one of the references:
Global Warming 101 video from National Geographic:
http://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/player/environment/global-warming-environment/global-warming-101.html
Time
one of the references:
Global Warming 101 video from National Geographic:
http://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/player/environment/global-warming-environment/global-warming-101.html
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Fantastic, it needs no words of explanation!
ReplyDeletePeople on Skeptical Science love this!
ReplyDeleteLove your entire gallery! :)
ReplyDeleteFound you via Skeptical Science; this is just gorgeous. I love it.
ReplyDeleteA picture is worth a thousand words.
ReplyDeleteCat
this is the beginning of "polar cities" google "polar cities red" and Jim Laughter to see essence. Bravo
ReplyDeleteIn about 100 years, from 100 to 500 years, we will need polar cities for survivors of global warming chaos. It will unfold slowly, it will happen slowly. It won’t happen overnight, and it won’t impact humankind until at least 100 years from now, and mostly not for another 500 to even 1000 years. But we are headed, not to the stars, but to polar cities, for sure. Northern settlements of millions of climate refugees on an Earth in a deep funk. We did this to ourselves. Global warming is a man-made phenomenon, and anyone who says otherwise is dreaming. So it’s time to wake up, everyone, and there’s still time. That’s my message: there is still time. And the time is now to start planning actions to stop C02 in its track, and get off oil and coal use now, soon, today!
ReplyDeleteI’m flying over the Pacific on a fuel-guzzling, carbon dioxide-emitting 747 from Los Angeles to Tokyo on my way to meet a Japanese climate activist who claims that climate change is already so embedded in humankind’s future that only so-called “polar cities” will be able to save the human species from extinction.
ReplyDeleteThat’s a pretty tall order, and from the looks of things, I am about to get an earful.
Meet Kenji Watanabe, erstwhile climate envisionary, non-scientist blogger, doomsayer with a sense of humor.
“I’m not a doomsayer, ” he insists. “I am an optimist, like my teacher James Lovelock, and if anything, I am an optisayer, not a doomsayer at all. Please don’t say I am a doomsayer. I’m not.”
“Yes, I see dead people,” the non-doomsayer says over coffee at a local AKB48 cafe in central Tokyo where I’ve come to spend a few days getting to know this eccentric man who calls himself “James Lovelock’s accidental student.” More on that later.
It’s an interesting conversation, and he’s not the least bit loony or insane. What Kenji says makes perfect sense, with a few grains of salt added in, of course. He believes that we are doomed, doomed, and that major climate chaos events in the future will doom humankind to fleeing north to find refuge in what he has dubbed as polar cities, even though this abodes will not be the poles per see and they won’t be cities, either.
“More like Mel Gibson’s ‘Mad Max’ franchise meets Cormac McCarthy’s ‘The Road’,” he says, smiling. Kenji seems to be always smiling, and he comes across as a very friendly and down to earth person.
“I don’t have a PHD, and I am not a scientist,” he admits and says he welcomes criticism of his polar cities ideas and does not take any of the negative comments that come his way personally.
“People have their own opinions and I respect them all,” he says. “I don’t expect people to agree with me or even see my point. But I know I am on the right path, and Lovelock has seen the polar cities designs and concepts and told me by email that it’s good and worthwhile, if only it gets people to think outside the box.”
“I see dead people,” he repeats, “massive die-offs of humans, ten billion dead people in the next 300 to 500 years, perhaps sooner, and it won’t be a pretty picture at all. More like hell on Earth.”
Kenji tells me he gets his inspiration for polar cities not only from Lovelock, but also from Mark Lynas and Tim Flannery and James Hansen and Al Gore.
“Come hell and high water, humanity is in for the ride of our lives in the coming centuries. We might make it through to the other side, and we might not make it at all as species, this might spell the end of the humans on Earth. Of course, I am hoping we can find ways to stop this all before it comes to that. I remain optimistic.”
So what are polar cities all about? I ask the Optisayer.
“Survival,” he says, “survival. Polar cities will serve as climate refuges for climate refugees in the future. Not now, but later. But it’s time to start thinking and planning them now, just in case. I am sure the Japanese Defense Agency and the American CIA and Homeland Security Agency and similar departments in other countries are planning such polar settlements even now, on paper. There are meetings go on as we speak, all over the world, pre-planning and pre-siting these ‘cities.’”
This is awesome! What a easy way to explain global warming!
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