Is it just me or is it HOT on this planet? Crikey. I want to break open iced champagne every time the bastard sun sinks below Lion’s Head (our flat faces west). So is this that global warming thingy they’ve been talking about for ages? Is it here with all its molten bells and whistles? To find out I went surfing…first spot: Google, of course.
After the 2004 tsunami reinforced how devastating short-term sea level surges could be, a Geological Survey-led team set to work trying to pin down the potential effects of global warming - and resultant rising sea levels - on the world’s population in general.
The team apparently found that a 30m rise in sea levels would cover 9,5-million square kilometers of land worldwide; even a rise of just five meters) would affect 669 million people and cause 5,4-million square kilometres of land to veer very much towards the damp.
So that’s the bad news, O.K.? The good news, and really you need to hear this, is that currently, oceans are allegedly rising at between 1-2mm per year. That’s truly miniscule. So you only need to pick out a new cozzy sometime in the next million years, if you do the maths.
Still, a lot of people are bang for the coming flood. The other day I was talking to a friend whom I consider to be somewhat astute, and he said “No ways will I buy property anywhere below De Waal Drive; uh uh, no way.”
Personally, I blame popular culture for all this alarmism. The Day After Tomorrow and all that nonsense. It won’t even be the day after the day after tomorrow! Unless, of course - and this really is a big unless - the polar ice caps have start melting rapidly….uh oh…
Wait a minute, let me just look on the net here.
Hmmm.
Hmmmmm.
Ah – O.K.. So apparently, at the end of the last ice age, ice melt did indeed cause the seas to rise in a relatively short 500 years. And then also, I see here (thanks Google Alerts) that National Geographic did report just the other day that Polar Bears might be extinct in 43 years, because of the rapidly retreating ice in the Arctic region.
To be or Knut to be seems to be the question.
The truth is, no one really knows. We’re all guessing; even those walking brainstems chaindrinking coffee and nerve tonic at the Royal Swedenborge Institute of Advanced Pretentiousness. But just to be on the safe side, let’s hypothesise. Let’s mentally prepare ourselves by saying that, all right; our seas will possibly rise by 3,4cm in the next decade.
That isn’t actually sci-fi nonsense, according to a study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, considering the impact of the industrial revolution and our crazily out of hand CO2 emissions. But 3.4 cm? That’s only from
here> > to about here.
Surely not too bad? What would it mean for our everyday life, this 3.4cm?
Let’s look ahead. Ten – no, make it twenty – years.
Picture yourself standing on top of Table Mountain. There’s a bored Japanese tourist next to you, logging directly into Facebook via a neural link. Add to flends. Add to flends. Add to flends. Looking out into the bay, you see the flat, bleak terrain of Robben Island. Oh wait, you don’t. There’s only enough space left for a Wimpy restaurant; the rest of it has been turned into a submarine Apartheid Museum with the occasional view of a passing Great White.
Further out to sea is a lattice of small islands connected to each other via floating pontoon-supported roadways – part of the global initiative to house something like 17 million refugees, relocated from sea level or sub-sea level regions. Suddenly you’re interrupted by a MSM (Mental Short Message) that pops up irritatingly in your mind’s eye. It’s your brother – “Want to see Cheaper by the Dozen 6 at the V& A Cine Reef?” No! Click.. You blink your eyes quickly and the MSM goes away.
Where were we? Oh yes; top of Table Mountain. Far below, you can see little silver specks moving up Kloof Nek Road – electric cars, bumper to bumper. Like SmartCars, except smarter. The air smells fresh and clean; those cars were a good move – unfortunately, too little too late. The coastal waters of the Atlantic Ocean, while lapping ever higher at the nervous toes of Noordhoek property owners, are practically devoid of life due to over-fishing, curtailed too late to preserve many species. Thanks to that and a marine ecology disrupted by rising temperatures, the tuna and bluebottle no longer exist, except through cloning of preserved DNA.
You curtail your bleak ponderings and decide to teleport over to Durban to watch the rugby, stopping in P.E. to pick up a few beer pills at this one-stop you know there.
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