Dali Earth (1998)
Have a happy Earth Day...
...while you can...
From Live Science:
Our planet's prospects for environmental stability are bleaker than ever with the approach of this year’s Earth Day, April 22. Global warming is widely accepted as a reality by scientists and even by previously doubtful government and industrial leaders. And according to a recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), there is a 90 percent likelihood that humans are contributing to the change.
The international panel of scientists predicts the global average temperature could increase by 2 to 11 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100 and that sea levels could rise by up to 2 feet.
Scientists have even speculated that a slight increase in Earth's rotation rate could result, along with other changes. Glaciers, already receding, will disappear. Epic floods will hit some areas while intense drought will strike others. Humans will face widespread water shortages. Famine and disease will increase. Earth’s landscape will transform radically, with [my emphasis] a quarter of plants and animals at risk of extinction.
In a report sent to Congress at the end of August, government scientists argued that the warming of the atmosphere in recent decades cannot be explained by natural causes but must include such human sources as energy consumption and deforestation. It's a conclusion that a consensus of the world's climatologists reached years ago but that Bush has ignored throughout his presidency.
When the New York Times quizzed Bush about why his scientists had shifted their positions on what caused global warming, he appeared entirely ignorant that they had. "I don't think we did," he said. When tipped off to the paper's coverage of the report, he added: "Oh, OK, well, that's got to be true." Maybe he really doesn't read the newspapers. His aides then assured reporters that, no, this report wouldn't signal any change in his policies around climate change.
Salon: "Bush -- Global Warming is Just Hot Air"
[Cartoon by David Horsey]
Meanwhile, here's hoping a few, select, pre-cooked lizard brains spontaneously combust first...
1 comment:
Tongues
French kissing requires breath mints first, then tangerines, then the Eiffel Tower and baguettes. Yesterday I was watching Kermit the Frog on You Tube and he was singing in tongues, some with rubber bumps for traction and flippers. Spatulas can be useful for scraping down the tongue just before being hit by a Volkswagen and sent twenty feet over the asphalt, ripping open the pants legs of my best suit after a date in the rain.
Transformations appear awesome from the outside, but from the inside experience they are quite frightening and painful, since no one ever knows if they will end there, or continue on into something quite unexpected and undesirable. Out of control, the body continues to change, embodying chance hazards beyond the will, for which everybody is still held responsible. After death, the fingernails continue to grow.
[Disposable Prose Poem April 17, 2007]
Dr. Mike
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