Mjolnir – the hammer of Thor, used as a weapon against the Jotuns, heard as thunder by humans.
“If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, it would be like the splendor of the Mighty One. [Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.]"
Bracketed quote uttered by J Robert Oppenheimer, 16 July 1945, quoting the Bhagavad Gita, at the first atomic bomb test in New Mexico.
© 3 March 2012, Reginald L. Goodwin
In the aftermath of denials, false statements and outright lies for political gain, the science limped along as the Earth’s temperatures steadily increased.
The science limped as the educational system was emasculated, flaccid and impotent. Libertarian-inspired charter schools oscillated between hope to abject disaster, with no real world result to compare its outcome to. “Teaching-to-the-test” for fifty different yardsticks for a certain theocratic group that had co-opted God, convincing an electorate that theirs was the better political way, did not want critical thinkers: but mindless automatons that would keep the stratification between themselves and the bewildered proletariat intact, experts more at obfuscation than reasoned conclusions from data.
So, giving such a group controls over the nuclear football touched off short-term conflagrations that threw enough radiated dust and atomized humanity to block the exit of carbon dioxide – thankfully, not enough yet for a Sagan-prophesied nuclear winter, but enough to destabilize a teetering world economy collapsing on its own hubris.
Super storms struck continents: hurricanes that made Katrina look quaint by comparison threw tons of beachfront property into surrounding seas; tornados that made African villages existing for millennia extinct; Harlem, Brooklyn, Detroit, Vegas – settled urban concrete jungles with century-old brick and mortar swept clean to pristine, bare emptiness; polar bears that had resorted to cannibalism as polar icecaps reduced their hunting grounds for survival now like many humans…among the missing.
In the aftermath of denials, false statements and outright lies, no contrition from those that allowed this tipping point to happen. No apology for obfuscation: the remaining talking heads resorted to Blog Talk Radio – as the power grid had been decimated – and doubled-down on insanity in the only thing that they could say and could not prove: it was God’s punishment for humanity’s many sins.
Indeed, if Deity was the cause of the receding shorelines, if Divinity was the cause of our planet’s slow death, those who contributed to our slothfulness in action; they who polluted our thoughts with dogma eschewing scientific method as we polluted our terra-formed home could at least admit their contrition in our environmental iniquities.
We had reached the tipping point, there was no going back, nor solar sail, fusion engine, or warp drive to spirit us away.
...or, so we thought.
Reference link: Predicting and managing extreme weather events - Physics Today
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