By Rick Sklader in Minnesota
The rate of rapid destructive change of our entire climate and all the earth’s distinct and interconnected ecosystems is as stunning as it is horrifyingly frightening. The pace of these changes is quite difficult to come to and wrap one’s head around, considering that what we’re witnessing has occurred in a nanosecond when compared to geological or cosmological time.
I was born after World War II and grew up here in the greater Minneapolis area. Even after moving to the West Coast in late summer 1981, Minnesota continued experiencing relatively normal winters, which to you neophytes means sub-zero temperatures and lots and lots of snow. Sometime in the late 90s Minnesota started warming in the fall and throughout the winter, although sporadically at first.
Our first winter back here was 2010/11 and it was the cold snowy weather of old, but that’s no more. It is December 2nd. I just checked the time and it’s 1:17am, but outside it’s 48 degrees Fahrenheit when it should be 18. Still, the local weather clown declared yesterday was a “top ten weather day”. I’m hoping by this weekend that this extended episode of The Twilight Zone will end, even though the handwriting so to speak, is everywhere.
Other species on the planet have been responding to these alterations in the climate now for decades. There’s multiple reports in a range of scientific journals (look them up) that discuss how every insect species globally has either been moving north or south away from the equator, or to higher elevations, which had been going on for at least the past 20 years and perhaps longer. Many species have already gone extinct, because they had no place to go or were deemed unimportant to the global bloodsucking class. Similarly we can no longer talk of invasive species, as adaptation to adverse circumstances is a natural process for survival.
I mentioned this before, but it’s well worth repeating. Almost every bird species is getting smaller. This is an evolutionary adaptation caused exclusively by changes to the climate system, caused by capitalism choking Earth’s atmosphere with greenhouse gases. For many years we’ve been told that polar bears could go extinct, due to shrinking Arctic ice. Polar bears have been migrating South and mating with other bear species to survive.
These changes, drastic as they are, still do not seem to be sufficient to move the mass of humanity. Maybe the fact that we’re running out of what’s needed to make all the crap we don’t need that just makes us feel emptier and those things we really do need (nutritious food and clean water only two prime examples), we can’t, since it no longer exists or do you honestly believe that every supermarket is in cahoots to only sell five kinds of wild fish, while they increase farm-raised “fish”? Which is actually accelerating the degradation of the oceans, the principal source of our oxygen.
Before I forget, there’ll be more rain than snow in the Arctic where it’s been warming twice as fast as anywhere on the planet, meaning more intense and longer-lasting Polar vortices deep in the heart of Texas, as well as melting permafrost, which is holding countless tons of methane, which no species can breathe. Once we believed we’d be dead before the worst of this nightmare came to pass. No longer.
From the US socialist website Facts for Working People. The original can be found here.
