is the theater really dead?

i don't know exactly where it would technically be located-- the atmospheric theater, the global theater?-- but we are fighting a war against our habits and we are losing. as any war, its affects are far-reaching, long-term, and deadly.

i don't mean to be dramatic. too late?

i would bet money (or my veckatimest vinyl) that you have heard about the famine and drought decimating the horn of africa. i recently read an article about the linking of frequent devastating natural disasters to global warming.  

TOP: a mother cradles her malnourished baby in a field hospital in a refugee camp in dadaab, northeastern kenya on wednesday, august 3rd 2011. boris ressler, dpa/landov

the article essentially focuses on chris funk, a researcher who works primarily in eastern africa, studying causes and effects of droughts, ultimately attempting to figure out how to predict these disasters. these specific and obvious changes in amount of rainfall and temperature, funk says, compound to form an unforgiving and fatal cycle.

not only is the intensity of the droughts increasing, this compounding of factors affects their frequency. in order to find the cause of this phenomenon, funk and his team found that collected data showed weak winds over the ocean carrying less moisture to land as well as overall warmer oceanic temperatures. now taking into account the natural occurrence of la niña, the team used a model to predict the combined effects on the horn:

He and Funk began looking at data from past La Niña years, and eventually determined that that there was a 50 percent chance that two droughts would strike in a row -- one in the fall, and another in the spring.

This possibility of back-to-back droughts combined with a variety of other factors -- including the long-term warming trend that Funk and his colleagues had just identified, high food prices in the region and the lingering effects of the droughts that choked East Africa in 2007, 2008 and 2009 -- led them to realize that if back-to-back droughts occurred, it would be catastrophic.

while social action towards positive change is on the rise, funk's point is the apparent structural and large-scale issues worsening and causing significant and permanent global damage, and this will continue if nothing changes.

it is almost unbelievable to realize that our way of life has such intensely terrible global effects. why wouldn't anyone want to work towards a change?

-for immediate relief

-for long-term relief (cliche, i suppose? but helpful nonetheless)