fever dreams

As Polar Ice Turns to Water, Dreams of Treasure Abound nyTimes
With major companies and nations large and small adopting similar logic, the Arctic is undergoing nothing less than a great rush for virgin territory and natural resources worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Even before the polar ice began shrinking more each summer, countries were pushing into the frigid Barents Sea, lured by undersea oil and gas fields and emboldened by advances in technology. But now, as thinning ice stands to simplify construction of drilling rigs, exploration is likely to move even farther north.

After raping the world, and strangling the "natural cycles", hominids cleverlessly expose the last, great, virgin land -- ripe for bug hunts with pointed sticks, among other games pursued by the opposable thumbs set.

These resources are not worth billions. They are both priceless and neccesary building blocks of our only world.

Last year, scientists found tantalizing hints of oil in seabed samples just 200 miles from the North Pole. All told, one quarter of the world's undiscovered oil and gas resources lies in the Arctic, according to the United States Geological Survey.

The United States Geological Survey also reports that Santa Claus has already established a lease on half of this oil, and the Easter Bunny has hidden some eggs amongst those tricky methane hydrate deposits. The U.S. military is gearing up for reindeer games, because Westerners love the hydrocarbon immolation dance, down to the last drop.

Earth. On track to becoming the other Venus.

If the melting continues, as many Arctic experts expect, the mass of floating ice that has crowned the planet for millions of years may largely disappear for entire summers this century.

These ice cubes will float south for the summer, to quench the parched valleys and towns of California with crystal clear homo-habilis era water.

Indeed, not everyone agrees that warming of the Arctic merits concern. No one knows what share of the recent thawing can be attributed to natural cycles and how much to heat-trapping pollution linked to recent global warming

Indeed, some people are vastly ignorant. Like the Times reporters who hodge-podged this article together. One cannot point out that ice which has "crowned the planet for millions of years" is melting away in one paragraph, and mere words later weigh in with the point-counterpoint piffle about "natural cycles".

OZYMANDIAS

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said:—Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.