American Atlantis?
UNITED NATIONS (AMP) —The Vatican’s top linguist and U.N.’s environmental ambassador Serena Serghetti warned that melting ice caps will unleash Atlantis-like flooding upon the earth’s coastal cities unless the world unites to stop global warming.
Standing in ruins left behind by Hurricane Sandy in New York City and citing this week’s release of the most definitive data yet that the ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland are melting much faster than predicted even a few years ago, Serghetti declared that the world is now on pace for 4°C of global warming by the end of the century.
“Four degrees doesn’t sound like much, I know,” said Serghetti, whose environmental extremism has earned her the title “Mother Earth” from the media and reprimands from the Holy See and Big Energy. “But four degrees is all it took on the cooler side to plunge most of the United States and Europe under glaciers during the last ice age.”
Warming that warming could bring similarly drastic changes, such as three feet or more of sea-level rise by 2100, more severe heat waves, and regional extinction of coral reef ecosystems, she warned.
“It’s the poorer countries who will be hit the hardest, because rising sea levels will swamp large tracts of farmland in countries like Bangladesh, Egypt, Vietnam and parts of Africa,” she said.
Serghetti has been working with the World Bank and richer countries to help poorer countries build dams and seawalls, crop research, freshwater management, the necessary infrastructure to adapt to a warmer world. But she now says even those Herculean efforts won’t be enough on 4°C planet.
“We have to take radical action to turn the thermostat down and stop 4°C warming altogether. We have to look at everything from boosting renewable energy to redesigning the world’s transportation system.”
Serghetti’s call to action got a cool response from Big Energy lobbyists, who say it didn’t take long for her to stir the international pot after resurfacing from a nearly three-year absence on the world stage.
“Mother Earth should know better than anyone else that you can’t fight Mother Nature,” said a natural gas executive from Texas who spoke on condition of anonymity. “Temperatures on this planet have been going up and down for eons, regardless of carbon emissions and other human contamination, as she calls it. Instead of trying to control the winds and the waves, she should be helping us bring power to the peoples of the earth.”
Serghetti, 27, first gained notoriety as a teenager after “decoding” the ancient Aymaran language and selling her algorithm as a universal translator to Google for billions. She was later fictionalized as a globe-trotting nun in a series of New York Times bestselling blockbusters by novelist Thomas Greanias, starting with Raising Atlantis, which is set in Antarctica.
