The last man will call Barrow his home.

Just real quick. For no other reason than that it occurred to me.

Alaska (Aleut Alaxsxaq) was the first place inhabited by humans in North America. (My mentor in college, the eminent geneticist and anthropologist Dr. Stephen Zegura did work on the genetics and dental morphology of the first Americans, the tribes that crossed the Bering ice bridge to Alaska from Russia.) And Alaska, if global worming becomes catastrophic, will be the last place inhabited by humans in North America. The inland highlands of the North Slope in the last days of human dominion will be a pretty pleasant climate. Too bad that just means that we're all fucked. If it gets that bad, then the last humans on the North American continent will live very much as the first ones did. But with warmer oceans.

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Live Earth

I just got home from the mountains and turned on the TV to see some of the Live Earth stuff on NBC. Actually some not-bad performances. In order to claim a truly global concert, they had a band of researchers from Antarctica (they call themselves Nunatak). And the thing is, they were good. Get them in a studio, mix the sound a little better than can be expected from the South Pole, and I would buy that CD. Better than Genesis or Madonna anyway.
I'm just excited for the soon-to-be-big South Pole Sound. Pretty soon hipsters and art school graduates are going to move to the South Pole and a bunch of bars that serve PBR will open up and all the locals will have to move when rent starts to get too high.

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It's begun...

Every asshole out there telling you that "Islamofascists" are an existential threat to Civilization is a douchebag. And here's why. These same folks ignore things that are real and true existential threats (as opposed to a a few hundred goat fuckers with a hard-on for the Middle Ages--which actually describes the religious right pretty well, too) like the following, extremely momentous event (from the Independent):

Rising seas, caused by global warming, have for the first time washed an inhabited island off the face of the Earth. The obliteration of Lohachara island, in India's part of the Sundarbans where the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers empty into the Bay of Bengal, marks the moment when one of the most apocalyptic predictions of environmentalists and climate scientists has started coming true.

It's gone, motherfuckers, gone. That island isn't coming back, and dozens more are next.
The delta where that island was located is one of the most heavily populated parts of the globe, along with the deltas of the Nile, Amazon, and Mississippi (and we know what happened a couple years ago to the biggest city on the Mississippi Delta). It was a holy place, a magical place, one of the great centers of human achievement and culture, just like those other river deltas. It's begun, gentle readers, it's begun and I'm sore afraid that we might not be able to stop it. And if the loss of a single Indian island doesn't affect you, doesn't drive it home, then I direct your attention to one of the smaller, least geographically significant, estuaries in the world that could be equally swamped sometime in this new century, the locus where the Hudson River flows into New York Harbor. So if you fret that hordes of swarthy foreigners are a force to be dreaded above all others then I direct your benighted eyes and ears to the old saying: We have met the enemy, and he is us.

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