Black Dot Diary

I have no idea what will hap­pen on Decem­ber 21, 2012 when the Mayan cal­en­dar ends. Maybe the world will end. Maybe it won’t. Maybe the poles will shift? Maybe the Earth’s axis will wob­ble? Maybe.

I do know there are lots of peo­ple mak­ing money out of 2012 and the shelves in book­stores are fill­ing up with tomes on the end of the world as we know it. On the cor­ner of a major inter­sec­tion in Vic­to­ria where I live, a bedrag­gled guy holds a sign warn­ing of the wages of sin and the end times. Funny, I thought I saw the same guy hold­ing the same sign in Van­cou­ver in 1970.

I am not going to be fooled again. Back on Decem­ber 21, 1999, I remem­ber count­ing down the min­utes to mid­night with friends and fam­ily, wait­ing for the grid to go down as Y2k ticked closer. I had stocked up on mush­room soup and toi­let paper. I might still have some of those soup cans.

Last month Asso­ci­ated Press writer Mark Steven­son reported that Mayan Apoli­nario Chile Pix­tun is weary of ques­tions about the Mayan cal­en­dar sup­pos­edly end­ing on Decem­ber 21, 2012.

“I came back from Eng­land last year and, man, they had me fed up with this stuff,” said the Mayan elder.

Now, Not Myth

Here’s what bugs me — the world as we know it is end­ing — we don’t need to wait for 2012. Change is def­i­nitely hap­pen­ing and it’s hard to deny it. Some things that were, are no more. Some things that are, will soon be gone. It’s called cli­mate change, or global warming.

Yet instead of really focus­ing on what we must do to slow cli­mate change, our mass media focuses on Mayan myths and some ‘maybe-​maybe not’ event with Hol­ly­wood profit power — 2012 star­ring John Cusack.

Here’s what we know for sure that is not movie myth:

• The snows of Kil­i­man­jaro are melting.
• Polar bears wan­der the arc­tic, hun­gry, as their tra­di­tional hunt­ing ter­ri­tory lit­er­ally melts.
• Warm­ing waters in the shal­low oceans have con­tributed to the death of about a quar­ter of the world’s coral reefs in the last few decades alone.
• Greenland’s ice sheet is melt­ing. The amount of ice melt dur­ing the sum­mer of 2007 was the largest since sci­en­tists first started mak­ing satel­lite mea­sure­ments of the ice in 1979. Accord­ing to cli­mate sci­en­tist Kon­rad Stef­fen, the amount of ice lost in 2007 was “the equiv­a­lent of two times all the ice in the Alps, or a layer of water more than one-​half mile deep cov­er­ing Wash­ing­ton, D.C.”
• An oxygen-​depleted dead zone the size of New Jer­sey is starv­ing sea life off the coast of Ore­gon and Wash­ing­ton, reports Kim Mur­phy of the LA Times. It will prob­a­bly appear there each sum­mer as a result of “evolv­ing wind con­di­tions likely brought on by a chang­ing cli­mate, rather than pol­lu­tion,” accord­ing to Jack Barth, pro­fes­sor of phys­i­cal oceanog­ra­phy at Ore­gon State University.

On his site Global Issues, Anup Shah has ded­i­cated sig­nif­i­cant time and resources to pro­vid­ing a com­pre­hen­sive overview of cli­mate change and other issues affect­ing our Earth. His mes­sage — we can’t wait to act. He is not alone in his opinion.

“We have to do it this year. Not next year – this year,” Al Gore at the World Busi­ness Sum­mit on Cli­mate Change in Copen­hagen. “The clock is tick­ing, because Mother Nature does not do bailouts.”

Is cli­mate change real? Ask the peo­ple of the arch­i­pel­ago nation of Mal­dives. Eighty per­cent of its chain of 1,200 islands is no more than 1m above sea level. The United Nations’ Inter­gov­ern­men­tal Panel of Cli­mate Change is fore­cast­ing a rise in sea lev­els of at least 7.1 inches (18 cm) by the end of the cen­tury. That would mean the peo­ple of the Mal­dives, all of 396,000 of them, will have no home, no coun­try. Cli­mate change will claim it and the sea will bury it.

Recently, Mal­dives Pres­i­dent Mohamed Nasheed and his cab­i­net donned scuba gear for an under­wa­ter meet­ing to focus global atten­tion on the threat of cli­mate change. The cab­i­net signed a dec­la­ra­tion call­ing for global cuts in car­bon emis­sions. The dec­la­ra­tion will be pre­sented before the UN cli­mate sum­mit in Copen­hagen, Den­mark in December.

“We are try­ing to send our mes­sage to let the world know what is hap­pen­ing and what will hap­pen to the Mal­dives if cli­mate change isn’t checked,” Nasheed said. If urgent action isn’t taken accord­ing to Nasheed, “We are all going to die.”

It’s not the kind of thing you usu­ally hear from a pres­i­dent of a nation.

It’s not the kind of thing you want to hear.

Indeed, denial is eas­ier and so human — an effec­tive but self-​defeating shield against fear and despair. I believe we turn to denial because we really don’t know how to cope with a prob­lem of this scale and few peo­ple with power seem to be offer­ing real lead­er­ship. Cer­tainly Cana­dian Prime Min­is­ter Steven Harper isn’t, but then he has oil to think about, right?

Some­times I think global warm­ing is akin to a fever whose pur­pose is to fight off infec­tion in a body. Have we pol­luted the body of the Earth to the point of infection?

I do believe this planet will sur­vive. Will the polar bears? Will the whales and fish? Will the coral reefs? Will we? The ancient proph­e­sies haven’t been very defin­i­tive on this point. Stay tuned.

Tags: 2012, Al Gore, ancient prophesies, Apolinario Chile Pixtun, Associated Press, Canadian, Climate Change, Copenhagen, coral reefs, dead zone, Denmark, global warming, Hollywood, John Cusack, Kilimanjaro, Kim Murphy, LA Times, Maldives, Mark Stevenson, Mayan, Mayan calendar, Mayan elder, Mohamed Nasheed, Mother Nature, Oregon, polar bear, Stephen Harper, U.N., UN, Victoria, Washington, World Business Summit on Climate Change, Y2k

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 8th, 2009 at 1:56 pm and is filed under Climate Change, Community, Environment, Media, Mind, Science, Spirit. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.