A recent New Yorker cover carried a kitsch yet tragic image of a lone and all-puffed-out Father Christmas, sitting on a tiny disk of sea ice and leaning against a candy striped North Pole, like some absurdist and apocalyptic desert island scene at the very top of a hot and helter-skelter world.(*13&20 aug ’12)

George Monbiot’s scorchingly prescient piece on the record Arctic ice melt, in today’s Guardian, raises concerns that ‘a form of reactive denial’ drives lack of attention and a very muted response to this historic event. He describes 29th August, 2012 as…

‘The day the world went mad’:

As record sea ice melt scarcely makes the news while the third runway grabs headlines, is there aI wonder whether we could be seeing a form of reactive denial at work: people proving to themselves that there cannot be a problem if they can continue to discuss the issues in these terms…

(click above to Monbiot’s piece)

This interpretOr wonders whether cognitive dissonance drives the wretched and almost robotic ‘reactive denial’ bit, too…This event has the potential to impact upon all humanity – the phrase ‘earth shattering’ comes to mind…and all for that extra buckeroo for some oleaginous sociopath at mission control.