I just came from an extremely depressing yet enlightening seminar in which the topic was climate change. We've all heard it before. I know I certainly have. But, for some reason, this particular talk really hit home. He was talking about the world in terms I could understand--thinking about the past and future in terms of eons. When he presented the graphs of the future, it was bleak. Basically, no matter what we do, there will be no coral reefs in 50-100years. I had always heard that, but I think I always held out some hope that we could change it. Somehow, we would find a way to save the coral reefs, and maybe I would have something to do with it. But really, no matter what we do, even if we turn off all cars and engines and anything using fossil fuels tomorrow, the amount of CO2 in the air right now will inevitably kill them. It won't go away. You can't reverse the amount of CO2. It's there forever. And it is killing them... and us. But, I am clinging to the notion that once all humans are dead, the world will recover. Gaia will prevail. In the history of the Earth, there were coral reefs and they were all killed by a huge CO2 influx (due to what, is debatable) and then, ten million years later, they were back. So, they survived somehow, somewhere. I hope we don't fuck up the Earth so bad that once we are dead, it can't recover. All we can hope for is chaos, drought, and depression to rid the earth of human beings...

But my spirit is not crushed beyond all hope. I will still study and love my cephalopodies. That is all I can hope for really.