Fearing and Fantasizing, About Us

THIS SPRING in my neck of the woods, the American mid south, we had two intense periods of rain, periods where it rained nearly constantly for days, and it flooded, with a drought in between deluges, which lasted a bit less than a month. That seems like a lot of excitement for one little three month season. Almost as if on cue, on the first day of summer, the pleasant temperatures and rain stopped suddenly, and it turned hot and dry. AS the fourth od July approached, I began to pray for rain again, even though we still have plenty os moisture in the ground, owing to the spring rains. but that won't last forever, it won't last long. these ninety degree plus days will suck the moisture out of the soil and bodies of water, and more rain will be needed. I dread the thought of a summer long drought, and the sight of the trees across the wooded hillsides turning brown in August, as as happened two or three times in the past twenty years. Its frightening. Its also just what climate scientists have been predicing for decades; more estreme weather patterns, longer, more sever droughts, more violent storms, and more flooding when rainfall amounts become extreme. I have told many people that I can envision a summer, in my lifetime, (and I am seventy years old) during which the temperature reaches one hundred degresson Memrial Day, and remains there through Laobr Day, with few if any interruptions. This prediction, which I am standing by, perhaps seems a bit paranoid, and indeed I am paranoid about climate change. This, mainly because I took chemistry in high school, and I undrestand the basic science of climate change, science which simply cannot be denied, and which clearly shows exactly why climate change caused by human activity is inevitable. Hell, I wasn't a good chemistry student, but you don't have to be to understand the basic chemistry of climate change, the truth of it, like a rock falling to the ground when dropped, due to gravity. You don't have to see it drop to know that it has fallen. I can see a future in which the wooded hills where I live have become grass covered hills, the trees all gone for lack of water. The older you are, no matter who you are, or where you live, the more obvious it seems that the climate has changed, and is changing. In the northern heisphere spring now begins in the middle of calendar winter and October is becoming a summer month. I keep fantasizing about a massive solar energy collector in Earth orbit, sending huge amounts of free energy to the surface, powering desalination facilities, piping fresh water inland to arid areas, making them fertile. I imagine industrial facilities capturing air, cleaning the carbon out of it, and sending it back into the atmosphere fresh and clean, in abundant quantities, ameliorating and reversing global warming. Skyscraper cities bringing people together, while leaving most of the Earth's land area, yes, most of it, to the other millions of species of life on Earth. Earth could probably hold many billions of people under such an arrangement, still leave the planet healty and unpollutted. I hope soon to start fantasizing about somehow removing all the plastic from the Earth's soil, air, and water, and from our bodies, bloodstreams, and brains, but...I'm still working on it. As of now, it seems impossible. But so does everything else worth doing, at first.