Averting Climate Catastrophe?
Ostriches Can’t Keep Their Eyes on the Prize
Confusion prevails around the tropical topic of climate change. The term ‘global warming’ has been replaced by this far more anodyne label since corporate spin doctors and related liars were paid vast sums to apply their talents to distracting the public from the greatest threat planetary human civilization has ever faced (with the possible exception of nuclear technology and weaponry).
Are our rampant industries responsible for today’s undeniable alterations in weather systems, the rapid disappearance of the world’s fresh water supplies and the melting of the icecaps – or are all these effects merely symptoms of grand cycles that have prevailed for millions of years? Do we face catastrophic global heating and concomitant sea level rises or an equally devastating ice age? Is the Sun the only real driver of our planet’s suddenly chaotic weather systems or can we moderate the changing cycles on planet Earth - and even in the heavens?
Despite argument and contention about facts and figures, it’s a foregone conclusion that the effects of human influence on the Earthly ecosystem have never been so profound. Alterations in the makeup of the atmosphere, the disappearance of vegetation from much of the planet’s land surface and the radical depletion of oceanic life – and lifeforms in general – are radical changes for which humans are definitely responsible. Human activity now rivals the powers of the mythical gods and goddesses whose tempestuous wills ruled over our minds in bygone times of civilisation’s infancy.
To understand our present situation we must understand what occurred in the past. As many climate change skeptics (including Australia’s Ian Plimer, for instance) have pointed out, the Earth has undergone six great Ice Ages and levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide were extremely high when each of these major glaciations commenced. As many ask, how can CO2 be a major ‘greenhouse gas’ in light of these findings?
Simplistic thinking fails to recognise the causes and effects of profound events which always occur at the end of each relatively warm interglacial period such as ours, which modern humans have inhabited throughout all clearly recorded history. The beneficent climate of the Holocene era – the current warm interregnum which we inhabit – is the longest interglacial period Earthly life has ever experienced, since planetary glaciation cycles first commenced only a few million years ago. By all known precedent the planet’s higher latitudes should already be covered with miles-thick sheets of ice.
The ends of interglacial periods are marked by global heating which throws vast amounts of water vapour into the atmosphere. This is how so much of the world’s fresh water manages to fall – as snow – on the poles and mountaintops, forming the massive stores of ice that prevail in the long cold millennia of so-called Ice Ages (when much of the world remains quite warm and stable - but quite a bit drier with so much of the world’s available water locked up in icecaps).
At the end of the interglacial warm times, carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are usually poured into the air by unimaginable conflagrations of much of the world’s vegetation. Extraordinary amounts of dust and debris (and more CO2 and greenhouse gases) are thrown into the air by more or less simultaneous volcanic convulsions, chilling the planet in a fairly regular cycle of devastation our intellects have difficulty envisioning, let alone understanding. What can we learn from these precedents?
Solon, the notable ancient wise man of Athens, travelled to the Nile delta two and a half millennia ago to visit the Temple of Sais. He intended to ask the priests there a question which would settle a bet he’d made with a few friends; was there merely one Great Flood, or two? Was the Deluge of Deucalion identical to the Flood of Ogyges – apparently separate events that were both recorded by separate tribes of ancient Greeks - or were there truly two separate Great Floods? *
The priests of Sais (who were reputed to maintain a library of texts containing information going back 50,000 years) replied that the Greeks were a very young and childlike people whose forebears had often been reduced to such barbarism they had no way of recording or passing down the truth of events which had destroyed their (and all other) previous civilizations.
They informed Solon (an uncle of Plato, who recorded his tale for our edification) that the world had been devastated by convulsions of water and fire on at least four occasions, to their knowledge. As one might expect, when the planetary catastrophe was brought about by the element of water, all who inhabited the lowlands were exterminated and many living at higher altitudes survived; on the other hand, when fire from heaven destroys the world the high places are totally consumed.
Many theories have been advanced over the last century or two to explain these grand destructive cycles. Durning the first decades of the 1900s it was a widely recognised and discussed fact that the distribution of ice during the last Ice Age indicated that the planet’s axis had tilted some twenty degrees since the Holocene began. Such planetary tilts are clearly recorded and described in the ancient annals and legends of many peoples, including the Greeks, the Chinese, Egyptians, Australian Aborigines, Amerind tribes and the Vedas of ancient India, to name a few. Instantly frozen mammoths and the sudden extinction of a plethora of species are vividly obvious instances of the devastation that occurred.
Luminaries including Einstein regularly corresponded with now widely vilified visionary mavericks such as Immanuel Velikovsky and Charles Hapgood, attempting to discover what could have possibly caused the Earth to experience such a massive event. Collisions with planetary neighbours or disastrous near misses, cyclic wobbling caused by uneven icecap distribution and a number of other theories competed to provide an explanation for the catastrophic tilting of the globe.
After that time other ideas surfaced, including the notions of Hamaker and Weaver in the 1970s – which, briefly outlined, claim Ice Ages occur when available minerals in soils and continental shelves have been so thoroughly depleted and locked up that all the forests of the world burst into flame in a planetary conflagration, due to the suffocation of bacterial growth that provides nutrients for plants. Soil acidification increases throughout the warm times, binding up minerals and rendering them inaccessible to bacteria and all the lifeforms that depend on this essential base of the planetary food chain.
The collapse of myriad coastal shellfish stocks (whose shells are made of calcium carbonate), which are also primary drivers that maintain stable atmospheric CO2 levels, are another result of mineral depletion and acidification of the oceans due to increased levels of carbon dioxide. The Earth’s biologically stabilised state thus regularly collapses into a new paradigm, and ice ages subsequently grind mountains to dust over tens of millennia, providing freshly mineralised alkaline soils for the next burst of growth in the next interglacial era.
A singular advantage of this hypothesis is that if demineralisation is truly the cause of cyclic ice ages (and not merely a symptom), humans can alter this grand cycle by remineralising soils and coastal fringes, thereby holding off the coming glaciation. All it would take is the widespread application of huge amounts of crushed rock, pulverised to a very fine dust, into coastal regions and watersheds. This would regenerate soil bacteria, vegetation and shellfish and fix vast amounts of CO2 into soils and seabeds.
Whether Hamaker’s theories explain the nature of glacial cycles or not, they provide clean green solutions to many of our dilemmas without the need for last-ditch recourses such as widely promoted and largely discredited technical fixes, like dumping toxic pollutants into the oceans and atmosphere in irresponsible experiments that will almost certainly fail to mediate global chemistry and temperature in beneficial ways.
Another less comforting theory is outlined in The Serpent at the End of Precession,+ which states that the vast cycles of glaciation are a result of polar flips and earth tilts and occur whenever the solar system passes through the galactic plane, at roughly 700,000 year intervals. The entire solar system is a huge gyroscopic structure and grand climatic cycles can quite easily be (ice) sheeted home to an even greater and inexorable galactic cycle.
The Earth is not the only planet currently experiencing the effects of climate chaos; a second Great Red Spot has recently formed on the planet Jupiter and the icecaps of Mars have been retreating at accelerated rates, amongst a raft of other observed changes. These changes indicate what we’ve always known – that the Sun is the primary driver of all weather in the solar system.
Does this mean that the current preponderance of greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere is not a result of human activity, or that whatever we attempt to avert destruction our civilisation is foredoomed to annihilation? Not at all. CO2 is the least of our problems; we’re continuing to pump hundreds of thousands of lethal and toxic compounds into our air, water and soils at a suicidal rate. We already face potential sterilisation and species extinction without recourse to solar activity or grand galactic cycles.
Our chronic pollution of the world’s ecosystems (and our children’s bodies and minds) has to cease soon – preferably yesterday - and global commitments to clean up our act are an historic first step to accepting our responsibilities as the climax predator on the planet. It’s time to realise that we’ve become a virtual collective deity. It’s time to adopt truly adult sensibilities and virtues, and work for something far greater than endless acquisition of material goods and comforts at the expense of our very lives.
It’s tempting to believe that spewing never ending amounts of carbon dioxide into the air might be a way of staving off the next glaciation, but it’s actually more likely that doing so will result in even more rapidly catastrophic change. Our weather systems are already chaotic and all our food crops are already likely to wither in the present regime of randomly changing rainfall patterns, shrinking rivers and increasing temperature.
Global heating may be the very mechanism that brings about ice ages; sea level rise places catastrophic strain on precariously balanced tectonic systems and can easily lead to massive earthquake activity and the concomitant vulcanism that instigates enduring global winters. Our entire biosphere exists in a delicate state of (dis)equilibrium and as scientists have pointed out since the 1980s, humankind is engaged in an unprecedented and potentially irreversible experiment with the extraordinarily thin membrane of Earth’s atmospheric envelope.
Humans have achieved a stage where we are now in a position to moderate the cosmic cycles which have prevailed in the past. Just as life is the antitheses of entropy, consciousness is the prime cause, creator and governor of all material effects. This commonplace of quantum mechanics is still largely misunderstood and disbelieved, but it’s the truth nonetheless; mind not only affects matter, it patterns every material substance and event.
The universe bears only a superficial resemblance to all the images we hold of it, and all the ideas we’ve been routinely taught to explain its form and existence are provisional at best and at worst dangerously wrong-headed. The same is true of widespread beliefs about the inalterability of human nature and the potential of your mind to alter and create events in the manifest world. Long-running and replicated experiments have demonstrated not only that human beings (and life in general) routinely alter the odds in their favour, but that it’s possible to alter solar activity with a careful application of collective will.
Believe it or not, you aren’t a mortal animal inhabiting a finite universe at all, but an immortal being patterning your existence in an infinite holographic multiverse. We each have an infinite number of realities to choose from and experience and the world is made of mindstuff. Everything you do, say and think is significant in ways most domesticated primates can scarcely imagine. What were you thinking an hour ago, or ten minutes ago? If you’re not aware of your thoughts how can you possibly note their effects?
What kind of world would you like to live in? We all have the choice of inhabiting blind cycles that follow historical precedent like clockwork, or to recreate the prevailing patterns into an entirely different future – and change human nature itself. Either way, if you want to survive and thrive it’s vitally necessary examine your mind, heart, deepest motivations and very soul - utterly transforming your reality by examining all your hopes and fears, and changing them into viable conscious tools of evolution. Evolution isn’t over. The human race is not yet run. Enlightenment and survival require not just transformation, but complete metamorphosis!
The future is in your hands. Live long and prosper; turn on, tune in, OPT OUT! Together we can create a far better millennium than life on Earth has yet experienced…
by R.Ayana
PS – I’ll be having a party in 2013 and you’re all invited!
For Mind Over Matter see http://newilluminati.blog-city.com/global_consciousness_project_1.htm
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