Not taking action carries costs, too.

Copied comment from another thread in which I debated this issue:

https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2020-01-02/2019-was-australias-hottest-and-driest-year-on-record/11837312?pfmredir=sm

“2019 was Australia’s hottest and driest year on record”

Also this: “Annual Climate statement 2019” http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/current/annual/aus/

2019 was the hottest AND driest year on record. Those two things don’t necessarily go hand in hand. But together, that’s a deadly combination, as we’ve seen.

Will 2020 be worse than 2019? Maybe, maybe not. It would actually be surprising if 2020 broke records set in 2019. Records do not need to be smashed every single year to prove the global warming hypothesis. Global warming is not tidy, uniform, or consistent, and you have to look at decades’ worth of data to draw firm conclusions.

Climatological records have been kept in Australia for over a century. And: 2019 just saw the hottest *and* driest year of all those years.

This isn’t just “weather.” Australia’s climate is changing.

And this fire was started by arsonists

And according to scientists, climate change is what it caused to get out of control, regardless of how it started. I'll leave it up to you if you believe those scientists or not, but the whole truth can only be revealed when vital facts are not left out, so let's make the story complete.

Three hundred and fifty thousand, seven hundred and fourteen verses. Twenty lines per verse, and every line rhymes with the following one.

That’s how long Andrei Gheorghe’s poem is. It’s almost four times longer than the Mahabharata of ancient India. Forty times longer than The Iliad and The Odyssey combined and twenty times longer than Dante’s Divine Comedy.

It’s (appropriately) called The Longest Poem in the World and it’s composed by aggregating real-time public twitter updates and selecting those that rhyme. Every day the poem grows longer by about 4000 verses. Some of it sounds inane (“Playing hide and seek at the park. 🙂 / Waiting on Heather and Mark!”) A lot of it sounds funny (“im hoping that its easy and i can finish it quickly / They made porcupine love, so stiff and stuck and prickly” and “Had a great gala evening and won lots of prizes / And also simulating p**is sizes”).

But most if it’s actually fantastically mundane. Boring. Stupid. People waiting for their favourite TV show to start. People twittering about God during the sermon. People announcing their hangovers like victories. People regurgitating sayings and Oscar Wilde quotes.

Gheorghe’s has called it a collective consciousness. And in effect it is—it brews an essence of human thought and if you read it for too long you’ll be moved. You’ll get angry. You’ll feel every ounce of wasted life like somebody was yanking your haemorrhoids with a tire-iron.

But perhaps this is humanity. Perhaps this is the essence of our being, making The Longest Poem in the World one of the most relevant pieces of art around. One that mirrors (a part of) reality in a one to one correlation. One that, if read in its entirety, would annihilate the little that may still be left of our souls and leave us completely aware of the emptiness that envelopes our lives.

The poem consists of what hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people deemed most worthy to communicate to the world and/or their friends at a given moment (in real-time). And it rhymes, which somehow accentuates the inherent nihilism of this deranged and disturbing poem.

I don’t blame twitter. The results would probably have been the same (or worse) if the material had been small-talk. In person. Offline. And I’m not sure my own statuses and/or small-talk would’ve been any more interesting.

Yet perhaps the sensation it evokes is false—not based in the reality it stems from. Perhaps the world is not as empty and meaningless as The Longest