Global Dimming and the Dimming Reasons for Any Birth

Geoffrey Hamilton

Blog, April 18, 2006

Donald Rumsfeld often says sarcastically about journalists "Henny penny! The sky is falling", wrongly claiming that they're always saying disaster is upon us and then nothing happens (the Iraqi insurgent war, etc., which did happen). However, the reverse is true. A disaster happens and no one notices it as a disaster. People look outside their own windows and see the same old cows munching, the same neighbour picking up the newspaper and think this disaster wasn't so disastrous. This happened when Gorbachov predicted that war would break out all over the Soviet Union if Yeltsin had his way and the Union was dissolved. Well Gorbachov was correct, but afterward everybody just accepted the wars as normal. This thing happens all the time because the act of worrying causes worse feelings than the disaster itself. The 'worrier' also has no idea about the other factors that will mitigate his horror afterward, mainly the self delusion that all is well enough.

So now we have a new environmental disaster called global dimming which cools the earth even as green house gases warm it. The cooling effects of dirt in the air, which dims the world's sunlight an average of 22 percent, also masks the rising temperatures, reducing average temps by 1 percent from a 2.5 potential rise. It's a self-made mitigation /slash/ self delusion.

The dilemma is the cleaner we make the smog the faster global warming's effects will be exposed. But to keep the atmosphere dirty means health and other climate disasters loom. Further, to allow one problem to fight the other for you will be like building a house of cards on a ship. And it will not stop either the global dimming or warming from hurting everything anyway. Even a sudden collapse of the world economy and the end to dirty air overnight would only accelerate the rise in temperatures.

So disaster is coming, the sky will be falling very soon, but are we going to care when it does? Forget about stopping it. We won't change anything about ourselves enough to stop it. When the sky falls we'll not only continue eating the placenta of our babies, we'll be frying our own children filet style with some fava beans and wondering how the predictions of disaster could have been so wrong. Our views within disastrous times change so much that war, death, rape and speeding seem like so much fluff.

People will always be giving birth to frying pan size babies. There doesn't seem to be an end to the blind desire to have children. Even with all the looming disasters that we worry about, it make no difference to people. The reality is that these disasters can only be considered minor reasons for not giving birth, a sort of footnote really. There are countless better reasons not to have kids, beginning with the fact that birth is the only way to create death and suffering.

So here we begin another countdown to the end of the world. But many countries from Congo, Liberia, Ethiopia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo and on and on have gone through their world-ending disasters and the people don't seem to give up hope. The possible mass extinctions envisioned by this PBS doomsday program are best described by the line from Waiting for Godot "...if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all...." Perhaps, the need for readiness could be made irrelevant too if there were no more births.

Gh

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