John P Matthew on Writing, Book Reviews, and the Writing Life!

Read what Al Gore has to say about "Global Warming" in an interview with Deepak Chopra

Seems we have only ten years left to reverse the global warming process. I had ranted about this in this short story and this blog entry

Al Gore
"We are facing what is probably a planetary emergency. It is difficult to see the reality of this emergency because it’s outside the boundaries of any previous experience in human history. But there are three factors that have combined to completely and utterly transform the relationship between the human species and the earth’s ecology. The first is the population explosion, which has quadrupled the human population in the last 100 years. To put that in a broader historical context, it took 10,000 generations of human beings before we reached a global population of two billion. Now, in the course of a single lifetime — the generation born after World War II — we have moved from two billion to over nine billion.
"Second, our technology’s power has magnified thousandfold in just the last century. When this new power has been used without adequate wisdom and when the new power is multiplied by six-and-a-half billion people, what we get is a very new relationship between humankind and the planet.
"The third factor is a psychology, a philosophy and an attitude — a way of living on the earth — which is dominated by a focus on the short term to the exclusion of the long term. A willingness to ignore the future consequences of present action, a willingness to abandon responsible ways of our grandparents in reusing, recycling and minimising our impact on the world around us. Instead, we are behaving as if the planet is a business in liquidation. When all these three factors combine, it produces a collision between our civilisation and the earth. The atmospheric shell of the planet is thin and we are now changing its composition, filling it up with global warming pollutants, warming the planet, changing seasons, disrupting the climatic pattern that existed since the last Ice Age 11,000 years ago, well before the first human cities were built. All this is happening very rapidly, but we can still change it — we have the time, technology, everything except the political will. Though in a democracy, political will is a renewable resource.
"Leading scientists in the world are openly saying we probably have less than 10 years in which to make dramatic change in the pattern that now represents business as usual. We have less than 10 years to dramatically reduce the accumulation of global warming pollutants like carbon dioxide, methane and a few other gases. Yes, we can fulfil the task but we will first have to change attitudes and awareness and recognise it as a spiritual issue. It’s a moral, ethical challenge that goes to the core of who we are as human beings."


Seems very unlikely that the powers that be would change their ways. The corridors of power are lined by the ill-gotten wealth of sooty chimney stacks and blackened exhaust pipes.

So more Tsunami's Hurricane Rita, Hurricane Katrina, are set to happen. And we can look forward to more of our own 26/7. Remember our own deluge of July 26, 2005? So be prepared to send a night in the office and listen to FM radio broadcasting messages from people stranded for, well, something like 24 hours in a car, in one spot, yes, one spot.