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LONDON AND NYC TO BE UNDERWATER?
London and New York are under threat of becoming the world's first underwater cities as greenhouse gases reach levels not seen for millions of years, according to warning today.
The British government's chief scientific adviser Sir David King said there was enough carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to melt all the ice on the planet - and submerge major cities such as London, New York and New Orleans.
He says, "You might think it is not wise, since we are currently melting ice so fast, to have built our big cities on the edge of the sea where it is now obvious they cannot remain. On current trends, cities such as London, New York and New Orleans will be among the first to go."
King's comments were made at the launch of a scientific expedition to Cape Farewell in the Arctic, which aims to raise students' awareness of climate change.
He said, "I am sure that climate change is the biggest problem that civilisation has had to face in 5,000 years."
A spokesman for the scientist said: "We are talking about the very worst case scenario. If nothing is done to reduce greenhouse gases, and then we are talking about hundreds if not thousands of years."
The tide will turn
I am burning up some ozone as we speak in the form of midnight oil as I contemplate that Insomnia is not a place near Bulgaria as I stare at the monitor with pizzas for eyes. It's nearly four am and I have been tossing all night, unable to wake up my wife. She claims I make too much noise lovemaking and that my snoring puts her off. I spent four hours listening to owls obviously unable to get some shuteye themselves. I live in a suburb of Europe's smallest city. The Isle of Ely. (30,000 folks, a cathedral and WH Smith) What is absurd is that all the nocturnal raptors within the Fen decided to love-call on my roof tonight. They don't give a hoot do they?
This sleepily brings me to the dilemma mentioned above. Icecaps melting and whatnot. I am much maligned as to the smattering of knowledge I have about my person concerning the Ecosystem and it's confliction and what confuses the average Joe with a mishmash of hysteria and comic book speech bubbles from the mouths of the media and people who didn't try hard enough at school. I don't know. Yellowstone Park is supposed to erupt into a super volcano that will wipe out civilisation. Old Faithful is a ninety second time bomb already 30,000 years overdue according to the last math. The Gulf of Mexico where the meteor hit (hence its horseshoe shape) that caused the extinction of dinosaurs within three hours and its Gulf Stream will cause an El Nino, tidal waves and hurricanes so powerful they will have you running to the store for more duck tape. Blahdey bla blah.
But I reckon I have it all figured out.
If we study what happens when ice melts in our G&T, we can see that it will only melt if we sit too near a log fire in the pub. If on the other hand (depending if you are left or right-handed of course when you hold your drink) you sit in a bit of draught coming from the 'Gents' your ice will not melt quite as fast. Now, your liquid lunch is like the glaciers of the Antarctica. The only difference is, no 'Gents at the North or South Pole. But if you take a large bottle of Gin to these areas it probably will mean 'London Dry', for some time. I know what you are thinking in America! What about Canada? Already full of snow that, of course may melt, and flood the area. Just store ginger ale in your basement and that could mean you will save this beautiful country just by keeping 'Canada Dry'.
Greenhouse gases.
Co2 is more important to keep in the atmosphere than oxygen. It's only humans and animals that need it after all. That is what Carbon Dioxide is. Bad breath and fizzy drinks that always go flat eventually. Carbon is necessary to feed plant growth. Forest fires are essential to feed those forests. Dead trees become fossilised and carbon provides much needed power and fuel. From an evolutionary beginning, when life started with that first spark in a boiling, volcanic organic soup, where amino acids and protons, electrons, neutrons and various elements became fused to form the simplest form of life. Long before Jade was around, huge earthquakes, super volcanoes plunged the world into a millennia of nuclear winters with a blanket of magma forced skywards with giant clouds, hundreds of miles up into the atmosphere and thousands of miles thick. But as the earth cooled it brought the earth into a riot of colour and teeming with some of the most colossal, lumbering monsters to ever walk the earth. Once again, Jade was still not born because dinosaurs don't have sunroofs, yet amidst all these poisonous gases, the earth in all its splendour was born and has flourished ever since.
I live in the Fens of the South East that was once under eight feet of water. "200 years ago 4000 men from Holland came over with just shovels and the sweat of their mighty brows and dug 12000 miles of dykes across this wet wilderness without the use of snorkels. Ditches were dug at intervals in a grid that subside the waters. If you pour maple syrup on a breakfast waffle and watch the maple find its own level in the indentations then the concept is the same principle but the other way around. The ditches fill and it was water instead of maple syrup. Waffles taste shite when emersed in ditch water. This magnificent engineering feat that brought these dishevelled lackies from the flatlands of Holland paid their own way to get here. Well, they went Dutch, (where the expression came from originally). They played poker to get ship passes. They sold all their belongings to bring their families here. They worked and mingled with Fen folk and soon were speaking Double Dutch.
This part of East Anglia will never flood. If all the icecaps melted tomorrow I would still be able to go outside of my house in carpet slippers. Yet, we are below sea level here? Why is that so? Because we have the advantage of very high riverbanks. The Dutch had to put the earth from the ditches somewhere, and with no JCB's invented yet, they chucked the shovelled earth along the riverside in great heaps. Some of our riverbanks are over 20ft high!! Lots of 'navvies' hated shovelling earth that got in their way and had nightmares. So they tried to put it all behind them.
Stubble burning in my part of the world proves my point. Stubble burning still happens after a harvest when the environmental agency isn't watching. For those readers who think that stubble burning is something that happens to tramps who have their cigarette lighter turned up on full, when trying to light a fag while they are too drunk, this bears no resemblance to rows of wasted fodder and chaff being set alight. (Oh, I don't know though?) Why, do our humble farmers do this ritually? Because the carbon produced by stubble-burning is rich in minerals and enriches the soil when ploughed in.
The rain forests of South America depend solely on sustained growth by aged trees that die through this astonishing process and sets up a natural cycle to produce more space and rare sunlight to be replaced by a dozen more young trees.
You don't have to be called Archimedes to work out that all of us are made of 76% water and 24% of, you've got it, yes, that's right, carbon. Enough to start a BarBQ with some good-sized relatives. Talking of which our nearest relatives, the primates, or in my case, my nearest relative is Aunty Dolly from the day centre around the corner, needs many hundreds of square kilometres of rain forest to swing from tree to tree. They cannot do this with deforestation and the destructive 'slash and burn evil' that presides over their habitat. The apes need to get home of a night. You only have to look into the eyes a female monkey with her young and see her terror. So, when I saw her face, now, I'm a believer. Not a trace of doubt, in my mind.
The last slice of Forest Ghetto.
Imagine the vital hedgerows that continue to disappear in this country? Worst scenario? There would be nothing to cling to on the way home from the pub. Nothing to conceal your fondness of Big Phyllis, the barmaid, from the 'Hat and Feathers'. People would love to see her privets.
We say that every year a portion of rainforest the size of Wales disappears through the razing to the ground of healthy lush foliage thousands of years old. Ok, then what's wrong with just getting rid of Wales instead. This would solve the problem. Of course we would have to set up detention centres but at least that little bit of Welsh rarebit Catherine Zeta Jones could meet someone of her own age. The Welsh won't mind, they will probably sing all the way through the experience and want a game of Rugger' at some stage. Mind you, why do they eat so many leeks? It's an onion isn't it? I bet they have breath to melt the tyres off a car. No wonder they have a flag with a Dragon breathing fire. They don't wash them properly either. I told my mate, 'Taffy', to rinse them thoroughly in a colander once, and he refused, claiming that it was already 'full of leaks'. He was caught stealing one from a field once and arrested for taking a leek in public. Leeks as opposed to onions will not make your eyes water, unless one, is placed firmly inside your body during the heat of the moment and a lack of batteries. Don't try this at home unless you use butter. Just a small nob will do.
The Welsh! What are they like? Ok, I will tell you. Errrr, can't think of anything, but sheep will probably be in the equation somewhere along the line. Lets face it, you rarely see an ugly one, do you?
Carbon dating.
This is nothing to do with having sex with Rexco nuts. This is an accurate way to see how old relics or fossils are. This technology was first used to find out how old Dennis Norden is.
The object has to be kept stationary during the analysis so it would be very difficult, for instance, to carbon date Lionel Blair for instance, apart from his dental records of course. The Irish 'double' act, 'The Proclaimers' would be carbon copies. This method can pinpoint ages of things million of years old within a window of just 300 years. If your spaghetti meal was found later than this, it could be 'passed a carbon era.'
Carbon is essential. For every tree that is 'slashed and burned' a thousand others re-furbish the forest naturally. Our human presence is insignificant when you think that the rainforests of South America are the size of 12 million Epping Forests and they don't even have a park attendant with a small hoe and one of those 'pick-ey up' litter-sticks.
Worry about tree destruction when tree surgeons are let loose with a 'lopper' in your back garden. Some bloke from Cork came around my house to 'nip at my plums'. He said he felt "like a bit of 'prune'". I said he looked a bit of twat as well.
We all bemoan the choking global atmosphere. But cars are manufactured so fuel-efficient nowadays; they actually have cleaner air through the grill than its emission at the rear. Which is more than be said of Jade again.
Poor cow
All the dead livestock carcasses from the 'foot and mouth' epidemic were incinerated and made into, you've guessed it 'fertiliser'. So carbon from perfectly healthy animals were put in the ground to produce grass for healthy cows to graze on. Yes, 'over grazing' can be bad for the environment. This is to breed cows for burger meat, but at least they don't have to eat them, or wear gaudy, ill-fitting uniforms and a silly hat. If you gave a burger to a cow, it could very easily be a former friend. But, if the cow ate it, the poor animal would be dead within an hour. Herbivores cannot digest meat. Their gut will disintegrate.
It's a well-known fact that many of the innocent creatures that died at the hands of Tony Blair could have escaped death especially if they were black and white ones. They could have grazed near pubs with tables outside and hid amongst the Guinness.
Even humans that are vegetarians, unlike cannibals that are not humanitarians, may still release carbon into the atmosphere through eating too many pulses. Ozone depletion is 99% down to, flatulent 'tree huggers' who look far unhealthier than people in fish and chip queues. Dyslexic vegetarians have been known to smoke forty courgettes a day, too. Not very environmentally healthy. Woolly hats and Citroen Diane's will not help the environment. I can only associate Armageddon with synthetic sensible shoes and people who do not floss, and say "Jeepers" a lot
Look at Australia. All those Bar-B-Q's do not cause green house gases. How can they have harmed or endangered their own environment? The kangaroo population has exploded since they found harmony with the habitat and other wildlife, or Australians. Three kangaroos to every human reside together in that vast country. Most nights at the Sydney Opera house the place is literally 'jumping'. You can't blame Australians for crimes they commit against the environment. They were in enough trouble when they first arrived there. You can, however, chastise them, for liking the song 'Waterloo' that they played all the time in the seventies and eighties. It was the Swedish quartet's Eurovision pop chart blaster, that was their very first hit still and still popular in all parts of OZ even now. It was an Abba Original.
Snow joke.
It's not funny about the icecaps melting. It's not nice to have the prospect of our polar summits suddenly melt all at once. But lets do the sums. Here's an example. I defrosted my fridge once and put a chunk of ice in my dogs bowl the size of bowling ball. She had that ice in her dish for the whole day and it was at least 80 degrees in my kitchen. Plus the dog was trying to, bite, chew and lick it, for hours at a time. In between that disgusting thing that dogs do when you have guest she was biting , chewing and licking the lump of ice too. It wasn't until I got up the next day that it had almost completely melted. Now, say, there was an iceberg the size of Liverpool and a chunk the size of Worksop fell off it, because of a slight rise in climate temperature, over the next fifty years. That iceberg, (remember, we are talking of one and not the hundreds of thousands of bigger lumps of pack ice out there.) is at least 100 million times bigger than the piece of ice I gave to my dog, and that took a day to melt. So, according to my figures, 100 million days are left before any significant threat to the planet need to be heeded. Giving us time to enjoy the Indian summers we have of late to the full.
Breaking the banks
As for flooding? The council should forget sandbags, and use the flash flood effect to its full hydroelectric potential. High street torrents could be directed through large funnels and used with a series of underwater propellers to harness electricity to power generators we need because the power would have been cut off. Alternatively, the recent floods could be used to grow rice and other waterlogged crops. Venice, copes very well with these type of emergencies all the year round. Surely, we could use barges and canal boats as a travel alternative to get to the shops? You would not have pesky locks to manhandle and the Norfolk broads would have a heap of new short cuts. Tesco's could dispense food in vacuum packs only, and 'float' the food to you at checkouts run from small dinghies. Small grappling hooks could be used to lodge complaints.
Yes. London and New York would be under water. The sewers would be overwhelmed but the water authorities are not interested in ageing sewer systems. They prefer to just drop the matter, and just go through the motions, pooh poohing any ideas from others that have set their stool upon them. Hovercrafts would have to be used down the Strand or Central Park. Now, this is when the shit really hits the fan.
Raw sewage will cause Typhus and Dysentery. London will reinvent the plague. The Thames will heave with disease as it did in the days of Samuel Pepys. Hotdog vendors will make a fortune more than usual. The tubes will become human aquariums.
The answer?
Use dredgers to collect all the 'bottom squeeze' up. Stuff lorry containers with the 'gloop', keeping them afloat with car tyres, with all the 'poopiedoodoos and grunties' and then dump it on 10 Downing Street. Mr Blair will then know what it feels like for his nation to have been shat on from a great height for a change.
Global warming is no different than a 'housewarming.'
You didn't ask to get invited.
Half the people you meet don't know what planet they are on.
If they do recognise you they suffocate you all night.
There is no atmosphere.
You wish the world would stop and you could get off.
The queue for the loo means you have to pollute the environment by pissing in the bushes.
You recycle your wine by hiding it under the stairs so you can pick it up with your coat later.
After some homemade beer you recycle it all over the hostesses 'gownless evening strap'.
It would mean the world to you if you could just go home.
In your bid for freedom you fall over the wheelie bin and join its contents on the lawn.
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