BLOBAL WARMING
The latest scientific reports on climate change trot out all the familiar devastating consequences of global warming: Melting ice caps, rising sea levels, shifting weather patterns, super-hurricanes, species extinctions, droughts, drowning polar bears.
Now I’m going to tell you something really scary–the single most terrifying threat that global warming poses to mankind, and one you’ve probably never considered. It is so spine-tinglingly dreadful, so blood-curdingly awful, so bone-chillingly horrible that no one on either side of the issue will speak of it. Why? Because it scares the living bejeebers out of them, that’s why.
Global warming will bring back the Blob.
Yes, that Blob. The Blob.
The Blob has been dormant for half a century, but it’s out there and the only thing preventing it from squishing through the streets of our cities right now, leaving a slimy trail of death in its wake, is the biting cold of the polar ice cap. Remember? That’s where the Air Force marooned it after a bunch of teenagers neutralized the thing by freezing it with CO2 fire extinguishers. Steve McQueen himself assured us that we were safe “as long as the Arctic stays cold.”
As long as the Arctic stays cold. . .
Global warming is shrinking the polar ice cap at the rate of 9% each decade. By the end of this century it will be ice-free for several months of the year. Long before that happens the Blob will thaw, morphing from an inert mound of frozen protoplasm into a malevolent suppurating gelatinous goo. It will begin to feed. First a few seals and walruses. Maybe a narwhal. Then perhaps an Inuit village. Before long, it will be blurbling down the main street of your town, driven by one mindless overpowering insatiable instinct: To suck you up the way a paper towel sucks up green liquid in those TV commercials.
Don’t think you can protect yourself with CO2 fire extinguishers like those teenagers did. Sure, they’re effective against the Blob, but a CO2 fire extinguisher has one major drawback: It sprays CO2. Carbon dioxide is the most abundant greenhouse gas in the atmosphere and a primary cause of global warming. Start spreading that stuff around and you’ll only compound the conditions that invigorate the Blob. That’s right: in trying to stop it, you’ll actually be abetting the Blob in its blubbery rampage of death–a catch-22 of pure horror.
But go ahead, Mr. and Ms. Complacent. Keep burning fossil fuels and spewing out greenhouse gasses. Leave your carbon footprints at the scene of your crimes against nature. Because sooner or later the Blob is going to reach for you with an enormous gloppy pseudopod and envelop you in its oozing colloidal embrace. When that repulsive pectin from hell closes over your face and starts to digest you, dissolving your flesh, consuming your organs, absorbing your very essence–when that happens, you should have just enough time to regret not buying the hybrid instead of the SUV.
Of course, it doesn’t have to be that way. You could turn off a light now and then or take public transportation instead of driving. That wouldn’t kill you, right? But the Blob will kill you for sure.
The Blob must become the central issue in the global warming debate. The longer we refuse to talk about it, the greater the danger to our world. Silence = Blob. Unfortunately, the Blobal threat has been dangerously underplayed. It is a truth too inconvenient even for Al Gore–he never makes a single public reference to the Blob. Nor is the Blob specifically mentioned in the Kyoto protocol (surprising when you consider that Japan is a country that knows how to deal with an environmental crisis. They are still the only nation on earth to successfully take on the Smog Monster).
Until we face up to the threat posed by the Blob, no one is safe. Yet our leaders lack the vision, the will, and the resolve to confront this menace. So I conclude this warning not with the false but comforting sense of closure that the words “the end” might engender, but rather with an indeterminate feeling of dread and a panicky anticipation of an uncertain future that is best expressed as:
