Of Climate Change, Talking Fishes and the Himalayas
The glacial lakes far north in the country had all burst and the rivers across the Himalayas had turned pitch brown, and the atmosphere was adorned with the most powerful smells of soil and nature. Plant debris floated on the angry rivers as they knocked against each other producing the most hideous thuds.
Two large fishes were washed ashore, along the banks of Punatsang-chu, right on to the grounds of Khuruthang after a flash flood.
The sky was cast with a depressing family of clouds. Lightening struck and thunders clapped, rolling loud into the gills of the fishes on the bank. Shortly, it was followed by rain. As the droplets severely fell on the leaves of the trees, they cut through them like knives and cooked the eyes of the two large fishes on Khuruthang ground.
One of the fishes had the strength and thus the wisdom to shout,“Cop15”, followed by the second fish’s, “Failure” and died painfully of acid rain.
The year was 2080 the fishes had spoken for the first, and the last time.
Down south, their oceanic cousins had all died, due to rise in temperature and acidity of the ocean.
The rate at which the greenhouse gases were produced as a result of human activities had reached its peak and the oceans had started warming at a rate 50 times more than the atmosphere.
The water vapors from the oceans and seas floated high up and towards the mountains forming nebulous clouds. Across the Himalayas, the weather had become unpredictable and inhospitable for human settlement. Here, the atmosphere was bombarded by thunders, roasted by lightening and rummaged by heavy rainstorms.
The land had given itself up to chronic landslides, high magnitude earthquakes and in some parts, boiling volcanoes.
Typhoons, cyclones and windstorms ruled at sea. The ocean beds had become a melting pot of magma.
As the effects of global warming started taking its toll, first it affected the flora and fauna, then the drinking water followed by decline in hydropower generation and ultimately the economy and the people of the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan.
The natural disasters spread around the globe with human beings getting trapped in the gaping earth as earthquakes of cosmic magnitudes began.
Most of them were also killed as they got washed away by the flash floods and swelling rivers. Fiery volcanoes that ensued in most parts of the world consumed the population.
Pestilence of a rare kind followed fostered by the warm weather.
The human race was on the brink of extinction. The population of the developing world had all perished in the face of nature.
The capitalistic hunger of the developed nations that made them produce and consume more than they needed, followed by telescopic global warming led to this dire situation.
Year 2080 was a complete end in the era of human settlement in the Himalayas.
Starting from puny ants on earth to birds flying high in the sky, to the fishes in the oceans had breathed their last and were expecting reincarnation in a world better than the one inhabited by the humans.
The whole charade of these results were the selfish decisions taken at cop15 by the privileged and capitalistic developed countries!