[Newspoetry] Astronomical Death Tolls

[Donald L Emerick]

Inspiration for story is below newspoem.

*** Start a NewsPoem ***
Astronomical Death Tolls

Sometimes, I feel like I am watching John Belushi, playing Bluto in the great American classic film "Animal House".  John rolls into a speech on justice about vengeance, naming enemies of the house as malefactors who should be "Dead"...  I always thought this language was a tad over the top, as a post-modern fashionable (ie, already hackneyed, over-used, worn-out, trivialized) descriptive of excess says, as if it were being politely civil to us.

Alright, so I lied.  Bluto was way over the top.  Death is not a pleasant thing to impose upon others.  Animal House morphs into Animal Planet, as presented on some pay-for-viewing-what-is-sure-to-bore-you-commercial-channels.

Actually, as far as we know, there is only one Animal Planet in the dark whole of the Universe -- and we are on it -- which makes it a rather significant interest of ours -- as long as we are here, and all that sort of thing.

My animal friends -- "My Pet" as they call me in mutual reciprocity (although I swear I've heard them whisper, "Our Sucker" to each other as I leave the room to fetch for them food, water, treats, toys, clothes, while cleaning up their messes as I go) -- do not mess up their own living spaces -- but carefully find the next cleanest place in the house, before leaving their messes there.

So, how do planets die?  I've heard that stars kind of burn out like a light-bulb -- but no one seems to have an idea of how planets die.  Maybe that is because there is only one planet that is alive, that is also close enough to us to study, if we cared to do so.  But, early in my first classes on Science Fiction,  Primary School SCIFI, I learned that "Mars is a Dead Planet."  And then, in more or less short order, Venus is dead,too, so is Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, all the asterois, the Moon of Earth, and everything else.  Dead.  All of them -- dead beyond extinction.

Oh, we may yet spend a trillion dollars or so sending probes to those places (especially to Mars, the God-of-War Planet, if Bush has his sway), to see if we have "sucessfully" contaminated their environments yet, but otherwise, we can say that they are all as "dead" as we know Death.  (After all, we do not count the species of the parasitology of tombs and graves in determining whether something is dead or not:  recall that even though "worms crawl in, worms crawl out, worms play pinochle upon your snout..." does not imbue the worm-holier-than-thous with life.)

Earth is dying of a terminal condition -- it is occupied by a kind of parasitic life form that kills its host.  Planets die when they can't stand the pain anymore.

It's written in the stars, like some astrology, this coming death of earth -- fated to happen.  None of that bothers me -- but I had hoped to have been away before it happened in a neighborhood theater near me.
**** End a NewsPoem ****

As re-posted in TruthOut.

"Yeah, OK, this is scary...
Monday 24 January 2005 @ 07:15
Global Warming Approaching Point of No Return, Warns Leading Climate Expert 
By Geoffrey Lean 
The Independent U.K. on Sunday 

Sunday 23 January 2005 

Global warning has already hit the danger point that international attempts to curb it are designed to avoid, according to the world's top climate watchdog. 

Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the official Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), told an international conference attended by 114 governments in Mauritius this month that he personally believes that the world has "already reached the level of dangerous concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere" and called for immediate and "very deep" cuts in the pollution if humanity is to "survive". 

His comments rocked the Bush administration - which immediately tried to slap him down - not least because it put him in his post after Exxon, the major oil company most opposed to international action on global warming, complained that his predecessor was too "aggressive" on the issue. 

A memorandum from Exxon to the White House in early 2001 specifically asked it to get the previous chairman, Dr. Robert Watson, the chief scientist of the World Bank, "replaced at the request of the US". The Bush administration then lobbied other countries in favour of Dr. Pachauri - whom the former vice-president Al Gore called the "let's drag our feet" candidate, and got him elected to replace Dr. Watson, a British-born naturalised American, who had repeatedly called for urgent action. 

But this month, at a conference of Small Island Developing States on the Indian Ocean island, the new chairman, a former head of India's Tata Energy Research Institute, himself issued what top United Nations officials described as a "very courageous" challenge. 

He told delegates: "Climate change is for real. We have just a small window of opportunity and it is closing rather rapidly. There is not a moment to lose." 

Afterwards he told The Independent on Sunday that widespread dying of coral reefs, and rapid melting of ice in the Arctic, had driven him to the conclusion that the danger point the IPCC had been set up to avoid had already been reached. 

Reefs throughout the world are perishing as the seas warm up: as water temperatures rise, they lose their colours and turn a ghostly white. Partly as a result, up to a quarter of the world's corals have been destroyed."

And in November, a multi-year study by 300 scientists concluded that the Arctic was warming twice as fast as the rest of the world and that its ice-cap had shrunk by up to 20 per cent in the past three decades.