Behold the fool
I don’t know of any polite way to put this or who needs to hear it, so I’m just going to come right out and say it. There is nothing — absolutely nothing — that says temperatures on earth have to be survivable by human beings. There are no cosmic rheostats controlling maximum highs and minimum lows. The fact that temperatures stay between certain largely survivable highs and mostly bearable lows in regions where humans live is a pure coincidence. And that coincidence can end any time.
You see, recent reports of Las Vegas and places in Italy reaching almost 50 degrees centigrade (122 degrees Fahrenheit) may be the last time announcements of out-of-control hot weather on earth are shocking but survivable. Next time that we hear about a heat wave it could be a real killer, not just just where the elderly and the infirm and the infant is concerned, but a mass murderer where everybody dies. There is nothing stopping those highs from climbing into the 70s (158F) and beyond.
We have recently turned an ominous corner in the science of global warming. We are now entering a time where successions of days break each of the previous day’s record high temperatures. And it is all thanks to Homo stultus, that is, man the fool.
We’ve had more than 100 years of millions of pages of thousands of peer-reviewed papers with proxy, instrumental, and satellite measurements warning us of global warming. The response of your average Homo stultus? “LOL, bullshit.” Meanwhile some former government “whistleblower” comes out and, entirely without evidence, claims that UFOs are really space aliens and he’s seen them, and those same preposterous morons everywhere are suddenly climbing all over each other to be the first to shake his hand. What fools live here!
Meanwhile the fossil fuel industry is raking in unprecedented profits and slow-walking its stated goal of finding alternative energy sources. I think we need a new word for evil because, for the harm these people are doing to our planet and its future, the word “evil” is no longer adequate.
Let’s recall for a moment what the fossil fuel industry could and should be doing with those trillions of dollars of profits it’s been enjoying. It ought to be investing heavily into renewable energies and accelerating carbon capture and storage technologies to clean up existing fossil fuel use. It should be cutting methane emissions from the production lines and facilitating access to renewable energy for those still without electricity, people who number in the millions.
Instead the dirty bastards are slow-walking their decarbonisation commitments on the one hand and lobbying Republicans in Congress to reverse clean energy policies on the other. Apparently there really is no such thing as too many yachts to water ski behind. There is no limit to their greed. And we are paying the price.
It will give me small comfort to watch them burn. But very soon now global warming will bring tragedy to the doorstep of even the average oil executive. The fact that we must suffer their fate too is the universe thumbing its cosmic nose at us.
But if everyone does something now we can effect a change before it’s too late. I think it’s clear we’re going to have to go through some serious pain because of this epidemic of indolence, but if we get busy we can make a difference and we can preserve what future we have left. But we have to start — and we have to start TODAY. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.