THE SIXTH EXTINCTION

 

There have been five extinction events in the history of the earth. Three of them took place over hundreds of thousands of years and were the result of changing climate, one resulted from a volcanic eruption, and one from an asteroid strike.

   

Elizabeth Kolbert’s book The Sixth Extinction documents the loss of birds, animals, and sea life taking place at an extreme rate.  

 

Kolbert argues that we are in the midst of an extinction event caused by climate change.   She only deals peripherally with the human causation resulting in climate change, instead documenting the extinction of life taking place across the globe.

 

Undoubtedly we are past the point of arresting climate change.  There was a time we could have prevented this, but we did not have the resolve.   We are now seeing only the earliest extreme weather events that are a roadmap of things to come.  

 

We are at a point where the climates change is self-sustaining.   As the Greenland ice cap and the arctic ice melt, tundra buried for millions of years is emerging and emitting carbon diode which adds to the greenhouse effect increasing global temperature, increasing the melting rate.  It is not beyond credulity that within the next one hundred years the human race could be a nocturnal species.

  

I am not worried about climate change, because creative scientists on the upper end of the IQ scale will drag the rest of us into a sustainable environment.   Though we may have a massive extinction event of plants and animals in our familiar environment, the human race will be ok.    

 

The elephant in the room is not climate.   Russia has 5,977 nuclear warheads; the US 5,428; France 290; China 350; UK 225; Israel 90; Pakistan 165; India 160; North Kores 20.  

A total of 12,705 nuclear warheads, each one capable of mass destruction, exist in the hands, and at the whim of a few men. 

 

Think Donald Trump!

The sixth extinction 

 

The human race is not responsible enough to control this kind of apocalyptic power.  The term Mutually Assured Destruction is a prediction, not a deterrent.

FIRE AND FURY

LIKE THE WORLD HAS NEVER KNOWN!

There have been five major extinctions charted through the geological record.   That the sixth extinction awaits somewhere in the future is not a question but fact.   Whether that event results from an asteroid impacting the earth or the moon; or the sun boiling away our atmosphere leaving the earth like its sister planet Mars; or a cataclysmic volcanic event…    The question is not if, but when and how. 

There is a new scenario to add to the mix.    3.2 million years ago, a creature came down from the trees and found it could grasp a stick in its tactile hands and beat the brains out of other animals and creatures like itself. 

The 1.6% genetic difference between human and its closest relative in the great ape family allowed development of a creature that has been able to bring most animal groups to the verge of extinction, destroy the rain forest, pollute the rivers and lakes and oceans of the world and contaminate the very air that sustains life on earth.

The earth was able to adjust to man’s destruction for 3 million years.   Then in the early 1900’s, only 100 years ago, the population of man exceeded one billion: thirty years later two billion, thirty years later four billion… five billion, six billion, seven billion; and by 2050 the world human population is charted to reach nine billion.    The ability of the earth to support the consumption of food, water and natural resources required by this human virus is finite.

Only seventy years ago, in the 1940’s man traded the stick in his hand for a nuclear bomb.  Now instantaneous mass destruction brought on by human error or madness is possible.  

For sixty years the sanest among the race have held the reigns on nuclear destruction while building a nuclear arsenal capable of destroying the entire earth seven times over.   

The fear has always been that at some point in the future this power would fall into the hands of a person or persons unstable enough to pull the trigger: fire and fury like the world has never seen.

Seventy-two years later, on the anniversary of the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we have two psychotic narcissists being goaded by their minions to unleash Shiva the destroyer of worlds – not understanding that the world they will destroy is their own.

PISS ON ‘EM

Many years ago my wife and I moved into an abandon farm house buried deep in the Maine woods.   We had no electricity, sewerage or running water.  We carried our water from the stream behind the house, read and studied by oil lamps; with a porta-potty for my wife and an outhouse I built for me.

Each morning I would wake up and walk out into the front yard for a morning piss.  There were numerous small ant hills around the yard and it became a routine to select one to relieve myself on.  Within a month the ants were gone. 

We all, unknowingly, walk over millions of ants every day.

After the sixth extinction, and as we approach the final nuclear extinction, I believe the ants, not the cockroaches or rats, will be left as the dominant life form on this earth.  

Therefore, we should start our battle now.

Piss on ‘em

the Ol’Buzzard