07 April 2020

It Shall Not Rain

Most of the remaining humans think it is the year 10,024 by the ancient Christian calendar, and there are many different opinions how long humans have lived on this planet.

Regardless, there is consensus that they cannot survive here much longer.  About half of the rivers, lakes and oceans have evaporated and are now permanently trapped vapor in the atmosphere, never to reach the land as liquid again.

Estimates are in two or three thousand years no liquid surface water of any kind will exist on this planet, salt or fresh.  It will not rain, and it is unlikely it will ever be cool enough for morning dew to form on anything

Plant foods and animals can only live around the beaches and banks of remaining fresh water lakes and rivers.  Fish and sea birds a rarely seen near the very briny shores of salt water.  In the deep water way offshore; fish, birds and sea mammals are said to exist.  Few people say they have ever seen them.

Very little fresh water makes it to salt water seas.  The shores are hundreds of miles from where they are shown on ancient maps from the 5,000's.  In many places animals and humans could walk across salt flats to get to what was once called continents, if they can carry enough water and food, and survive the oppressive heat.

Some have tried, but none have ever been heard from again.

Every day is spent searching for food and fresh water.  In some places people have dug deep tunnels into underground aquifers to the water level to collect and preserve it underground.  A couple thousand years ago, in tunnels 50 feet underground, the year-around temperature was 65 degrees F.  Today the air in our water tunnel is 76 degrees and so is the temperature of our stored water.

A small bowl with one inch deep of water sitting open outside in the shade where the temperature is usually in the mid 90's day or night, will evaporate entirely in less then 15 hours, faster if the wind blows, but it rarely does.  Lakes and rivers are losing water to evaporation at about .6 of an inch per day.

Swamps, estuaries and ponds have nearly disappeared completely.  We are told at the north and south poles surface ice is entirely gone, very little surface water remains, and there is only a few hundred square miles of permafrost existing in either place, and glaciers disappeared from high mountain north facing canyons a thousand years ago.  Pipelines run for thousands of miles from remaining alpine lakes to underground storage reservoirs far from where glaciers once persisted.

It is not believed that any humans live near the equatorial belt, now about 5000 miles wide, surrounding the planet .

Very few animals or plants are believed alive in that zone.

Cities where millions of humans once lived have been wastelands of deserted salt flats for at least a millennium.  No one lives at the new coastlines, few even risk a journey there.

Sea salt is plentiful, fresh water is scarce and very valuable.  Many lives have been lost guarding supplies of fresh water.

This morning along our creek bank potato size yams were discovered because wild pigs had dug them there.   While digging some for our feast tonight a wild pig returned.  We captured and killed it, and its been cooking underground, and will be ready to eat in about 4 hours.  All meat must be cooked and eaten the same day it is killed, or preserved in salt, or cured and sun dried, and packed in fat, and stored under ground.

We don't have cold storage, no electricity, no ice, or anyway to keep things cold or frozen.

Over many thousands of years serious attempts were made, some violently, to get governments, armies, societies, clubs, and gangs to stop fighting climate changes and prepare for an ever warming planet.

No amount of pleading worked to dissuade them from thinking humans could reverse the inevitable growing power of the sun or stop earth's molten core from erupting, or counteract the tidal forces of the moon.

I guess they thought just forcing human behavior changes, killing all the non-believers, or wasting huge sums of wealth, or praying to some Gods could change astrophysics, gravity, and atmospheric chemistry.

Some how humans had made these problems, and humans could stop them, or reverse them.  Of course they all were and are dead wrong, and have been since the early 2,000's.

The demise of human-kind on this planet is inevitable!