Thursday, January 04, 2007

A general sense of angst

So I don't know if it's the balmy faux-winter New York's experiencing at the moment, but something prompted me to finally to watch the Al Gore film on global warming, An Inconvenient Truth. And since then, I've been living life in a general state of continous panic.

The world is ending, and in fifty years it will all be gone. There'll be global warming and ice age and waterworld all in one, and it's all coming at us now.

I spoke to a number of people about the findings on the documentary, and to my horror, at least half of them reacted with a, "Oh I don't want to think about it, don't talk about global warming!"

WHAT. Don't talk about it? Don't we HAVE to talk about it? How else will we ever DO anything?

This morning, I picked up a sandwich for lunch, and it came in: Paper packaging 1 --> paper packaging 2 --> plastic carrier bag 1 --> plastic carrier bag 2 --> 50 paper tissues. Does it seriously call for this level of armoured security to bring a sandwich back from the store? Global warming is now one degree higher.

I was just working myself into a right old panic about global warming, when Delta and I watched a different documentary about Yellowstone being about to erupt. So apparently Yellowstone is a latent volcano which erupts every 600-650,000 years. And apparently it's been 640,000 years since the last eruption. And scientists have measured increased heat, more frequent geyser bursts and rising ground levels in the park over the past two years. Go figure.

So then I stopped panicking about global warming and started focusing on the more imminent threat of the Yellowstone apocalypse.

I suppose the good thing about this, at least I've stopped panicking about retirement savings and the 401k.

2 comments:

Inihtar said...

If it's any consolation, ever since you chided at me for trying to use an extra plastic bag for onions, I've been very careful about wasting bags and paper, and recycle religiously.

Ficali McDelta (nee McPipe) said...

:)
You're a doll!

~FMP