Everyone Is Doing Something About The Weather But No One Is Talking About It.
The Coming Global Superstorm by Art Bell and Whitely Streiber notes that the earth's history includes a list of mass extinctions. They contend each extinction results in a better model, as if something other than chance is at work. They liken the earth-moon system to a "life-creating machine" which uses periodic extinctions to actually facilitate the process of evolution.
They note extensive evidence of past advanced human civilizations that accomplished things that we are unable to do today. 400,000 year old throwing sticks have been found which demonstrate advanced understanding of ballistics and trajectory.
What happened to these early advanced civilizations that left their mark in strange ruins around the planet? Almost all human cultures include early myths of upheaval involving violent weather.
About 8200 years ago an extinction of large animals occurred planetwide that has been blamed on the spread of humans and their need to hunt. But something else happened. Mammoths from this time have been found around the arctic circle which were rapidly frozen with flowers in their mouths and stomach.
The freezing was so rapid the flowers were undigested. It is estimated only a sudden drop of temperature to -150 degrees F could have done this.
For most of earth's history, the tropics extended far into northern and southern latitudes. Polar caps were small or non-existent. The recent 3 million year history of glacial-thawing cycles began when the newly risen Central American land bridge redirected ocean currents.
The conditions that give rise to global superstorms arose from this development.
The conditions include sudden increases in Arctic temperatures, melting ice and decreasing ocean salt levels, rising water temperatures, cooling upper atmospheric temperatures and the collapse or redirection of the North Atlantic currents. Decreased ocean and air currents could then allow extremely cold upper level air to crash southward in massive blizzards and flooding, ushering in an ice age if conditions are right.
The Permian extinction (destroyed 95% of all life) and the Cretaceous extinction (destroyed the dinosaurs and 75% of all life) both actually began millions of years before the final die-off episodes. The extinctions were the result of geological and climatic events causing changes that eventually reached crises proportions. We are presently in an extinction period that actually began 3 million years ago and has intensified in the last 20,000 years. Human population has exploded, the authors contend, because climatic imbalances have favored humans over other species.
Human activity in the last 100 years (industrial revolution) has hastened the extinction process by altering atmospheric chemical content, with chemical factories and fossil fuel burning replacing the massive forest fires and volcanic eruptions of past extinctions. Humans are the catastrophe precipitating an extinction climax for which our survival is not assured.
Throughout our current period of global warming, One Whirled View has noted frequent record lows being set. Could these "burps" from the cold upper atmosphere be warnings of greater disturbance if balance is lost and chaos ensues? Only last year were the first 300mph winds ever recorded. Keep an eye open for erratic weather.
Chaos theory was developed by a meteorologist. A multitude of factors interact to create stability in the atmosphere. Any extremes, alone or in combination, can interact as a "critical mass” switch triggering a cascade of events resulting in a global superstorm. Authors Bell and Streiber suggest that the last superstorm froze the wooley mammoths and led to the great flood mythology present in so many cultures.
One of their final chapters on hope suggests that humans also have a "critical mass" switch which will trigger social and geopolitical activity toward survival. They suggest the collective power of each of us making individual wise choices about lifestyle and energy use.
The final chapter betrays this optimism with its examination of all the factors acting to neutralize any attempt to deal with this issue. It is hard to feel hopeful given the current political situation. The friends of fossil fuels are firmly entrenched and tightening the noose around our necks.
Missing from the book's discussion is any nod toward the concept of "biorelativity" advanced years ago by Jeffery Goodman. Essentially, "we are the weather." (Or the earthquake, etc.) As such, we might do well to acknowledge our connection to nature, humble ourselves before creation and seek in our hearts how we might reach a co-creative paradigm with the earth-moon and "life-creating machine" that brought us into being.
It may be our destiny to evolve such a consciousness, if not this time, then during the next cycle or the one after that. But then, nothing precludes our extinction. It is our power to choose. Weather, you like it or not.