Wednesday, March 20, 2002
Another day consumed by the tedious business of writing, rather than by the tedious writing itself. There's a lot more of that sort of thing than most people think. At least, more than I think most people think. It's sort of like overtime, except not exactly, and you don't get paid for it.
If Dame Darcy is reading this entry (and I suspect that she isn't), or if anyone else reading this knows of her precise whereabouts at this moment, please contact me. The lives a many lemmings may hang in the balance.
And speaking of lives hanging in the balance, I'm just finishing Peter Ward's excellent River's In Time: The Search for Clues to Earth's Mass Extinctions, which examines the largest mass extinction events - the Permian/Triassic (P/T) Event, the Triassic/Jurassic (T/J) Event, the Cretaceous/Tertiary (K/T) Event, and the "modern" mass extinction. I reccommend it to anyone who thinks Greenpeace goes too far. Meanwhile, in the real world, a 70-meter long asteroid passed within 461,000 kilometers of the planet (that's a near miss by generous cosmic standards).
And the Larson B ice shelf in Antarctica - 720 billion tons of ice, an area roughly the size of Rhode Island - has collapsed into the Weddell Sea in less than a month. Optimists and politicians (strange bedfellows, indeed) will say we need more data before we let any of this make of nervous, and certainly before we blame the mess in Antarctica on global warming and do something rash like consider reducing emissions of greenhouse gases. I suspect they'll still be saying that when Manhattan and London are underwater and yuppies are buying up beachfront property in Phoenix and San Antonio.
I am a cheerful fuck, aren't I?
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