Saturday, April 07, 2007

wow, now THIS is a bummer

"Sue me if I play too long."

--Steely Dan

From everywhere:

"The UN report on global warning, in a sense, is a more focused indictment of the world's biggest polluters -- the industrialized nations -- and a more specific identification of the victims. Last-minute negotiations led to deleting timelines for future events and scaling back the degree of confidence in some projections. Both actions will ease the pressure on industrialized nations to reduce their emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that are gradually warming the planet.

"Several scientists vowed afterward that they would never participate in the process again because of the political interference."Once is enough," said John Walsh, a climate expert at the University of Alaska Fairbanks who helped draft parts of the report. "The science got hijacked by the political bureaucrats at the late stage of the game." The report paints a bleak picture of the future.

In light of this report--which basically says we're just like caged animals, shitting up our own home because we have nowhere else to go and we're too stupid and lazy to figure that out--I had to post this. I read this piece by Carl Sagan a few times a year, because it's so lovely and so sad.

"We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.



"The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

"Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."

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