I see dead people.

A different kind than that kid in the movie saw.  He saw people who were already dead but didn't know it. I see that a major extinction event has just begun and the people who are going to be dead don't know it. In fact, they may not recognize it as an extinction event right away just as no one quite understands that the United States is going to hit a second Great Depression within a year or so.

I do not want to be a purveyor of gloom-and-doom but that's what I see. Right this second the world's hope for the survival of humanity is a desperate hope for a great technological advance that will solve all of the problems we face and that as soon as it is recognized, the entire world will immediately adopt it.  That won't happen.  We have about 600 years of fossil fuel left at today's usage rate.  Since there may be twice that much which has not yet been found, there is probably about 400 years at the ever-increasing rates we are going to use it. And we ARE going to use it.  The entire world is based on a fossil fuel economy and the largest companies, which own the largest governments, are going to make sure we keep them in business. (*1)  This year we will dump ~30 Billion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere.  The Gulf leak has already released the methane equivalent of 30 Billion tonnes of CO2 in just two months.  We had a leap-year for climate change.

Next year we will dump something on the order of ~40 Billion tonnes of CO2 and probably an amount of Methane equivalent to that CO2.  Methane which is now locked in ice but is reverting to it's gaseous state and entering the atmosphere.  The current scientific opinion is that the planet will warm one degree C every time the CO2 in the atmosphere doubles. The oceans are acting as a huge CO2 sink and absorbing almost half the CO2 we throw off, but there are myriad problems with that.  The CO2 makes the ocean more acidic.  Dead (apoxic) zones form; creatures which make shells can't.  Coral is a prime example.  The coral reefs where fish spawn and young fish find shelter are disappearing.

As the water becomes warmer, more methane can revert to gas and escape....while less and less CO2 can be absorbed.  There is a saturation point.  When we reach it, and that will be within ten years or twenty, the oceans will become net EXPORTERS of CO2.  So the atmosphere will get everything we throw into it as well as what the oceans can no longer hold.  That will begin runaway warming.  It is coming.  It has already started to signal. Over a billion people (one in seven)  have no access to safe water. 25,000 a DAY die of hunger.  And we cannot stop it.

I have friends who insist that nothing we puny humans can ever do could affect the earth. That volcanoes and ruminants create more Methane and CO2 than people and that the extra CO2 and a few degrees of warming is actually GOOD for plants and humans.  It isn't.  We are a product of evolution just as every other plant and animal on earth.  We evolved to fill a niche - the plants, which photosynthesize sunlight and CO2 and give off oxygen as a waste product couldn't get rid of their waste oxygen until and we came along and started metabolizing oxygen and giving off CO2 as a waste product.  That was a good symbiotic arrangement and worked well until we became the dominant lifeform on the planet. As of today, ONE MORE DEGREE of average warming will destroy humanity and that degree will come within the time period of eighteen months minimum to 8 years maximum.

There are now enough of us that problems are starting to arise simply by our numbers. To feed all these people we need to grow more food.  We are only growing as much as we are now by adding huge amounts of fertilizer which runs off and pollutes lakes, streams and the ocean.  But we can't stop.  We need to grow even MORE. That requires more energy and more fertilizer and more water.  But there isn't any more water.  The Hydrological cycle is well-established now, but we have no idea what the hydrological cycle looks like when the oceans begin exporting CO2 with water vapor and causing the planet to warm even more. As of today, ONE MORE DEGREE of average warming will destroy humanity and that degree will come within the time period of eighteen months minimum to 8 years maximum.

We still breathe oxygen and so we need a continuing supply of it.  We are destroying the plants which make our oxygen. We are losing 80,000 square miles of arable land a year to topsoil runoff, desertification, and by clear cutting forests and rain forests.  We will have eliminated our oxygen production system in ~275 years at the present rate of loss.  A better estimate is that we will be out of food, water, fish, oxygen and hope by about 2034.

Let me talk politics for a second. The two primary American parties ought to be called what they are.  The two Washington mafia families.  Neither one of them give a good Goddamn about Americans.  Why are all our jobs in China and India?  Why were Americans sold bad mortgages and are now losing a million homes a month?  Who is cooking the books to make it look like we are out if the recession when we are going into a second great depression?  Why are we paying Taliban warlords in Afghanistan?  Over 8 years and we are losing. WE ARE LOSING!  GET OUT!  WE ARE LOSING OUR OWN COUNTRY TO FOREIGN DEBT, AMERICAN CRIMINAL CORPORATIONS AND A FAILED GOVERNMENT!

What happens when a bad (Dubya Bush) government is succeeded by what we all hoped was a honest turn-around had been depressing?  There has been no 'change we can believe in'.  There has been no change of direction.  There has been nothing good at all...all of the Patriot Act nonsense is still being used and the President seems to be someone who might be doing a better job as the mayor of Chicago.  What the electorate is going to do is begin electicing radicals and it almost doesn't matter HOW radical.  Because we want change and the as-is government we elected to change it isn't changing anything.  And, after November, if a LOT of things aren't changed in an immediate and dramatic way. we will elect MORE radicals in 2012.  That's just human nature. We do what we have to do to get the message across. That may require anothe American Revolution.  I don't know.  But I do know that running circles in congress isn't fooling anyone anymore.

(*1) http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/science/recentac.html

Follow me at http://drtom.posterous.com\ and my brilliant and tolerant friend at http://planetearthandhumanity.blogspot.com/

"No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms."
- President Thomas Jefferson

"The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance." - Cicero - 55 BC

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