Blue Monster

I am really very annoyed – Yellow Monster has called me a dude – I mean can you imagine me a Blue Gurgitation Monster of the most refined kind being called a dude. What ever must you all now think of me – I am very distressed about this.

And so this week I think you should all write about the quality of light coming in through the window.

Light through the Window

The room was light in a sort of half gloom that struck Eric as odd; the furniture seemed to melt in upon itself. The light was a pathetic dim grey that seemed to diffuse reluctantly into the room rather than spill or pour as he felt it should. It was as if it itself was some entity, a naughty dog trying to look small to appease a master.

There was a dank chill to the air that seemed to draw the warmth from his limbs leaving aching bones. Where had the summer gone? Had it ever arrived? It was September and the sky was still the milky grey it had been since the late spring. Crops had failed and there was a food shortage but still everyone pretended everything was OK; after all, who needed to stay on such a miserable little island when they could easily get a ferry to France and enjoy the continent?

But not everybody could afford that, in fact most people couldn’t and depression was gripping the nation rendering the work forces insolent and demoralised. Hunger for the first time since the Second World War now burned inside the general population and having your own allotment was not much consolation as the intrepid watched their crops fail with blight or fail to ripen due to the lack of sun.

Eric had warned of this; had told of the albedo effect, had pointed out that the UK should be colder than it was, that it relied on the deep ocean currents to be a pleasant place to live, and that for the retched little island with big ideas, global warming would in the first instance probably mean cooling. But no one had listened and no one, not even the other scientists, had seemed to comprehend that there were such things as positive and negative feedback loops, and that these loops themselves where part of systems that interacted and fed each other. It worked like cell metabolisation, or nucleosynthes inside the hot bellies of stars, but no one would listen.

And so the world had heated due to the emissions from cars and factories and the like, burning of forests and woodlands had not helped, nor the denuding of land for beef cattle who themselves, due to bodily functions, produced another greenhouse gas, as it was termed.

There where many many effects and the change in heating on a global scale lead to upsets. The gulf stream that brought warm air to the Uk would soon seize as the ocean currents stopped and killed the bottom dwelling life by stagnation; a reversal of currents was just as devastating with thick rich nutrient brought up from the bottom leading to algal bloom and suffocation in the very oceans.

The warmth caused by the gases had a knock on effect – the clouds that boiled overhead. Increase the temperature and more water from the oceans, seas, rivers, lakes, ponds and reservoirs would steal up into the air to become clouds. These clouds would act as a blanket keeping the heat in and acting as a mirror to reflect the heat back to the Earth’s surface again and again.

But the clouds also acted as a mirror on the outside, too, and reflected the Sun’s light out into space rendering the Earth cool, cooler and cold. A self-regulating system, most of the time. Sometimes it could get out of control and send the earth into frozen aeons.

Which effect would win, Eric did not know; he also knew that for humans it did not really matter, as either was pretty devastating. But no one had listened. He oiled his gun and checked his tinned food supplies again, and waited for the chaos to begin.

Posted: Monday, February 23rd, 2009 @ 5:41 pm
Categories: Uncategorized.
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