Beautiful Earth

It’s hot as hell out there. Everybody I know is calling it the hottest July in history, and you can just bet August and September are going to top the charts, too. People on TV keep saying el nino kicked the jet stream north, but that tells us what’s going on, not why. They bend over backwards saying it’s not a big deal, but I think they know.
Either something new is happening or it’s not. I like binary decision trees, and I gotta tell you…on this one I’m on the something new side. A couple of years ago, I stacked a cord for the fireplace, but it rotted away unused. Now, I buy four or five logs at a time. That’s plenty, because the next day it’s usually too hot. Once I even went water skiing on Christmas afternoon, great fun, but the sun was merciless. Still, the water was nice and cool.
I’m sorry. I know it’s unpopular, but I’m going to risk it. A lot of people don’t even think it exists, but I chalk all this up to global warming. I used it in my novel, Dawn on Earth, the effect of rising world temperatures on our lives. Days were consistently in the mid ninties, but that wasn’t what made my characters miserable. It never really cooled off, even at night…sounds a lot like what’s been going on around here.
Of course, I had to write in a little conflict. Some people, the ELITE, were comfortably air-conditioned and avoided going outside as a life’s mantra, but you know me. I was all wrapped up in what was happening to the non-elite…the rest of us, and it was devastating to take my reasoning out that far.
With the entire planet challenged by something nobody could really control, I thought we’d probably unite as a single government, and in my novel it worked, providing everyone water and some sort of food, though it was usually only grain. I know, I know…maybe I was overly optomistic, considering how pitifully governments respond these days, but that’s the way I wrote it. It’s FICTION, for God’s sake!
The fun part of letting my imagination roam was describing topographic changes in my hot new world. Of course, sea levels rose tremendously, forcing people to migrate ever farther inland, but rising waters also restored the ancient, shallow sea over what is now the great plains, greatly reducing our food larder. It wasn’t hard to imagine; I was describing the world of the dinosaurs…almost exactly.
Global warming is peculiar territory. Costal storms become more severe, weather inland ferociously erratic, and some places actually get cold, but in the end relentless heat wins…a little like what happened on Venus. It began a lot like Earth, but a runaway greenhouse effect took it all the way to a surface temperature of eight hundred degrees. Water has boiled away completely, and the carbon dioxide atmosphere is heavy enough to crush a human being like a slug.
The arrow points only one way. Polar caps melt, reflecting less heat, fresh water dilutes the sea, killing well-established dynamic currents, and from that point on, everything accellerates. You know, we could be on the first step of a long slide. Nobody has said the words RUNAWAY GREENHOUSE EFFECT yet, but it happened on Venus. Why not here?
Look up at the evening star. It’s beautiful in the growing night, that disaster between us and the sun, but the view from a distance is notoriously deceptive. Some call her our pitiful “Sister Planet,” but I sure hope it doesn’t run in the family, that head-long dash to self-destruction.
Even if it were hell-bent on sharing the fate of its evil twin, our Earth would probably stay beautiful in space for a long time before slowly morphing to a brown and gray thing. Eventually, bright clouds would no longer fill our skies, aggregating instead into a hideous, dirty helmet, but it would still rain…not water, but corrosive acid. Don’t fret; we’d all be dead by then.
Stuff on this subject usually ends saying, “There’s still time,” but I didn’t…too trite and not really my style. I had the naive idea that by showing what could happen, I might change the way people look at things. Truth is, it has…for some, but there’s one significant diffenence they should remember. Venus’ destruction was natural, but what’s happening to us is self-inflicted…kind of a planetary suicide.
In my darker moments, I picture alien archaeologists shuffling around in cooled environmental suits, finding a torn copy of my book that hasn’t burst into flame, and reading it for their report. I can hear one of them saying, “He was right, that poor, dead son-of-a-bitch.” I guess I’ll have to live with that image. I can’t seem to get it out of my mind this summer.

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