 |
Inside Climate Change comprises a collection of very short stories, vignettes, essays, and poems centered on thoughts of impending global disaster. A major focus is our current uncontrolled combustion of fossil fuels, which the author believes is not only immoral (because greed-based) but will lead to the Earth collapsing in on itself. Much of what we are generally told about climate change, the author asserts, is “twisted, bent, pulled and stretched." He vividly describes what will happen to people caught up in confusion, who then fail to read the signs and prepare for what's to come. There will be earthquakes, volcanoes, and magnetic storms, until finally humans will have to live in underground tunnels because the surface of the Earth will no longer be habitable. One poignant poem toward the end of the book is “On Top,” a child’s question to a grandparent about what it was like to live on the surface:
…What about the porch light?
Riding a bike.
The breath of fresh air!
Gram-papa, Gram-papa,
What’s it like?
The author, otherwise unidentified, is, as he puts it, the “self-proclaimed” Professor What-If. He wrote this slim volume after several years of inner revelations that came to him as fragments of dreams. The bringer of these insights was a female; "she" (possibly, he says, Mother Nature) supplied him with simple but crucial concepts that he was to convey to others. Though the experiences made him worry about his sanity at times, he began to realize that the messages bore a sense of clarity and certainty. This sense crystallized for the author in 2014 after learning that Russia would be opening up Antarctica for oil exploration. He then began earnestly to compose his book. Readers can decide about the fact or fantasy contained in Professor What-If’s collection. For some it may seem far-fetched, for others, food for thought.