Oh, the Places We Will Go -- Polar Cities, Here We Come!

By Denial Oberbyte


Toward the end of the exhibition “Beyond Climate Change: The Future of Polar Cities,” which is on now at the American Museum of Natural History and will likely stay up for a while, if visitor traffic dictates, a visitor is confronted with a chance to help make ''polar cities'' in the far north (and far south, too -- think Tasmania and New Zealand) livable. Time frame? 2100 to 2200. Prepare for a wild adventure, the show seems to be saying.

Using an interactive screen the size and shape of a Ping-Pong table, you can play God and direct the future in places like Alasaka, Canada and Russia when global warming's impact events have made the Lower 48 unlivable. Ask James
Lovelock in Britain. He knows what the museum show is all about. In a way, he helped curate it.

The first task is to site your polar city, design it and then start building it, all on the interactive screen.
All of made me feel like a delightfully naughty 7-year-old boy.

"Wow, polar city life will be exciting, yet scary at the same time," I exclaimed, eliciting sage chuckles from the museum staff members nearby. After all, we’ve been preparing for this scenario over the past 2500 years on Earth.

The idea of the polar cities museum show seemed wildly and gloomily appropriate when I first heard about it. We think of museums as being for old dead things, and polar cities seem just too doomsdayish to think about. But the museum has
made the exhibit fun to walk through, and it's thought provoking at the same time.

The idea of the exhibition is to look forward 50 or 100 years, said Sarah Michaels, the curator of the show. “We’re at a crossroads,” she said. “We have to decide what to do when the shit hits the fan. Where is the vision?”

In this case, the vision is solely Dr. Michaels, she admitted, arrived at by picking the brains of climate experts. Lest you get too excited, it does not yet represent the official agenda of the CIA or any other agency.

The world sorely needs some kind of polar city blueprint going forward, if indeed we are to go forward and survive the coming Long Emergency in a world made by hand, and though one can quibble with many details, this one is as good as any. One can fantasize that this show could have the same long-range impact on shaping public expectations about climate chaos as magazine articles and television shows did in the 1950s. In that case, I hope it travels to the other countries that are now preparing thei own climate agendas, like Japan, like Russia, like China.

Those who think that global warming is a leftwing conspiracy shored up by Al Gore and that any efforts to deal with it, and humankind's future, is ridiculously expensive, wasteful, dangerous and unscientific — a group that includes a lot of scientists I know — might want to stop reading right here. The exhibition plays shamelessly to those of us are not afraid to face reality and what climate chaos might do to our planet -- and our descendants 100 to 200 years down the road.

“Somebody will do these things,” Dr. Michaels said. “Maybe not the U.S.”

The times being what they are, there is an iPhone app to go with the show. Point your phone at one of several special stations and extra information is downloaded into your hand; you can collect it and e-mail it. And the exhibits faithfully refer to climate prophets like Lovelock and Hansen, not to mention Lynas and Bloom. The uplift the show gives to a weary sci-fi boy like me
is beyond words.


Sooner or later — in the year 2080, it says here — humans will be forced to migrate north to polar cities in search
of food, fuel and energy sources. “It won't be a pretty picture,” the show notes in travel-brochure language.

We find ourselves in the Polar City Red, for example, where there's a war going on between residents, mostly scientists
and government officials, and scavangers or marauders living in the tundra regions away from the climate refuges.

Getting there is also going to be interesting. By then, Dr. Michaels figures, we will have had enough of the violence that climate chaos will provoke and we will yearn for peaceful lives in polar cities.

Around the corner from Polar City Red, a scale model of Polar City Blue explains to visitors the various alternatives they
will have in the 100 or so polar cities envisioned in the far north by 2080 -- or sooner.

There is a psychological test you can take to see if you can tolerate the level of detail, stress and loneliness needed to survive life in a polar city some 100 years from now.

A full-scale model of the U.S.-administered Polar City Red dominates the scene. Built along side a mountain outside
Fairbanks, Alaska, it looks like some prehistoric creature with an overdeveloped head browsing the ground.

Some climate scientists think that polar cities could serve as lifeboats for humanity and in the words of Lovelock as "breeding
stations for future generations on Earth."

The cost? Accoring to CIA estimates, “trillions of dollars.” Only trillions?


Not everybody agrees that such a scheme would work, nor that we even have the need to do it. But like it or not,
polar cities, here we come. This eye-opening musem shows paves the way.

The journey has still only begun.

Step “Star Trek” style into the hologram at the end of the exhibit and you are beamed effortless into a real polar city,
to experience first hand what life might be like in one.

“That’s where we can go, where we must go, if we are to survive as a species,” Dr. Michaels said, “and the focus.”

The show, “Beyond Climate Change: The Future of Polar Cities", is open daily from 10 a.m. to 5:45 p.m. at the American Museum of Natural History, Central Park West at 79th Street, in Manhattan. Information: (212) 769-5100 or amnh.org.

Climate denialists and global warming skeptics are welcome, too.
--
Bonus VIRTUAL GRADUATION SPEECH TO CLASS OF 2080 AD...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-wnrm2jE-E

Staffan Fenander in Sweden does cover song of ''AMAZING RACE'', new lyrics from the old soulful meloody

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=10150402316399615#!/profile.php?id=736144614


https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=10150402316399615#!/photo.php?v=10150402316399615&set=vb.736144614&type=2&theater

Staffan notes on his Facebook page:

''Återigen gamla Amazing Grace men nu i en svensk/amerikansk tolkning: texten skriven av min gamle vän Danny Bloom , som jag träffade på spanska trappan i Rom 1971. Bifogar texten om människorasen...Amazing race! A new version of the old hymn , now ''Amazing Race'', lyrics by my old friend Danny Bloom, writer, poet, singer and expat eccentric....

Danny adds:

"My Swedish friend from our Bob Dylan subway busking days in Italy 1969 has done a wonderful NEW rendition of my new lyrics updating the old AMAZING GRACE song with same soulful melody but with new words and Staffan's wonderful wonderful voice and guitar. A new classic is born. Bravo, SF!"

The Unlikely Event

by Avi Steinberg

Because I do not want to die in the brawny arms of an industrial-kitchen-fixtures salesman from Tulsa—at least, not one I’ve only just met—I don’t much care for airline travel. During a recent trip from Salt Lake City, my Boeing 757 began to lurch and heave and make dreadful noises. At times we seemed to be in free fall. I caught the look on our veteran flight attendant’s face as she rushed by: it was genuine fear. During one particularly terrifying plunge, I felt the brawny fingers of that kitchen-fixtures salesman inching toward me, tugging at my sleeve. I needed an escape. I reached into the seat pocket in front of me.

At 33,000 feet, and falling, we are presented with roughly the same options as on earth. First, we get the in-flight magazine’s glossy parade of petit bourgeois distraction. But, face it, when your plane is going down, what good is a recipe for a quick and easy hake with hazelnuts and capers? For those seeking something more directly relevant, there’s the Sartre-esque barf bag. But for those of us who occupy that metaphysical middle ground between the in-flight magazine and the barf bag, there’s the airline safety card.


As everyone knows, the story contained in this pamphlet has little to do with anything resembling the truth. If shit goes down, if that horrifying alarm is sounded, will your fellow passengers really calmly place oxygen masks over their faces? Will that crazy lady sitting next to you inflate her life jacket in a quiet and orderly fashion? (“Put it on as you would a waistcoat,” a 1930s British Imperial Airways card advises its clientele.) In the history of aviation, has any plane ditched over the north Atlantic, leaving its passengers floating in the mountainous, frigid waves of the open ocean with serene expressions on their faces? Airline safety cards aren’t instructional guides, they are works of fantastic imagination.

This isn’t meant to denigrate the safety card. On the contrary, if ever there were an occasion for bold revisions of reality, surely the art of airline crisis is it. The form itself abhors strict realism. A 1992 cross-cultural study conducted at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University determined that people prefer graphic illustrations instead of photography on airline safety cards. Photos, the study claimed, are inevitably full of distracting detail, or “visual noise.” Hence the safety-card aesthetic: spare, noiseless projections that maintain a zenlike neutrality to the chaos and horror of the actual event. It comes as no surprise that these drawings are always a centimeter away from completely missing the point. According to the 1992 study, European passengers are more apt to correctly identify an image of a high-heeled shoe, whereas Americans, a more homely bunch, are more apt likely to classify the high-heel simply as “a shoe”—the consequences of this misidentification can be tragic. In plane crashes and minimalist art, every detail matters.

The best airline-safety-card artists know how to amplify these details without creating too much noise. They are, after all, artists. They work within and bend the conventions of their form by playing with allusions to earlier work. Take, for example, a current US Airways safety card that portrays the conventional water flotation scene. We see a beautiful woman, with lush red hair, floating effortlessly, gazing ahead in an attitude of easeful melancholy. The airline artist has recruited Dante Rossetti’s 1877 Mary Magdalene, with perhaps an ironic nod to Botticelli’s Venus, as the heroine of our worst-case scenario. Thus the “fallen woman” motif is reimagined in the most urgent terms: this airline Magdalene is a woman who has quite literally fallen. And this is where we find her, floating in limbo, clutching a lily-white life preserver to her breast (instead of a vase, as in the 1877 portrait). Like Rossetti’s romantic Pre-Raphaelite Magdalene, this woman’s lowly state serves only to magnify her elemental beauty. Here she is, Our Lady of the Plane Crash. “I will make you fishers of men,” says the Christ. “We will rescue you in any corner of the globe,” says a Pan Am safety card. The fallen woman will not remain cast away forever—and, if we follow her lead, the artist assures us, neither will we. It is a pretty vision of earthly salvation.



The artist behind a current AeroMexico safety card is not convinced. In an echo of The Son of Man, the 1964 painting by Belgian Surrealist René Magritte, the AeroMexico man is rendered in realistic detail—from rolled up sleeves to tousled hair—all of which is, however, a set up for the darkly comic punch line: the man has no face. This bit of surrealistic surgery, more than the yellow life preserver, is what we remember. It is plain to us that this creepily inanimate son of man is, in struggling to preserve his life, in some sense already dead.


Another current airline-safety card riffs on Hopper’s 1942 painting, Nighthawks, and imagines the conventional post-crash scene as a variation on the loneliness-within-a-group motif:



Back in the fifties, safety-card artists worked with a lighter touch. A Qantas Empire Airways safety card, drawn in the wink-and-grin style of a men’s magazine cartoon, depicts a sporting fellow leaning over the side of a lifeboat, flirting with a long, lean, blonde mermaid, much to the annoyance of his wife. Other life-raft images from the period feature a cast of dapper country clubbers reclining, puffing on pipes, scanning menus as smirking fish and seagulls breeze by. A Lufthansa card shows a lifeboat packed full of delicious foods, wine, and a fishing rod.

Is it possible that in the golden age of aviation even the crashes were glamorous? What are we to make of the safety card that says, “Life vests are fashionable and quite handsomely tailored.” Certainly something has been lost. A Pan Am Boeing B-377 card gives escape directions with reference to “the ladies’ powder room,” “the coat rack,” “spiral staircase,” and “cocktail lounge.” And if we were wondering about the pilot, well, rest assured, he’s a stud. “Remember,” the card tells passengers, “that while the captain may have played the genial host under normal conditions, his authority is absolute.” In this sexy environment, it somehow isn’t surprising that the safety card tells passengers, who find their plane going down, to “loosen your tie ... but keep all your clothes on.”

It’s easy to get nostalgic for an era of flight before we were forced to stand barefoot and humbled before the gropings of uniformed agents, long before the time when our fellow passengers occasionally tried to kill us. But it turns out that the fifties and sixties, safety-card whimsy was designed to lighten the widespread fears of that era, of a population still new to flight.

For all the old cards may have had in terms of sex appeal, they often lacked in tact. They were textually expansive; often, they said too much. In order to justify the need for oxygen masks, one safety card helpfully noted that modern aircraft fly at “very high altitudes.” A Canadair card from the early seventies boasted that its lifeboats were “seaworthy, with great buoyancy.” This was in contrast to the plane itself which would, the card promised, sink before your eyes. An old United card offers this uniquely discomfiting warning: “move out of this plane fast. There is a fire-danger any time a landing is other than normal—particularly when the airplane structure is damaged.” No mention is made about staying calm. An Australian card confesses that the only means of escape involves kicking the window exit open with all of your might. VIASA, Venezuela’s former national airline, urges people not to be anxious when the alarm is sounded. It asks passengers to “keep your muscles taut to absorb the sudden impact.” Another card urges people to grab their warmest clothes before they jump into the sea. An Air France card directs passengers to the closest axe—no further directions are given.

But even in these cards there are some moments of genuine pathos. Like the best of the contemporary cards, which have almost entirely done away with text, the effect was achieved through a drawing. A late sixties Gulf Air card portrays a well-tailored Marvel Comics–style man, stalwart and square jawed, prepared to meet his fate with a ducklike dignity.

But there is something to this art form beyond the drawings or texts. The last page of many safety cards is blank, which would be unremarkable had they not also included this caption: This Panel Intentionally Left Blank. Thus ends the artifice. Here, on this page, there are no melancholic passengers or dreamboat captains, no stern warnings, only a blank screen upon which you and I may project … what, exactly? What are we to make of this combination of blankness and intent? Seasick and weary, Melville’s Ishmael knew all about it. Whiteness, he said, “strikes more of panic to the soul than the redness which affrights in blood.”

Is it by its indefiniteness that it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the Milky Way? Or is it that whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color, and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colorless all-color of atheism from which we shrink?

This horrible dumb blankness, full of meaning, this colorless all-color of atheism, this drab charnel house within our hearts, yea, this universal white shroud, is the airline safety card’s intentionally blank page. It pictures not an unlikely event but the only one about which there is absolute certainty.

Avi Steinberg is the author of Running the Books, a memoir of his adventures as a prison librarian, recently out in paperback.

AMAZING RACE - a slow gospel country song sung by J. Gale Kilgore in Texas

=================================lyrics==================

Amazing race, how cool you are
A long-lived family tree.
We are one on Earth unbound
Once born, we breathe, we see.


O human race there's naught to fear.
life's one sweet adventure true
How precious is each day we live
You and you and you!

Though many dangers, toils and snares
Lurk behind the doors of fear
We are one amazing race
and friends are always near.


Day by day and year by year
We need to stand up tall
And fight injustice wherever it lies.
United, one and all

But when our flesh and hearts do fail,
And mortal life does end,
The human race goes on and on
and memories last, my friend.

Well, we've been here ten million years
And we'lll last till the end of time.
So wipe away those human tears
Be strong, be good, be kind.

Humans Won't Survive on Half of Earth by 2500? Danny Bloom: It's True! Prepare for the worst!

Average global temperatures, that have been rising for a century already, due to anthropogenic climate change, won’t suddenly stop rising in 2100, say Australian and US scientists in a study just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Up to half of the planet would become uninhabitable by the 2300s with an average global temperature rise of 21.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Survivors of climate chaos will live in 300 polar cities scattered around the unfrozen Arctic shores.

see
http://pcillu101.blogspot.com/

This would make much larger regions into uninhabitable deserts than now. Humans would not be able to adapt or survive in such conditions.

“If this happens, our current worries about sea level rise, occasional heat waves and bushfires, biodiversity loss and agricultural difficulties will pale into insignificance beside a major threat – as much as half the currently inhabited globe may simply become too hot for people to live there,” says an observer.

Just 500 short years from now – after a relatively brief period of enjoyment of the planet compared with the dinosaurs – we could see temperatures that humans can no longer survive.





The scientists give the 21.6 degrees Fahrenheit rise a 50/50 chance. We might be able keep it to a merely disastrous 12.6 degrees global average by 2300. So far we have seen only a few degrees rise in global average temperatures. (Global average temperatures comprise the sum of increases and decreases in different regions.)

That climate change won’t stop happening in 2100 is not news. But this study manages to spell out clearly enough what that will mean – and manages to get it written up at at least one major news outlet in the developed world – The Telegraph.

As Treehugger points out, it is only 500 years since the Enlightenment in Europe that propelled reason and empirical evidence to the forefront, allowing the development of all science.

Science made possible the development and exploitation of dirty energy and science uncovered the effects of greenhouse gases and science developed the clean energy that could replace dirty energy safely.

Even before the Enlightenment, we survived at least 200,000 years as a species with brains: Homo Sapiens.

Arctic to be the Center of a New World by 2300 and Home to 300 ''Polar Cities'' for Desperate Survivors of Climate Chaos in Lower 48 and Europe

Arctic to be the Center of a New World by 2300?Danny Bloom poses this question:

If climate change continues along the business-as-usual path, the 24th Century’s ''brave new world'' will be in some ways more like the world of Ancient Greece – with what’s left of the world’s inhabitants living in desperate and isolated polar cities in the northern regions and
scattered along the coast of a single sea.

For the ancient Greeks, it was the Mediterranean Sea. For those of our descendants that survive in polar cities, it will be what is now the Arctic circle.

LINK:
http://pcillu101.blogspot.com/



The countries that will remain habitable for polar cities for survivors of climate chaos after 300 years of climate change are centered on the now nearly empty lands around the Arctic Circle: clockwise this shows Siberia, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Greenland, Canada, Alaska.

That is the conclusion of a paper that studied how global warming will affect the northern areas of Europe as two-thirds of the world becomes uninhabitable by 2300, that finds that the effects of climate change will redraw the map of the main influence centers of civilization. Eaarth – as Bill McKibben denotes our climate altered future will center on an open sea over what is now the Arctic. It is also the conclusion that I have reached with my work at the Polar Cities Research Institute (GOOGLE).



In The North: The New European Frontier with Global Warming, Trausti Valsson of the University of Iceland Faculty of Engineering argues for the inclusion of ”Iceland, Norway and Russia (because of Siberia) in the European Union, because the importance of these areas in the future, economically, militarily and as a future living space for the European community.” None of the three nations are currently members of the EU.

Valsson’s argument is that, combined with the uninhabitability of the rest of the planet as the world warms, that the shorter and more secure transportation routes across the Arctic Ocean between Europe and north-western Canada and the USA will make a completely different center to the world.

(Related: Humans Won’t Survive on Half the Earth by 2300)

Temperatures here are expected to range beyond what humans and most animals can comfortably make a living in by as soon as just 300 years away – about as long as US settlement by Europeans. While a thin strip at the coasts will still support life, the interiors in the shaded regions will become gradually devoid of human beings (and presumably the animals and plants suited to current temperatures).



Last year McMichael and Dear published Heat, Health and Longer Horizons at the National Academy of Sciences, sounding the alarm on long term climate change scenarios, referencing, among others, Sherwood and Huber’s Adaptability Limit to Climate Change Due to Heat Stress and determining that more than half the world we occupy today will be almost uninhabitable by 2300 due to temperature increase beyond what we can tolerate.

Danny Bloom  writes to publicize the many great solutions for climate change that we can find if we just put our minds to it.

Our Iceberg is Really, Really Melting!

Our Iceberg is Really, Really Melting!

-- A Global Warming Fable About Unhappy Penguins at Their Wits End

Illustrations by Deng Cheng-hong

by Danny Bloom

Once upon a time, no, make that, right now, on an iceberg
near you, the following distress call is going out pell mell, as
fast as we can write it down, to all penguins worldwide, whatever their stripes or colors or political leanings, and we tell this fable for one very important purpose and one very important purpose only: to save mankind from extinction befeore it is too late!

STORY TYPED IN LATER HERE.

(c) 2012-2015 Danny Bloom Productions