The Domesday Book, Chapter II

The global population hit one billion about 1800. Two hundred years later there are 6 billion people on earth click on this and scroll down.

I wish they had a tabulation about how fast the ice is melting, but I don't see it. I don't think there is good quantification yet.

The earth can support about 3.5 billion people. We can't kill off all the animals or eat all the food or deplete all the oceans at that number, but we have already burned most of the oil. More people than that deplete the natural resources beyond their ability to replenish. We have already tipped the ecosystem past the point of no return, so there is going to be an extinction event pretty soon. I am talking mass die-off here, not merely a pandemic or a nuclear war, although those are probably in the cards too.

The food is almost gone and the oil is almost gone. The DAY Iran gets a serious nuclear capability they are going to nuke Israel and Israel is going to nuke all of the oil regions in the middle east. Everyone knows it. And they can't help it. They have been fighting each other since the dawn of civilization and they will never stop.

The Muslims are willing to live in the 7th century again, without cars, without oil, without electricity, without medical care, because many of them do anyway, and they will take the loss to get rid of the Great Satan. But because they are such ignorant assholes they don't realize that when the earth goes they will go with it.

The Great Satan, in the meantime, is going to run out of food and oil at the same time. EXACTLY the same time. And so will everyone else. The economy of the entire world will crash on that day. And it won't be 2040 when there are 9 BILLION people, it will be between 2010 and 2020.

Will the human race survive? I used to think "Sure. Life is very difficult to extinguish. But there won't be many and they won't have a very good chance of starting over". Now I am reconsidering. A disaster involving 6+ billion people will overwhelm every government on the first day. The second day there will be no more government or armies because everyone will be trying to get to their families. They won't make it. That same day people will start killing each other for food or revenge or for medicine or just because that's what people do when they don't know what else to do.

By the end of that week if you are anywhere NEAR a population center you will be dead or starving. Stephen King described the landscape in The Stand, which was the only King book I could ever read. It rang optimistically true except he allowed a few people to live. He didn't know about global warming back then.

I can hear you saying "Wait a minute, Pal! A global warming die-off can't just happen is a week or a month. We would notice and stop it." I beg to differ. There are BILLIONS of tons of CO2 ice just sitting in the oceans like huge rocks. The oceans have been absorbing it for thousands of years. As a result, we still have enough O2 to breathe and the earth hasn't overheated. But if the oceans warm up just a bit and that stuff bubbles back into the atmosphere....or if the Atlantic conveyor stops and the sulphur-loving organisms near the bottom move toward the surface, we are ****ed, right then. Not in 20 years, I mean within weeks.

Plants are going to help kill us too. Everyone knows that plants convert CO2 to O2 through photosynthesis, but we have just discovered that when plants are stressed they can produce methane as well. Like cows. Methane is a good, clean fuel but it is also a greenhouse gas which lingers in the atmosphere for about 100 years and warms the earth 23 times as much as CO2. Burning 20 gallons of gas equals a good cow fart.

We are past the tipping point before which we could prevent this. We are very near the critical point at which this situation will begin to feed on itself. We don't notice it because our top is spinning just like it always has so we feel no sense of impending danger. When it stops, and I use a metaphor, it will wobble once or twice like a kid's top and almost instantly crash, just as tops do. When it does, humans, which are not able to control the weather, or each other, or do anything but kill off every other life-form that gets in the way of a parking lot, are not going to know what hit them. Do you know that 99% of every species and plant which has ever existed on earth is extinct? That's just natural. It has happened because we have had 5 MAJOR and several other less major extinction events we can document. Here is the Wiki.

So science tells us that even without an earth impactor, another major extinction event will happen within 10 million years regardless, but that the activities of humans, a previously non-existent factor, may move the event up to ........oh, maybe....tomorrow.

But every cloud has a silver lining. No scientist has ever witnessed the world dying off before, so there is a lot we can learn! As long as we can write pretty fast. Sadly, no one will ever read it.

And there is religion. If everyone is dead, we will have succeeded in our goal of wiping out organized religion. If I am one of the temporary survivors though, you can be damn sure I am going to try to control anyone I meet by invoking religion. If that doesn't work and they won't accept me as King, I'll just kill them.

The Domesday Book, Chapter I

I have had this nagging idea for some time now and I just realized what it is. I have never been one of those nutty vegetarians (no pun in ten did), but for the past few years the meat in the stores hasn't looked quite right to me and I haven't been able to figure out why.

I used to go into the meat section and the steaks looked appetizing. I mean, really GOOD! Now they are all exactly the same color and it isn't the color beef used to be. Not only that but in the past you could find the same cuts of beef in various sizes. Now they are all almost exactly the same size. That isn't right. No one can EVER convince me it is. You used to be able to toss a thick steak on a barbecue with nothing more than salt and pepper and have a fine dining experience. These things are like tossing cardboard cut-outs on the grill.

Now then....I go over to the seafood section because I want a chunk of fresh Atlantic salmon for sashimi. The salmon is all raised in Canada and it is a sickly brown. And that is AFTER they have added color to it. I look around and notice that EVERYTHING THERE is farm raised. Hey, I want fish fresh out of the ocean, not something that has been raised in a grey-water recycling pond so they don't have to pay for fish food. And little signs are appearing on fish products behind the counter: "This product treated with carbon monoxide". Why would anyone need to treat food with carbon monoxide? You will have to look it up.

Chocolate bars are now colored wax. In particular, anything made in the USA or Japan. When I was a kid, chocolate melted in the sun. That Hershey bar you just paid $3 an ounce for won't even melt in a microwave oven. You could pave streets with them. If I want to eat wax, I'll buy a scented candle.

Chicken. Healthy, right? I reckon not. The chicken butchers sell the leftovers to the cattle ranchers for feed and the cattle butchers sell the leftovers to the chicken farmers for feed. Pig farmers throw fast-food slop to the pigs and the pig butchers sell the useless parts to the fish farmers or, as I said, the fish farmers grow their catfish in waste recycling tanks. If I throw chicken on the BBQ a nasty green flame comes off of it for a second or two. Hey, what burns with a green color?!?!? NOTHING IN A CHICKEN!

In the mean time the pigs shit E-coli all over spinach and everything else so your veggies are all contaminated.

But hold the phone. Is any of that illegal.....or even regulated? Not at all. Everyone is on the honor system.

Oh, wait! CHEESE! Do you people know how cheese is made? If I told you it might make you hurl, so I won't. You can look it up right after CO (Carbon Monoxide).

So I go to one of the local farmers and buy sweet corn but I won't take just anything fresh-picked. I shuck it on the spot and take only the ones with caterpillars in them. If a caterpillar is eating it and is still alive, it must not be poison.

I get the tomatoes and lettuce out of my backyard so they are organic. I let the bugs eat enough to keep them happy, but I chase off the slugs.

I am on a water catchment system. There is no county water out here and that's fine with me. We get a lot of rain and I developed a little water filtration/decontamination/sterilization system that I pump the water through before it gets to the real filters. It was pretty easy to make, too! I just scraped the radium off about a hundred old alarm clocks and put it in a filter. As long as it is glowing I know it's working. The only problem with the water is that this pink stuff is all over the inside of the shower and I can't kill it, even with Lysol and Clorox. But whatever it is, pink stuff can't be bad for you, right? Anyway, my catchment water is like a crystal clear mountain stream compared to most of them which have drowned rats and what-not floating in the tank.

OK, I'm kidding about the radium.