writebuzz®
About Us   Publish and be read! Poetry, lyrics, short stories, scripts, words of wisdom, features, memorials, blogs (a day in my life), memoirs, history, business, and I.T.
Home   Adults   Youngsters   The Plot Thickens   Publications  

Options
More by this Author
 
© writebuzz® 2004-2024
All rights reserved.

The copyright of each of the publications on this site is retained by the author of the publication. writebuzz.com has been granted permission to display the publications under the terms and conditions of membership to the original site. Publications should not be copied in either print or electronic form without prior permission. Where permission is obtained the authors must be acknowledged. Thank you.
 
  You are @ HomeAdults Stories & Scripts

Stories & Scripts

Source: Adults

Author: jonny graham

Title: Kyoto was a gas ( part three ) .

Bill ; We sound like the purveyors of doom , mulling over whether there will be future generations and what state the planet will be in .

Ben ; Yes , but I guess people just need to face facts and accept the evidence we are being confronted with . The bottom line is that it may already be too late to react to what is happening to the planet . Mankind , by dint of his own success and ingenuity , may have sown the seeds of his own destruction . Let us not forget that everything that ever lived , every species , eventually became exinct . Why should homo-sapiens be any different ?
The ice is going to melt . The seas are going to rise . The majority of coastal cities around the world will end up submerged . But incredibly , nobody is preparing for it . I suppose the global warming hysteria has at least been a wake up call .
The real threat to mankind's survival is not melting ice , but rather a lack of energy sources . Oil , coal , gas , all the fossil fuels , will be depleted in another 50 years . If we can capture the energy of the sun , the wind , and the oceans , we will survive not only the coming warm-up but also the cool-down that will follow it . There will be global warming . There will be another ice age following it . That cycle is definite , it has been happening for over 4 billion years on this planet .

Bill ; I guess the only difference is that we will leave a documented record of these changing events on paper and computers and film , instead of just scrawling on cave walls .

Ben ; Don't be so sure about that . There is no way of telling just how bad things will actually get . If mankind survives deep into the future it is conceivable that we may be scrawling on cave walls again .
We should not forget , and this is a fairly contemporary parallel in archaeological terms , that the Neanderthals became extinct because they failed to adapt to a changing world .
I think mankind has reached a very crucial point on his journey . We smugly see ourselves as just one rung below the angels on the ladder of evolution , but in reality we remain merely ' kissing cousins ' with the chimpanzees . I truly believe mankind , at this moment in time , needs to excercise caution .

Bill ; Try expounding that to anyone living in a developed capitalist society where consumerism is the driving force . You would fall flat on your face . The worrying thing is though , they all know it is true but they resolutely choose to remain contemptuously ignorant of the situation .

Ben ; Well , all the evidence is there to be found , it's even in the air we breathe .
Carbon dioxide is accumulating in the atmosphere twice as fast as natural processes can remove it . The concentration of carbon in the atmosphere is now higher than it has been for the last 42,000 years , and quite possibly the last 20,000,000 years . The air we breathe today is vastly different from that breathed by our ancestors throughout the 7,000,000 year evolutionary history of the human race .
So it's not surprising at all that the Earth's climate has once again begun to tilt out of balance . Although this time the natural cycle of heat-up and cool-down has been aided by man's activities .

Bill ; Yes , mankind has become very successful . We swarm over the face of the planet and plunder it's natural resources without a second thought . Perhaps the effects of our activities are now catching up with us .

Ben ; The 1990's were the warmest decade since records began , and are likely to have been the warmest for the last thousand years , quite possibly longer . The top five warmest years ever recorded almost run in sequence . 1998 was the warmest , followed by 2002 , 2001 , 1997 and 1995 . There is no doubt the planet is heating up rapidly , and the rate of warming is actually accelerating .
Climate change predictions have outlined a number of scenarios that range between temperature rises of 1.4 degrees celsius and 5.8 degrees celsius on a global scale over the next century .
The lower end of that spectrum is more than double what we experienced in the twentieth century , the higher end of almost 6 degrees would take the planet into uncharted and extremely dangerous territory .

Bill ; That really is scary . The resulting impacts on mankind and the planet don't bear thinking about .

Ben ; Yes , and what is even more scary is that the resulting impacts are actually predictable . We know what will happen .
The ice caps and glaciers will melt completely , in tandem with accelerating rates of rising sea levels . Hurricanes and typhoons will become much stronger and more frequent , and the intensity of floods and droughts will also increase and become more prolonged . Tropical diseases will spread northwards and southwards towards the poles . Billions of people will lose their water supplies . Complete ecosystems will unravel as plants and animals struggle to adapt to rising temperatures , animals will not be capable of migrating fast enough or far enough to stay within their natural climatic comfort zones . Agriculture will suffer badly , and food supplies will inevitably dwindle .

Bill ; You are painting a very worrying picture , to say the least .

Ben ; Very worrying indeed , but there is more .
These impacts will be disproportionately felt by the poor and the vulnerable in semi-arid and tropical zones , most of whom already live on the edge of survival . Conflict and war over scarce and dwindling resources will become commonplace . There will be wholescale movement of environmental refugees , tens of millions will be made homeless by extreme weather and flooding of low-lying areas .
You need to envision all of this on a global scale of course to even get a glimpse of the devastation that will be caused .

Bill ; I guess that this all depends on mankinds behaviour in the face of the evidence presented to us today and the dreadful consequences of our possible inaction . Do we continue to pump out billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide or do we embark on a transition towards a clean energy economy ?

Ben ; Yes , exactly . There is something else , the acceleration of global warming , once underway , will trigger a series of other dangerous events that are too difficult to quantify .
There are huge quantities of methane locked up in undersea deposits around the globe , more than double the worlds entire fossil fuel reserves . This methane is kept stable by low ocean temperatures and the pressure of water from above . As sea temperatures creep up , large eruptions of this methane will enter the planet's atmosphere . Methane is twenty times more destructive as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide . Vast amounts of methane entering our atmosphere will trigger a runaway global warming effect that we would be utterly powerless to halt . It seems very likely that these ' methane burps ' probably triggered past global warming episodes in the Earth's long geological history .
One more thing , the Amazonian rain-forests , often referred to as the lungs of the world will inevitably become drought stricken if temperatures continue to rise . The rain forests will die and release all their locked-up carbon into the atmosphere . This will also add to the global warming scenario and contribute hugely to temperatures rising even further , not to mention spelling doom for the biodiverse ecosystems that the rain-forests support .

Bill ; If things do get that bad , we could be staring extinction in the face . That is the worst case scenario , isn't it ?

Ben ; If we fail to change . If we fail to adapt . We may well go down the same road as the Neanderthals .



Published on writebuzz®: Adults > Stories & Scripts
 

writebuzz®... the word is out!