We Never Thought it Would happen in a Million Years

Albert Arnold Gore Jr. (born March 31, 1948) is an American politician and environmentalist who served as the 45th vice president of the United States from 1993 to 2001. Gore was Bill Clinton's running mate in their successful campaign in 1992 and the pair was re-elected in 1996. Former Vice President Al Gore called Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz a “climate hero” Friday the 13th. When Gore introduced the governor at a three-day event in Minneapolis tied to The Climate Reality Project (The Climate Reality Project is a non-profit organization involved in education and advocacy related to climate change. The Climate Reality Project came into being in July 2011 as the consolidation of two environmental groups, the Alliance for Climate Protection and The Climate Project).

The dramatic truth is that those of us who are alive today in 2020 have in our hands decisions to make that will have enormous consequences for a thousand generations to come. And that may sound overly dramatic coming from a skeptic like myself but it's the case whereas we're putting 110 million tons every day of this heat-trapping pollution into the sky, especially in places such as Cairo, Egypt the most polluted city in the world, scoring in the bottom three for air pollution (284 PM10), light pollution (14,900 μcd/m2) and noise pollution (1.7). While Chinese cities dominate the most polluted at10. Beijing is 3rd, Guangzhou is 6th and Shanghai is 7^th in which all over the world that pollution stays there for a thousand years on average and it's trapping so much extra heat. The amount of extra heat energy every day is equal to 500,000 Hiroshima-class atomic bombs exploding every day.

That's sounds crazy but that's what Gore said we earthlings are doing.

Now I’m thinking to myself that the mother of all apocalyptic fears, could be climate change that  is the biggest threat facing the planet. Climate change could make extreme weather more severe, increase droughts in some areas, change the distribution of animals and diseases across the globe and cause low-lying areas of the planet to be submerged in the wake of rising sea levels. The cascade of changes could lead to political instability, severe drought, famine, ecosystem collapse and other changes that make Earth a decidedly inhospitable place to live.

Global warming is the term used to describe a gradual increase in the average temperature of the Earth's atmosphere and its oceans, a change that is believed to be permanently changing the Earth’s climate. There is great debate among many people and sometimes in the news, on whether global warming is real (some call it a hoax). But climate scientists looking at the data and facts agree the planet is warming. While many view the effects of global warming to be more substantial and more rapidly occurring than others do, the scientific consensus on climatic changes related to global warming is that the average temperature of the Earth has already risen between 0.4 and 0.8 °C over the past 100 years. The increased volumes of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases released by the burning of fossil fuels, land clearing, agriculture and other human activities, are believed to be the primary sources of the global warming that has occurred over the past 50 years. Scientists from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate carrying out global warming research have recently predicted that average global temperatures could increase between 1.4 and 5.8 °C by the year 2050. Changes resulting from global warming may include rising sea levels due to the melting of the polar ice caps, as well as an increase in occurrence and severity of storms and other severe weather events.

You’re probably wondering why I started this story with a pretty unknown dude to many of the millennium babies but it’s important that I share with you that he knew what he was talking about as I write to you in the year 2050 from a 32'×10' Doomsday Bunker that was made from corrugated pipe and designed to be buried 200 feet underground. The Atlas Survival Shelter came complete with two bunk beds that have under-the-lid storage, an escape hatch for emergency attacks, mudrooms with a lockable laser cut interior door, countertops, a kitchen with a sink, low voltage electric lights, electric outlets an electric toilet with tank, flatscreen TV, shortwave radios, camera surveillance, 300-5,000 gallon water tanks, 100-500 gallon fuel storage tanks, DVD player, power-generating exercise bicycle, red oak cabinets and solar panels.

When the first real effect of Global warming occurred.

I was on my way to go whale sightseeing along the Mississippi River of all places. Whales had been spotted along with sharks and barracudas. The temperature was about 125 degrees and there was a state of alert for people over 30 to stay indoors if they didn’t need to venture out. I was 95 years old at the time and I knew that heat wasn’t my problem as I walked wearing a wool sweater.

When I arrived back home I knew it was time for me and my parrot Cisco Kid to travel down to our new permanent home inside the bunker. 

The world's ice sheets had suddenly vanish; brutal droughts killed many of the trees in the Amazon rain forest (removing one of the world's largest carbon offsets); and the planet plunged into a feedback loop of ever-hotter, ever-deadlier conditions. 155 degrees Fahrenheit. "Thirty-five percent of the global land area and 55 percent of the global population, were subjected to more lethal heat conditions, beyond the threshold of human survivability,"! Meanwhile, droughts, floods and wildfires regularly ravage the land. Nearly one-third of the world's land surface turned to desert. Entire ecosystems collapsed, beginning with the planet's coral reefs, the rain forest and the Arctic ice sheets. The world's tropics were hit hardest by these new climate extremes, destroying the region's agriculture and turning more than 1 billion people into refugees.

When my broker told me that I was insane for investing in that bunker. I got to thinking about that song sung by Connie Francis: Who’s Sorry Now.

Watching on my 72 inch TV I saw the mass movement of refugees, coupled with shrinking coastlines and severe drops in food and water availability that began to stress the fabric of the world's largest nations, including the United States. Armed conflicts over resources, perhaps soon to culminating this awful situation into a nuclear war.

The result, coming from a drunken and frighten newscaster kept slurring in his commentary that it just might be the end of human global civilization as we once knew it.