Phantom Hope..

It is said that the world is warming up. As it does, animals like the Polar Bear will disappear because their habitat will no longer exist. It is difficult to imagine a world without the North and South polar icecap. One can't help but feel that something cataclysmic would happen along the path to total meltdown, something really BIG. If you think about it, the rising ocean levels swamping what are now coastal low lying areas is bad enough.

You may think that you are sitting pretty if you live on high ground, but you would soon lose that smug grin. Where do you think all of the people in coastal cities like Montreal, New York and London England are going to be displaced?

Who, exactly is going to pay for the removal of infrastructure away from the areas which will be hit hard? How and when will it be moved?

As the oceans rise, so does the level of water in estuaries, and what is attached to all estuaries? Yes, you guessed right. The small river not too far away from you is also going to rise. Today's fields, farms, golf courses, business parks and domestic housing areas are going to be lakes.

Wild animals, their habitat fast receding, will come into conflict with the escaping hordes from the large coastal cities, whose only interests will be getting someplace to live, be it on a high ground farmers field, or vast tracts of previously forested land, all of the trees about to be cut down to allow for space and building materials.

Fishing fleets will have nowhere to bring back catches unless they fix wheels to the fish processing plants and centres, so no more Sole Meuniere at your favourite restaurant, or cod and chips out of the paper while watching the waves gently roll up the beach.

Meanwhile, up on the high ground, you can't go out in the sun for longer than fifteen minutes unless you smother yourself in sunblock with a rating of '2000', which is probably just as well because there are marauding bands of displaced city dwellers looking to take what you have got, and I don't just mean the sunblock. Better to lock yourself in at night and maybe daytime too.

Living on what is left of the surface will be no cakewalk. Ecosystems contained under glass shields are still very much in the trial stages. Billions of dollars are being poured into space research, but space is a long way from here, and from pictures sent back of our sister planet Mars, unless we are in the market for red rocks and dust, there is not much hope coming out of the research at all.

In the meantime, billions of dollars are being spent on the war to decide whose god will ultimately save us. Salvation is in our own hands, yet we do not seem to have the mind set to realize it

I woke up this morning, still holding what I see a the glimmer of hope that life will improve, but as days pass, the glimmer is like the expectation of watching a forest burn in the belief that, when the flames are extinguished, it will immediately transform into the lush green that it was just before fire took a hold.