The End is Coming

Last night I went to see a Mr. Gwynne Dyer speak at Brock. He is an amazingly smart man...gah, I wish my brain worked like his. He is a journalist, filmmaker, author, freelancer...he does all kinds of stuff. And he was a very good speaker. He has a new book out which deals with the issue of climate change.

When I first heard that that was what his talk was going to be about, I remember thinking, "can we possibly beat this to death anymore"? The answer to the question being, yes, we can. And we have too. Mr. Dyer's talk was pretty grim. I mean, there were some small flashes of hope, but the general conclusion was that mankind has screwed the pooch on this one. Before global warming gets better, it's going to get a whole lot worse, killing people off, one natural disaster at a time. Our food belts are going to become deserts, entire cities are going to be wiped out by rising ocean levels. Shit is grim.

You can't help but feel a little hopeless when you listen to him. Hopeless and a little resentful. Hopeless because he was all doom and gloom, we're going to die, we've done it now, famine, famine, famine, and resentful, because, way to go people in the past, look what you've freaking done! I listened to the first half of his seminar with mixed feelings of fear and que sera sera, because hey, if we are all going to die, we're all going to die.

He did lighten it up a bit during the second half, and a little light of hope was lit inside me. He talked about politics and how the biggest issue is going to be getting through the political bullniz. And ain't that the truth! Also, our Prime Minister is Stephan Harper. I dislike him. He just seems like a slow moving man, literally and figuratively.

Anyway! Dyer was talking about these two new technologies that could delay the affects of global warming. Shows how proactive everybody plans on being about these things! Instead of trying to fix it while we still got a shot in hell of doing so, let's invent things to push it back, push it back, so we don't need to really deal with it. Seems backwards. But in any event, these two technologies included: (forgive my complete lack of knowledge of any kind of scientific terms. Science is not my friend). 1) Sulfur drops that go into the engine of the airplane (or some other part that blows air out). Once these drops of sulfur are released into the atmosphere, they form a protective layer over the earth which thus reflects some of the sunlight, keeping the earth at a cooler temperature. 2)Some kind of yacht thing goes out into the ocean and settles itself under some low clouds, it shoots stuff into the air, and the clouds change it into....good god, I don't know. The point is, why don't we do things that are actually understandable now, instead of waiting 20 years, when we'll apparently all be living in the Jetsons.

Gah. Stuff like this is frustrating, because what exactly can you do. You get the lightbulbs, you buy the car, and yet here we still are, sailing towards global destruction anyway. Mr. Dyer ended his talk by pointing out that in a mere 10,000 years, all of our civilization will be for naught anyway, as we are going to enter another ice age. Them's the breaks I guess.

Anyway, I have no conclusion on this other than to say, I"m a little bit fearful of where this is all going. I'm a lot fearful actually. And I can't do a whole lot about it.