Sunday, November 05, 2006

Sunday Newspapers and Global warming.

Sunday newspapers are geared towards the majority of people who wish to pass a sunday by reading all day. Welll alright you can't really stretch a tabloid all day. Probably more like ten minutes. Another thing about newspapers is that supposedly one can tell a person's character by the kind of paper they read. Wrong. I don't really take life too seriously so my daily consumption of news is the old tabloid favorite "The Sun". Read by many a brick layer, scaffolder, plumber....you get my drift. The same old stereo type of readers. How unfortunate. I find the many of the articles to be quite entertaining. Just what you need for any morning of the week day. It has to be said that I wonder what a stranger would think of that? Would they turn their nose up at me just for reading such "rubbish"? Perhaps. On the other hand I am rather partial to The Independant on Sunday and occasionally during the week. Why? It is probably because I have joined the growing band of people concerned with the environment. And the Independant focuses a portion of its news on such matters. Today's sunday edition however is going a little to far and like much of the media plays on the fears of people about current affairs of the world. The head lines read "Tsunami horror hits Britain". I caught the head line with a glance and thought "Have I missed something?" and "shouldn't I be at least eighteen of water under?". Further inspection concluded a little line underneath with the date "5 November 2060". That would make me 86. Reading further the article presented itself as a textual version of the film "The Day After Tomorrow". I'd rather slap on that kind of film than read the article. More so that I find this kind of scare mongering a little too much. Now don't get me wrong because I would like to regard myself as an environmentally conscious person and do as much as I can for recycling efforts, water, electricity and gas saving and walk a lot more often therefore avoiding the use of polluting vehicles. This kind of writing sensationalising much of the reality and gravity of the world we live in may have honest and sincere intentions but will it change the minds of the capitalist society we live in let alone the major contributors of the world to global warming? Not any time soon. There are suggestions that the efforts of reversing the effects are a little too late. If that is so then perhaps while still trying to rebalance what mother nature once gave us perhaps we should look to saving ours selves by looking to protect ourselves from the inevitable.

I cannot help but think that while nature is struggling counter against all the pollution we create, if we were to suddenly stop damaging the planet that nature would not be able to cope with such another dramatic shift and therefore over compensate for the change creating an equally if not more harmful world to live in.

I do fear for the generations after me and for what they may say about all of us in the year 2060. They may say that we were the ones who killed the planet and we did nothing to stop it. In fact it will be the planet that eventually kills us in the process of undoing all the harm that we have done to it by bringing back the balance of what the planet was hundreds or thousands of years ago. Ice ages and tropical periods of pre-history prove this. That however took millions of years over many cycles of heat and cold. A little like spring cleaning.

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