Before the Fatal Flood
Ted Folkert
November 3, 2016
Donald Trump likes to start rumors by saying: “some people are saying that …… blah blah blah”. Of course, what he should say is: “I would like you to believe that …… blah blah blah” – to support my incessant fabrications, exaggerations, innuendos, and outright lies and my sacrificial and benevolent willingness to single-handedly make this country great again.
What about our environment and the future condition of our planet? You won’t hear about this from Trump, he thinks global warming is all a hoax, but a lot of people are saying troubling things about the survival of Planet Earth to continue supporting human life. That may sound like a stretch, but if you believe 97% of our scientists, it isn’t a stretch at all, but a situation we must correct and reverse or it could soon be too late.
The troubling terms we hear and read about include:
- Carbon dioxide emissions
- Climate change
- Coral reef depletion
- Degraded planet
- Devastating droughts
- Devastation of living conditions
- Extreme weather
- Fossil fuel dependency
- Glacier melting
- Global warming
- Greenhouse effect
- Thin atmosphere
Lots of terms that we hear and that should be of concern. Let’s see if we can put this list of potential and real Earthly maladies together to make one sentence which will describe to fix we are in:
Our way of life, which requires massive use of energy sources, causes us to have a fossil fuel dependency, which causes us to constantly mine and drill and produce massive amounts of coal, oil and natural gas to burn to power our addictions, such as electricity, cars, heat, air conditioning, stuff, things, etc., virtually everything we do, which produces excessive carbon dioxide emissions in the thin atmosphere surrounding this molten rock we inhabit, which creates a greenhouse effect, which causes global warming, which causes climate change, which causes devastating droughts, which causes extreme weather, which causes rising ocean temperatures, which causes depletion of coral reefs, which threatens ocean life, and glacier melting, which causes rising sea levels, which is causing and will continue to cause devastation of living conditions in many parts of the world and, if allowed to continue unabated, will make the planet unable to support human life.
So, the message is clear. We have a fatalistic problem.
What have we done and what can we do about it?
Unfortunately, to date, we all seem reluctant to take necessary measures to correct or change the course of these activities to save the planet to support life for future generations. Although 97% of our scientific community agrees that this devastation is eminent, we just can’t agree to deal with the problem head-on immediately, while, if we act now, we can likely reverse the calamity.
Those who are concerned about this rapidly upcoming disaster for numerous parts of our planet should watch “Before the Flood”, a film produced from a worldwide exploration of this startling demise by Leonardo DiCaprio and his environmental experts from around the world. The film shows in detail just what is taking place, the causes, the devastation, and possible steps we can take to reverse the explosion of maladies with which we are now, or will soon be, confronted.
The film addresses such environmental damaging activities for fossil fuel recovery as: mountain top removal, fracking, and offshore drilling, all of which do extreme damage to our planet. These truths are poo-pooed by the corporations who prosper from the activities and are accepted by the rest of us as simply harmless collateral damage in supplying us with the drugs to feed our addiction – fossil fuels – the basis of our entire economy.
The film discusses and illustrates the prediction that Greenland is melting away and may entirely disappear, a climate station in the Artic exhibits the melting of fifty feet of ice, all of which melted into the ocean, South Florida could be washed away, stable temperatures of 12,000 years are now moving toward 4 degrees of warming which will exacerbate the time table of the predictions of demise.
It discusses the fact that Germany now uses 30% renewable energy, Denmark uses 100% renewable energy, Sweden is moving toward 100% renewable energy, in Paris 195 countries committed to do everything possible to change the trend but no penalties or enforcement provisions were put in place.
This should be mandatory viewing for all inhabitants of the planet, without exception. It should encourage and mandate immediate action for every country to achieve 100% renewable energy and save the planet.
This is an unavoidable challenge for our youth. They are well-educated, intelligent, energetic, and have the most to lose by allowing our leaders to ignore the fatalistic problem and vote as directed by the hand that feeds them, our corporations engaged in such practices as mentioned above.
Think about it!