Doomsday............Why Not?by | 29-07-2011 18:00 |
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As 2012 draws near people often ask, ?Are we doomed?? The instinctive answer seems to be ?No?, but when we analyze the global trend of events, we are forced to think again. Almost everywhere, people are experiencing different climates than what is considered normal. Cities and countries around the world are experiencing their hottest summers, the worst winters or the wettest monsoons. Glaciers are melting very rapidly. More than half of the world?s major rivers do not make it to the sea at some point of the year. Very year, we hear the news about natural calamities ravaging various places and killing people by the thousands. When hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans in 2005, the world watched in horror, but these days, every now and then a new storm hits the coast but people are not surprised. Similarly, Mumbai was hit by its worst floods in 2008 and people were moved; but people were not struck when the same happened the next year. News of severe flooding in China, Bangladesh and even in Nepal has become so frequent that we do not seem to care. Earthquakes, some of the strongest in history shook Chile and Haiti last year. Other major ones that occurred in China and Pakistan had made the news earlier. Recently, the volcanic eruption in Iceland had obstructed air-traffic over Europe causing major problems. Is the chain of events mere coincidences? No, they are not. They are warning signs to us that we have gone too far with the Earth or are trying to do so. The Earth is changing. The Earth is changing because we are changing it. It is because of global warming. We are all aware of that. Most of us know what the cause of this change is and what actions need to be taken to prevent it. Why are not we doing something about it then? The simple answer is that we CANNOT. We talk about cutting the carbon emissions and going green. But is it feasible or even possible? Airplanes, for example, produce a lot of greenhouse gases. Instead of phasing them out, we are producing more and more of them. The production of vehicles, cars or bikes is growing instead of being the other way round. Even if we start to decrease the production, many people will go jobless and socially, we will be facing another different problem. We are so used to using lights that we cannot live without them. We cannot even think about turning the lights of New York or Las Vegas off. For us to overcome this situation, a lot of people, especially the big corporations and multinational companies have to sacrifice most of their assets, which they are not ready to do at any rate. We can imagine how efficient we are by looking at how much time it is taking for British Petroleum (BP) to clean up an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico despite all the money, technology, resources and equipments they have. Human beings might just be the next species, like the Dinosaurs, to be wiped off the surface of the Earth after an era of untouchable dominance. The bandwagon of human progress is moving at too fast a rate to come to a halt before the inevitable crash. We may well already be past the point of no-return. If we are to perish, it will not be as a result of not acting in time. It will be the result of not realizing the urgency of the problem earlier than we have done. The only faint hope we have is that we may be able to conjure something for ourselves by developing some kind of miracle technology; but a miracle of that proportion is more suited to fantasies than reality. As of the current state of events, the Mayan prophecy of Doomsday in 2012 looks a realistic possibility. |
