Your Opinion: Beyond the point of no return?

Bob Boldt, Jefferson City

Friday, May 27, 2011

Dear Editor:

Sad to say, most readers will not find this a very welcome epitaph of sorts for the dead in Joplin.

In his landmark book “Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet,” Bill McKibben posits the concept that the world we inhabit and depend upon for our very existence has become so different than the former late, great Earth, that it requires a new planetary name: “Eaarth.”

“The world hasn’t ended, but the world as we know it has,” McKibben says. I have not heard one peep anywhere, not on the local news, not on the network news, not in any mainstream print media, connecting the disasters we are experiencing with global warming.

No meteorologist has failed to mention the unique nature of our weather conditions — some of which have toppled all-time records.

Yet not one has tried to connect these facts with any Big Picture.

Two weeks ago CBS had on some NOAA spokesman who actually cautioned against trying to see GW in these local weather patterns. Amazing!

I’m afraid our frogs are cooked. We have long since passed the chance to recognize our plight and jump out of the soon to be boiling pot that is the Earth’s emerging disastrous climate.

Not only have we passed the point of averting environmental catastrophe, but we no longer even have the sense to take precautions to live in the changed world our foolishness has created.

Perhaps the all-wise Preserver/Destroyer/Goddess, Gaia will annihilate us and our disastrous capitalist economy by stripping most of us humans off the earth, as She did with the 200-plus deceased citizens of Joplin, using her own resources: floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunamis.

This may be our only hope: that She strips the land clean of as many of us as possible by “natural” means.

We must begin the difficult process of hardening our hearts to the suffering of the victims of her natural disasters as She shakes off the terrible virus of Humanity that is so hell bent on desecrating Her.

Too late mankind has learned, “It’s not nice to fool with Mother Nature.”

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Bucky 1 year, 12 months ago

So Bob, I guess next year you will be celebrating Eaarth Day?

soxfan 1 year, 12 months ago

i look at it as a renewal of the earth-a change and change is sometimes very good don l chicago

asb 1 year, 12 months ago

Nothing does more to discredit real efforts to understand and counter negative human impacts on the Earth, which are very real and well modeled, than utterly silly and mystical pablum like the goddess Gaia. That the Earth is conscious (a reasonable requirement to be divine I'd think) is one of the dumber new age counter-science ideas around, and Lovelace should be shot for promoting it. Bob, meterologists know that weather is a momentary expression of climate, not a reflection of it. They correctly point out that while we can well expect increasing violence from a warmer Earth, this year's events do NOT prove anythnig. Otherwise, a quieter 2012 would mean we're back to global cooling, a shriek often heard from the energy industry funded apologists. Yes, a clearly warming Earth will bite us more and more often, but the dead in Joplin cannot be used by your foolish anti-science drivel to prove something that only relentless and repeatable science will prove. You harm GW education and politics with this drivel.

redblack564 1 year, 12 months ago

Global warming is a bunch of huey. If it's not then I created the internet with Al Gore. Read you history books, the earth has destroyed itself many many times before and only the last one was chronicled in a book almost everyone believes a little something out of . yes I'm talking about the great flood in the bible. There has been proof of mutiple ice ages and tropical ages since the begining of time, and us humans have only been on the planet for a short time in geological age(2000+ years) The earth they say is 65 million years old What makes you or anybody think that we were the first or the last life form that Mother nature got rid of?

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