THE WATER WILL COME

This one has got to be the FEELGOOD READ OF 2019, LADIES!  Jeff Goodell's book -- ISBN 978-031626024-4 -- is more than the MESSAGE OF HOPE I was looking for.  This book explains, so that even a Homo sap. can understand it, that the CAVALRY IS COMING!  IT'S ALREADY HERE!

You know all those science fiction movies that have someone frantically trying to get the attention of someone who can DO SOMETHING about an onrushing DISASTER?  The best-known example in MY home library is Martin Brody in Jaws, trying to convince the Mayor of Shark City to CLOSE THE BEACHES.  Nobody listens to him of course, or to his sidekick Matt Hooper, the doomcrier scientist required in all such stories.  AND THEN BRUCE COMES AND EATS EVERYONE.  Good  times, I tell you -- GOOD TIMES.

 

(Deleted scene of Bruce recruiting Alex Kintner in Jaws)

This book is a forum for all the Matt Hoopers out there to SAY THEIR PIECE AT LAST.  He starts out with those guys, then travels around looking at places where RISING SEA LEVELS are quickly going to spell DISASTER for our future recruits, the Naked Apes.  He describes how the Marshall Islands, for instance, are disappearing under the rising Pacific (as they call it), taking with them the cracked, leaking NUCLEAR WASTE DUMP left by their eternal tormentors, the U.S. of A.

And Miami.  The author spends a lot of time in Miami checking out the situation -- their sopping-wet origins and their decidedly damp future.  Here's a graphic from the book:

 

 

There's a lot of discussion of Venice, too, a city so close to being fully underwater that they have a Shark recruiting film about it: 

 

 



...but I digress.  The author moves next to discuss WHAT THE NAKED APES ARE DOING TO SAVE THEMSELVES.  There are all kinds of creative low-tech solutions, like building floating community centers, and breathtakingly expensive government-level ones like the plan to install movable gates that will keep out storm surges -- projects that NOBODY UP ON DRY LAND can afford to build or maintain and whose best-laid plans are (the author tells us) TOTALLY INADEQUATE for the scope of the problem.  Over and over he describes plans made to address maybe 3 feet of sea-level rise when the local, national and international Matt Hoopers are estimating the water will be rising 6 feet, or maybe more like 15 or 20.  That's what you see in the cases where anyone is bothering at all, and most of them AREN'T -- whole governments are trying to DENY EVERYTHING, particularly the biggest one on my "patch."

NEVER FORGET that more than half of the Homo saps are living as close as they can get to the water!  For every hermit on a mountaintop or sodbuster raising cows on the lone prairie, there are AT LEAST TWO sunning themselves on a saltwater beach.  It's just a reminder that on some level, THEY UNDERSTAND AND ACCEPT THAT WE ARE COMING FOR THEM TO BRING THEM INTO THE SEA FOREVER. 

Be happy, ladies!  THE CAVALRY IS ALMOST HERE!