a rain forest, ... but could become a savanna, a grassy area with few trees. In that case, we're told that the death of the Amazon rain forest would release billions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere that had previously been absorbed by the rain forest vegetation, making the planet even hotter and dryer. And so, dear Future Archivist, that is where we stand today, September 6, 2019. Scientists tell us that if we are to preserve the planet as the green, verdant, life-filled, productive, beautiful gift given to us by our Creator we must act now to clean our atmosphere of fossil fuel emissions, clean our waters of the pollution, plastic and chemicals we've dumped into our rivers and oceans - well, that's another global problem besides the warming - and change our life styles to become better stewards of the Earth. Scientists say this is the moment. Some say it's already too late. Of course, only you of the future know. And yet at this moment in the history of humankind there is still hope on the horizon.. To be continued... References
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/28/climate/fire-amazon-africa-siberia-worldwide.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/23/world/americas/amazon-fire-brazil-bolsonaro.html https://www.vox.com/2019/8/22/20828219/amazon-rainforest-wildfire-photos-fire-greenland https://www.newsweek.com/nasa-images-show-africa-has-five-times-more-wildfires-burning-amazonheres-why-theyre-1456382 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/26/unprecedented-more-than-100-wildfires-burning-in-the-arctic-in-worst-ever-season https://www.mintpressnews.com/MyMPN/goodbye-flying-rivers-amazon-rainforest-drying/ https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-rainforest-experiencing-record-breaking-deforestation-2019-7 https://www.edf.org/climate/will-wildfires-keep-spreading-climate-change
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Dear Future Cyberarchivist who, while sifting through ancient internet postings from bygone centuries in search of the history of humankind, has come across this blog chronicling the events and observations of life in the first quarter of the 21st Century AD: Two years ago I entered in this web log a post about a monstrous hurricane that hit Texas, a coastal state along the Southwestern seaboard of the country where I live, known today as the United States of America. (You may, if you wish and are able to, look up that post, entitled "Hurricane Harvey, 21st Century Behemoth" and dated 9/5/2017). At that time Hurricane Harvey was among the worst natural disasters to the hit our country, and surely the worst, most destructive hurricane, destroying much of the Texas city of Houston. This hurricane was a new weather phenomenon in its size and in that, unlike previous hurricanes, it moved very slowly so that it stayed for days hovering over the city of Houston,
At the time Hurricane Harvey was considered to be the worst hurricane in history - it had been preceded in 2005 by previous record-setting Hurricane Katrina, which devastated the city of New Orleans, and in 2012 by Superstorm Sandy that hit the eastern coastal state of New Jersey - and forecasters pronounced Hurricane Harvey to be a once-in-500-years weather event. But that very same year, 2017, two more equally monstrous hurricanes, Irma and Maria, defied the forecasters and wreaked havoc on the southeastern coastal state of Florida and some nearby islands in the Caribbean Sea and laid waste to the island of Puerto Rico, killing over 3,000 people.
Almost exactly one year later, in early September of 2018, another monster hurricane called Hurricane Florence churned up in the too-warm waters of the Atlantic Ocean and slammed into the south eastern coastal states of North Carolina and South Carolina,
A month later the Florida coast, not yet recovered from the destruction wreaked by the unprecedented storms Irma and Maria from the previous year, was again hit, this time by a a hurricane even more savage than Hurricanes Irma and Maria, a monster from the sea called Hurricane Michael,
...and set a new record for size, strength, and destruction. And one year later, today, September 4, 2019, Hurricane Dorian, a behemoth hurricane every bit as destructive as Hurricane Michael was last year, is churning off the beleaguered south eastern coast of the United States, with predictions that it will make landfall soon. But since its nascence in the Atlantic Ocean several days ago Hurricane Dorian has already laid siege to the Caribbean Island group to the southeast of the United States known as the Bahamas with 185-mile-an-hour winds and rains that have caused terrible devastation and loss of life. "Apocalyptic," "Unprecedented," "Truly catastrophic," "A historic tragedy," are the words that are being used by those who have seen the destruction of Hurricane Dorian to the Bahamas. And yet for the past three years at the end of summer monster storms have been rising up out of the Atlantic Ocean, each one worse than the previous, each one breaking unprecedented records of size, strength, and destruction. And note this, Historian of the Future: we, the people of the planet Earth, know perfectly well the cause of these apocalyptic weather events. For years every reputable scientist on the planet has been reporting that climate change caused by global warming caused by humans' overuse of fossil fuels is the cause of, and will continue to be the cause of, these monster storms. According to scientists bigger, slower, wetter - and consequently stronger, more intense and more destructive - hurricanes are the product of the rising temperatures of the ocean in which they are born. And we know, we absolutely know on this day, September 4, 2019, how to stop this terrible climate trend that we have caused. We even have the the technology to to replace fossil fuels with clean energy sources. But our country, The United States of America, the most powerful country by far on the planet, is currently ruled by foolish old men devoured by greed and personal power, which they put far above the welfare of our nation and our world. These foolish old men refuse to stand up to the obscene wealth and power of the fossil fuel industry because they themselves are in the pockets of the rich men who rule that industry. And so, the worried scientists tell us, year after year the hurricanes will come and they will get worse as the planet warms. And we could stop this. But as of today we are doing nothing. And while this part of the world is being destroyed by wind and water, other parts of the world are being destroyed by fire... To be continued... References:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/02/world/americas/hurricane-dorian-bahamas.html "A Warmer World Makes Hurricanes Wetter and More Intense," https://www.apnews.com/47d8e0bf05354260931de08ad9976a37
I recommend that you see it too, and soon - before everyone else has seen it and starts dishing out the spoilers - because I predict that this is a movie that is going to start picking up steam pretty quick. The plot line follows the chain of events that unwinds when a girl raised in foster homes with no real family marries the man of her dreams,
...whose fortune was built on the board- and card- game industry. The new bride being eager to embrace her husband’s family as her own and for them to embrace her as their own, she gamely goes along with a family tradition that’s sprung on her on her wedding night: Any new person who enters the family must agree to play a game with the family on their first night. However, things being seldom what they seem - in the movies as much as in real life – the young bride, brilliantly played by Australian actress Samara Weaving,
...soon learns that in this game the devil is in the details and that she’s acquired the in-laws from Hell – or at least closely affiliated with the place. From there ensues a scary, splattery, game of cat-and-mouse ― or rather, a dozen cats and one mouse ― that is nonetheless mostly played for laughs. And yet at one point in the movie there is a moment that transcends the horror and comedy when the beleaguered heroine asks her husband how in the world his relatives could do such awful things and he explains that it goes back to their childhoods: "You'll do anything your family says is all right." That line hit me as being so insightful and true that from that point on I started seeing this movie as more than just an escapist romp, but as offering a number of metaphors for real life, among them: - How children can be shaped - even psychologically trapped - to believe and accept just about anything, no matter how awful or absurd. - How hard - sometimes impossible - it is to escape those ties that bind us all, for better or worse, to our families.
I also found themes of:
...and a family selling its collective soul. Well, that could happen, right?
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"Tropical Depression"
by Patti Liszkay Buy it on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BTPN7NYY "Equal And Opposite Reactions"
by Patti Liszkay Buy it on Amazon: http://amzn.to/2xvcgRa or from The Book Loft of German Village, Columbus, Ohio Or check it out at the Columbus Metropolitan Library
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May 2024
I am a traveler just visiting this planet and reporting various and sundry observations,
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