Wake Up Stupid - Mankind Is Heading For Extinction

Mankind is heading for extiction.

There is nothing we can now do about it.

Of course, if we'd have listened to those "hippie types" thirty years ago and paid attention to organisations like Greenpeace or Friends of the Earth, then things might be different. But we didn't listen and now we must pay the price for our ignorance, arrogance and stupidity. Unfortunately most people in the western world are stupid. We ignore anything we hear or read that doesn't suit us or the lifestyles we envisage for ourselves. We are running out of oil, a finite rescource, but we still drive around in gas guzzling SUV's and "Off Road" vehicles.

That's stupid.

Global warming, for years something that was denied by supposedly "intelligent" politicians and world leaders and still is by George W Bush and the republican party, is now recognised as a reality. Still we continue to burn fossil fuels, waste precious energy and allow industry to continue to poison the already poisonous air.

That's stupid.

Scientists, many of them experts in their field, from such respected organisations as the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies have been telling anyone who would listen that ecologically and environmentally the world is in deep trouble. But no-one is listening.

That's stupid.

In the last year I have written three articles describing the possible extinction of the human race through natural disasters, some of which will be precipitated by global warming. Mega Tsunamis, a supervolcano eruption and a new Ice Age all pose an immediate threat to the world. No-one listened.

That's stupid.

In my book "The Cassandra Prophecy" published in 1999, I wrote that "Climate change is accelerating at such an alarming rate that within the next ten years we will be unable to sustain food production in the Western world." My evidence for this proposition came not from some crazed, delusional ideas of an environmental armageddon, or from the pages of some "conspiracy theory" websites, but from scientific evidence available to all. Still, nobody listened.

That's stupid.

Recently, a report commissioned by influential Pentagon defence adviser Andrew Marshall and leaked to the UK's Observer newspaper concluded that climate change will lead to nuclear war and global catastrophe that will cost millions, perhaps billions of lives. It stated that global warming was a far greater threat to the United States and the world than terrorism. However, the report was suppressed by US defence chiefs Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz for four months.

That's stupid.

What will it take to make people wake up to the fact that we are in very serious trouble. Within ten years global warming will shut down the Gulf Stream, forcing North America, Britain and Northern Europe into an ice age. We will no longer be able to grow our own food or breed our own livestock. Nothing grows when the thermometer falls to minus 50C. In the next four to five years global warming will raise sea levels to such an extent that major flooding will occur over large parts of the planet. Violent storms will smash coastal barriers making places like the Netherlands and parts of low lying areas in the United Kingdom and coastal areas of the United States uninhabitable.

Mega-droughts will affect the world's major breadbaskets, including America's Midwest, rising temparatures will force the necessary evacuation of many of the places currently considered habitable, and by 2020 "catastrophic" shortages of water and energy supply will become increasingly harder to overcome, plunging the planet into continual war for control of these vital resources. But is anybody listening?

Perhaps May 28th. this year will finally be the time when the world wakes up to the problems we are all going to face. It is on this day that Roland Emmerich's new film "The Day After Tommorow" is released world-wide. Emerich, the producer of the blockbuster "Independence Day" has made a film that graphically depicts the horrific effects of global warming. "While aliens were the enemy in Independence Day, in The Day After Tomorrow, the enemy is us. The film is a nightmare story not about what could happen but what will happen if global warming worsens and world leaders look the other way", Emmerich says.

And so, in The Day After Tomorrow, tornadoes rip apart Los Angeles; a snowstorm buries New Delhi; massive hailstones the size of grapefruit batter Tokyo; a volcano erupts next to the Hollywood sign in Los Angeles, San Fransisco Bay freezes over and in New York City, the temperature swings from sweltering to freezing in one day as a massive 200 foot high tidal wave approaches the city at the speed of a jet airliner. The special effects in the film are said to be "the best ever" and those that have seen previews say they were "visibly shocked" by the scale of the destruction and the realisation that the events being portrayed in the film will happen unless we address the problems of climate change and global warming.

Perhaps, with all the publicity surrounding the film, those stupid people who deny global warming is a reality will wake up. George W Bush and his fellow republicans should be forced to sit through the entire film at least twice. Maybe then they'll be forced to aknowledged the truth. (I realise that this is difficult for the Bush administration). Unfortunately though, it may now be too late.

© Copyright Ian Gurney March 2004.