Melting Arctic Reminds Me of Pompeii in 79 AD

“Pompeii Garden of the Fugitives” by Lancevortex, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Reading climate.nasa.gov’s 2022 “Key Takeaway: Summer Arctic sea ice extent is shrinking by 12.2% per decade due to warmer temperatures,” and recalling President Niinistö of Finland in Joint Press Conference with President Trump, August 28, 2017, “If we lose the Arctic, we lose the globe,” I wrote a new poem below. To clarify the problem, visit Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S)’s Climate Pulse (click “Sea temperature”), and see Dave Borlace’s Just Have a Think April 7, 2019 video Blue Ocean Event : Game Over? (325,412 views).

Day Before Mt. Vesuvius Erupted

 

“Pliny the Younger, author of the only surviving
written testimony,

described the morning before the eruption as
normal.” — wikipedia.org

 

Schoolkid challenged teacher,

“What makes you think

you know anything

about anything?”

 

Teacher fired back,

“What makes you think

you know something

about something?”

 

“I know everyone here

will die tomorrow,”

he whispered

to derisive laughter.

 

“You do?” asked teacher.

“Who told you?”

“A bird,” he said.

“What kind?”

 

“Dream bird.”

There was more laughter,

except louder

as teacher joined in.

 

By next night

all laughing were dead.

Blog readers curious about dangers of speed of melting Arctic may want to see my February 7, 2019 post “Arctic Methane Debate Rages On” in which Dahr Jamail noted in a video I included, “[Dr. Ira Leifer, Chemical Engineering Department, University of California, Santa Barbara, noted] the normal background rate for methane seeps from a seabed in that area is approximately 3000 methane seeps over a thousand square kilometer area. He had, using satellites to measure the methane, [ . . .] found in another thousand square kilometer area, [. . .] there were already 60 million methane seeps [ . . .]” [par break] “Leifer was ‘chief mission coordinating scientist for the NASA effort for airborne remote sensing of the Gulf oil spill.’”

Okay, here is where things get weird. I went to write the above paragraph, and this part was deleted by someone: “found in another thousand square kilometer area, [. . .] there were already 60 million methane seeps.” I am not joking, and I am not “seeing things,” as I asked another writer to verify the deleted part. I took screen shots to verify. One would think Google, owner of Blogger, would care about its reputation enough to protect blog content, but it seems Google did not in this case. It’s possible there is another explanation, like AI deleting duplicate content since I also mentioned “60 million methane seeps” in my October 11, 2019 post “The Moscow Times Reports East Siberian Sea Methane Emissions ‘Up to Nine Times the Global Average.’” However, if that’s the case, why did Google reinsert my “60 million methane seeps” text into the original post after I opened what I wrote on Blogger? I don’t know, and this is the first surprise-deletion I noticed in over 10 years of writing this Trees, Fish, and Dreams Climateblog.

Maybe this blog, and others like it, will be deleted by Google if content — even accurate content — doesn’t meet official propaganda requirements — or AI or company coding — as the climate emergency worsens.

I’m grateful for 35,000 pageviews in the past 12 months, mostly from the U. S., Singapore, and Hong Kong. I’m grateful for over 150,000 pageviews since about August 2013. I am grateful maybe someone in power considers my blog content dangerous enough to delete part of it that could possibly scare people into collective nonviolent action. I am grateful in 1987 Robert Bly came to visit Tom Ferte’s literature class when I was a student at Western Oregon State College (now Western Oregon University), and Bly said, “The trees will carry what we don’t say.”  so if my blog is deleted you can go to forests to listen.