The Future?
There
was a man, who once went out to sea,
He sailed to the Arctic,
And found it bereft of ice,
Then he stayed till the winter,
To discovered it was no longer cold,
And from there when he moved to Europe,
He discovered it uninhabited, with not even the old,
All that remained was ice, melt, death and uncommon cold.
He then travelled to the east,
From the Occident to the Orient,
He passed by India,
With its immense masses standing reduced,
Droughts in some parts and floods in the others,
But everywhere malaise and hunger had taken their toll.
From there to the South China Sea he went,
Which was fuming and frothing,
With typhoons raging,
And on reaching South America, he found the Amazon was gone,
No more squirrel monkeys, and no more macaws,
None left of the caiman and neither the poison arrow frogs.
On exploring further,
He found that all the humans had killed each other off,
They’d left Earth in a wretched mess of radioactive waste,
And had murdered themselves in coercing their enemies for
fossil fuels,
They’d bombed the countries to their left and the countries
to their right,
And they'd bombed and they'd shelled until they themselves were blown-up
and damned.
Slowly now the mist has begun to clear,
When I told someone about my dream they told me they’d had
the same dream,
Maybe I wasn’t just hallucinating,
This might be the future if went on this way,
And it’ll be just foolish if in spite of knowing the
consequences we still don’t change.
Mukund Palat Rao (February 23, 2012)
Surface heat and fresh water fluxes causes density gradients in the oceans of the world. This results in oceanic circulations which are also called thermohaline circulations. These thermohaline circulations are also called the ocean conveyor belt. Higher salinity and colder temperatures result in an increase in the density of water. It has been postulated that if for some reason if these oceanic circulations were to cease then Europe could descend back into the midst of an ice-age. This explains the reason as to why I have chosen to portray Europe to be in the throngs of an ice-age. A little reading on the topics of the Younger Dryas and thermohaline circulations might help the reader gain a better insight into these potentially catastrophic consequences.
