The End Of The World As We Know It

I watched the very end of a 20/20 rerun last night on the "Last Days" of the Earth -- about global warming and the effects it could have in the next few decades. Pretty scary, actually. Since Greenland is melting faster than the experts expected, my Florida relatives may be searching for homes inland in the next 30 to 50 years, according to the show. You know, St. Louis is about as far inland as you can get (note to Florida relatives).

I also caught the tail end of an interview with Should-Have-Been-President Al Gore. I mean Ex-Vice-President Gore. In case you didn't know, he has been working on environmental issues for the past few years. I really wanted to see Al Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth but since we have kids, and babysitters are hard to come by, and I'm saving up some money for a sitter so we can go see Spamalot, we'll have to wait until it comes out on DVD. I just added it to my Blockbuster queue, so we can see it when it is released in October. Just in case you were wondering.

And then this afternoon, NPR had an interview on California's new environmental regulations, which I partially listened to while driving home. You know, if I lived on the coast, I'd be pretty concerned about global warming, too.

This is the sort of thing that gives me twinges of . . . concern, or more like fear, that I've brought children into the world and what kind of problems they are going to face in the future. Maybe I'm just being overly dramatic, but I do think about these things from time to time. And then I get mad that I have to unwrap 20 cubic feet of plastic from every toy made today. And just about everything is wrapped in hard, heat sealed plastic containers that are impossible to open without a pair of scissors or wire cutters and you end up stabbing yourself with the scissors or on a sharp piece of plastic. Enough with the plastic, already! How about a box for Buzz Lightyear? Huh? Or maybe just a bar code on his rear end -- why can't Buzz just sit on the shelf with a price tag attached with a string like the good ol' days? No, Buzz has to be sealed in plastic so adults have to wrestle Buzz out of the package while all of his buttons are going off and Buzz is endlessly repeating "I don't think we're in the Gamma Quadrant anymore." Thanks for letting me vent.

Anyway, this evening I was checking out the weather page of one of the local news stations because I thought it might be raining and instead of looking out the window like most sane people, I logged on the internet to check out the Doppler radar (I know, talk about a strange thing to do, but I'm part of the wired generation -- I wanted to see where the rain was coming from and how much longer I could expect to get rain . . .) and our weather guy had some info on this Super Typhoon Ioke.

Apparently, it's going to wipe out Wake Island. And, by the way, it's a "super typhoon." Global warming, anyone?

But I also stumbled on this cool website from NASA called the "Earth Observatory." There's some really cool stuff on it. Enjoy the website, enjoy the Earth. Recycle something today. I know I am. (I'm becoming such a tree hugger . . .)