I decided to create a brand new category The WOW Moment, to express my thoughts on hot topics regarding what is happening in the environmental, political, corporate and social world at the moment. To be honest, it is things I incorporate in my other articles anyways, but I feel like a specific category is necessary, considering the amount of lies, cheats, and absurd, nevertheless real and true, news we get every single day.
To inaugurate this category, I have decided to talk about an article that made me want to create The WOW Moment in the first place.
Recently, I stumbled upon this article:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/mar/18/billion-dollar-polar-geoengineering-to-slow-melting-glaciers-global-flooding in the The Observer.
If you cannot be bothered reading it, or more realistically, you don't have time, here is a short summary:
An article published in Nature explained how the geoengineering of glaciers was essential in order to slow down the increasing warmer temperatures in the Arctic and Antarctica.
(For those of you who don't know what geoengineering is, which I expect will be 99% of people who read this, here is a couple of definitions:
Oxford Dictionary: the deliberate, large-scale manipulation of an environmental process that affects the Earth climate, in hope to counteract the effects of climate change.
Mine: the human-made and human-focused manipulation of the Earth processes and ecosystems in order to mitigate (not make as bad) stuff that are happening because of us in the first place. #guilt)
This article explains several ways the melting of glaciers and icebergs could be slowed down, such as:
- Building a 100-meter wall on the seabed across a 5-kilometre wide Fjord in Western Greenland, which would reduce influxes of warming sea water, responsible for eroding the glaciers' base.
- Constructing artificial islands in glaciers in Antarctica in order to buttress them, limit their collapse and therefore slow down ice melt.
- Circulating cool brine (salted water) underneath glaciers to prevent their base from melting.
Evidently, all of that would cost tens of billions of dollars (as a reminder, 1 billion is 1,000,000,000: once again, that is a lot of zeros).
You got the gist, and if you want to know more, I strongly suggest that you read the article yourself, which obviously explains everything I summed up much better than I do.
My point is not to sum up the article but rather to understand where we're at. Scientists, who probably have the best interests of humanity at heart (most of time), considering in this case that they do not want millions of people to be dislodged from their home because of rising waters, are saying that we now NEED to build fake engineering stuff in order to prevent glaciers from melting. Not that we haven't played with nature before: the actual fact that we messed up in the first place by treating the planet as a massive garbage bag is the reason why top scientists are saying we need to build fake icebergs today. And they're not even joking.
While Donald Trump is typing on his phone to tweet as quickly as possible, Putin being busy getting re-elected for the millionth time, Macron travelling around the globe for unknown reasons, Theresa May fighting for and against Brexit (we don't really know anymore), and Asia getting strong on capitalism, scientists are telling us that we need to build fake blocks to prevent glaciers from melting and therefore avoid mass coastal emigration, for a modest sum of billions of dollars.
And nobody says anything. We keep buying loads of crappy things, made from oil (reminder: plastic = made from oil) that are made not to last, with money we struggle to make, in jobs in we don't even like. Not to say humanity is bipolar but I mean, come on, surely that triggers one or two questions right? Or is it just me?
As per usual, never forget: knowledge is power. So go and be knowledgeable.