Maybe I just didn't like to hear.....

But i still can't believe Speed Racer is dead,.... or so Tori Amos attests in her excellent "Cooling," one of my absolute favourite Tori songs (along with Honey, Almost Rosey, Silent All These Years, Yes Anastasia, and many many more....) And cooling has been on my mind for a while.. firstly, the line "this is cooling faster than I can" reminds me far too much of my last relationship, and secondly due to the continuing realisation and acceptance that we are still leaving an ice age.... and that therefore global Warming may just be a normal, expected, necessary thing.... remember the Jurassic period? Well we had real summers then... nowhere near as cold as now.. then we cool a bit into the cretaceous, but still hot compared to today...then the ice ages come along, and everything chills.... now, correct me if I'm wrong, but surerly on average the earth's dominant temperature is higher than it is curently.. so global warming could just be the planet getting back to normal..... aahhh! I hear yu say.. but global warming seems to be unnatural, man made, artificial.... to which i say, why does man made mean unnatural? We are just as natural as a grass snake, our skyscrapers just as natural as a birds nest.. not as pretty possibly... but we are part of nature... but we have grown so used to thinking of ourselves as being apart from nature, that we have no problem in thinking of ourselves as something different, strange, destructive, unnatural.... well, let me publicise some theories held by scientists who don't get the airtime.... firstly the idea that global warming is a good thing... most models show that the temperatur increase will lead to greater evaporation of sea water, and lots more rain in Africa... this coupled with the higher temps would lead to the tropical and equatorial regions being able to support two or three harvests a year... and europe could manage three every two years.... helping solve the food shortage.. true, there would be casualties... the gulf stream would possibly switch off, leaving us Brits with the climate we should have.. similar to southern alaska.... but thats no hardship... and as for the ice caps.. well, if the northern one melts, the sea level will drop... ice, being less dense than water, takes up more space... work it out... and if we get the thirty or forty degree rise it would take to melt the southern one, then the 70 degree celsius summers around the equator, with all the petrol nearly boiling, will probably cause more trouble than a twenty foot rise in the sea level.... which brings me to the most controversial of the theories.... to illustarte we need to go back millions of years to when the CO2 levels were much higher... (now what does that remind me of...).. we had back then many mat-like organisms that inhaled CO2 and excreted oxygen.. they became so successful that they spread and spread, and produced so much oxygenthat they poisoned their own atmosphere.... and died off, leaving the path open for things that had adapted to the oxygen rich atmosphere... now, couple this with a version of Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis, that the earth is a self regulating organism, and instead of jumping on the "man is a cancer" bandwagon, start thinking logically... warm planet... planet cools... for next stage of development planet need to warm up.... best way to do this is increase CO2.. so allow development of creatures best able to produce CO2 in large quantities.. true, that very thing will destroy the creatures that produce the CO2, but hey, thats life for self regulating organisms the size of planets... look at the mats... so the theory says, in brief, that we have sprung up so that the warming of the planet is ensured, and our efforts towards this will lead to our extinction, and open the way for the next wave of development... just as the mats, the dinosaurs, et al moved aside.... in other words, global warming is our purpose, and by attempting to save our race, we may also be attempting to doom our planet... but i digress..... the truth is we don't know one way or the other... lets be honest, we're still divided over whether cancer is a nasty disease or evolution at work... so what chance do we have.... and, asa Tori said, "if that doesn't impress you much, come board this lunatic express..." until we all chin up, put on a pair of rosies and raise those blinds, Wisebeard salutes you!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!