A crisis greater than global warming (or cooling, for that matter) has been growing steadily for nearly a century. While the origin of many disasters can never be known, the exact moment this one began is etched in history. There is a monument on a sandy windblown strand at Kitty Hawk that bears everlasting testimony to the instant this world-devastating process began. It started quietly enough with the Wright Flyer.

Having been given wings and the freedom of flight should have been enough but, alas, no, there followed an air arms build up, commercial flight, and air travel is now pervasive and global. Consider the total tonnage of aircraft, passengers, fuel, and baggage that is in the air at any one moment. It is a staggering figure - trust me. What that means is why I am writing this; what you can do about it is also found herein. Be afraid, be very afraid. Afraid of what has already been cast and cannot be undone, and of that which will follow and cannot be stopped.

First some science along the vein of conservation of momentum. We have all seen beautiful young women skating on ice in the Olympics games, etc., and are familiar with the high-speed spins they perform. As they draw their arms in close to their bodies, the rate of spin goes up. That is conservation of momentum. You may recall an old law which states that once set in motion, an object will remain in motion unless acted upon by an outside force, or, an object at rest remains at rest...

The world we live on is a spinning orb. It has spun at various rates over the time of its existence, certainly, but has been predictably regular about how long a day is. Then came the Wright Flyer and all that has come of it, and the length of a day is in jeopardy and that has catastrophic secondary effects. My friends, the world has begun to wobble.

Without saying why, science has described the "El Nino" effect as a sloshing of the Pacific ocean which alternately sends warm plumes of sea to its eastern edge, then cooler water. This sloshing is caused by the wobble of the world. If you will indulge me, imagine the Pacific ocean is contained in a tea cup and a giant hand swirls it so the tea sloshes left and right. For our purposes, the giant hand is the result of conservation of momentum.

Enough science. Here is the threat and it is real: Because more and ever more aircraft and all they carry are airborne the weight carried about the surface of the earth is diminished. This is equivalent to the skater pulling her arms toward her body. The result is, the world's rate of spin is increasing and it is doing so at an increasing rate. This is serious by itself, but what is an even greater hazard for us all is that the weight aloft has not come from uniformly distributed sources. In a word, the world is falling out of balance just as if a tire has thrown a balancing weight; it is beginning to gyrate wildly. The most obvious evidence is the so-called "El Nino" effect. The entire Pacific ocean is sloshing because the earth is becoming unbalanced.

Other contributors are the relocation of fossil fuels via ship and pipeline, the damming of rivers, the aggregation of automobiles in population centers, and the wholesale relocation of great masses of people and all the trappings needed to support them.

What is certain is certainly unbelievable. We have seen the effects of weather caused by the sloshing of the ocean, we have seen the exodus from rain belt to more moderate climes (the arms are coming in ever tighter), even while we see the transportation industry poised to put ever more tonnage into the skies. This is positive feedback, or, a reinforcing energy which will cause this condition to worsen over time.

This is what is expected to happen. It is a highly likely chain of events and can be demonstrated by any competent earth scientist.

1) The Pacific ocean will continue to slosh and weather will continue to be unpredictable, or better put, predictably erratic.

2) The ice shelves in Antarctica are breaking free of the underlying seafloor they have been anchored to for eons. Bergs the size of small countries will float free into the oceans.

3) Biological species which have been trapped in that ice since the dawn of time are going to be released into the world's seas. There is a reasonable probability that diseases which have not existed on the planet since only generations removed from the first primordial slime will infect and kill, without any hope of antibodies, all levels of life which contact them. This will seriously disrupt the food chain, and much of that gift we call nature and which we hold dear.

4) The icebergs will migrate north across the southern Atlantic ocean and race pell mell for the northern latitudes just as paint, dropped on a spinning ball, will stream from the axis of rotation toward the equator. The issue with the largest iceberg is, it has inertia, and will not stop when it has reached the equator of the world, but will glide right on by as a pendulum swings past the lowest part of its arc to come to rest well past that point.

Let me describe what will become of the ice when it reaches the northern Atlantic ocean because it is fantastic and horrendous at the same time. It will graze South America, actually bounce off of it, and this will impart a spin to it. This spin will cause it to veer toward the European continent. Corialis effect, the same action that causes water to spin down a drain, will contribute to the direction and to the speed of the flow. It is anticipated it will first strike Iceland and it will not stop. It will overtop the islands and scrape them to 500 feet or more below sea level. Recall that Iceland is the tip of a volcano! Scraping the island to that depth will also expose the various caldera which are in the heart of the islands, and this will, in essence, pull the plug. The island turned seamount will vomit lava, gases, plumes, and continue to do so for more than a lifetime. It can be shown that the seafloor will slowly collapse as the release of magma into the sea lowers the bouancy of the underlying oceanic crust. Great cracks and escarpments will open up, the western edge of Europe and the English Isles will be slowly dragged under the sea. This will occur over decades.

The ice flow, having been the undoing of Iceland, will be deflected towards Portugal and Spain, and will come to rest as a mountain of ice, blocking the straights of Gibraltar. The Mediterranean Sea will be cut off from the ocean and will grow shallow over millennia, as well as very salty. The ice flow will push great quantities of sea floor ahead of it as it literally grinds to a halt. The effect will be a permanent dam forever cutting off the ocean from the Mediterranean Sea.

If this were the end of it there would be nothing further of concern. If it were only so. The weight of the icebergs, having come to rest against the eastern Atlantic, will contribute to the wobble of the planet. The northern hemisphere will be far too out of balance and the earth will actually begin to tip. The pole will move from its current point to a location somewhere around the latitude of New York. Just where on the planet the new pole will be is impossible to know, but it will not be a smooth transition. The entire globe will begin to wobble erratically as a poorly tossed football. The period of wobble will be far shorter than the existing rate, and this will cause ever more sloshing of the seas but with a greater and more disastrous side effect. Just as tidal bores now rush across the Bay of Fundy, or reach miles up the Amazon river, tidal bores, hundreds of feet high, will race across the low lying areas of the earth. Florida will be washed clean 6 times a day. Much of Indonesia will be scoured clean and then as the seas move on, land bridges between Indonesia and Australia will be exposed. The oceans will silt up and what ever life remains will be choked to death.

The waters of the Hudson Bay will circulate like wine spun in a goblet. The Great Lakes will slosh over their banks like swimming pools in an earthquake. The Gulf of Mexico will slosh as far north as Oklahoma, and the oil platforms which are found everywhere in the gulf will be carried away, breaking all the lines from which oil will pour unchecked.

Sadly, it only gets worse. As the world continues to tip, and as the polar ice at both ends of the planet are exposed to direct sun and the giant oceanic turbulence, the ice will melt. It will take years, to be sure, but it will occur. And it will melt faster than the waters at the new poles can freeze. This leads to more flooding, more biological threats from long frozen spores, germs, and viruses.

Good people, there is more horror to behold. On the big island of Hawaii, Kiluea has been spewing lava steadily since 1985. The southern side of the island has become top-heavy. Already on the island, a huge crack has opened up and it has to be seen to be believed. This is the precursor of what is to come. Just as has already befallen other older islands in the chain, and due in part to the gyrations of the globe, a massive chunk of the island is going to break off and sink under the sea. Several dozens of square miles of the island will sluff off and slide the thousands of feet to the sea floor. The mountain upon which Hawaii is made tapers as it goes deeper and this will cause the dislodged land mass to move horizontally as well as down. The momentum of this will propel the mass dozens of miles away from the base of the volcano which forms the island. This force will cause an equal and opposite reaction: The already battered earth will shudder under the stress. It should be obvious that tidal waves of unimaginable proportions will circle the earth, making several circuits before running out of energy.

There is hope. If we act now we can prevent this but time is running out and there is a point of no return toward which we are racing. We have to put the word out. We have to find the ear of leaders. We have to stop the mechanization which has brung us to this precipice. We need Al Gore.

Al Gore invented the Information Superhighway. Even while there is no evidence to support it, Al Gore began the thankless fight against global warming. He was the only man in high office to recognize there was too much English on the Internet. He has the uncanny ability to draw enormous funds from unlikely sources to pay for his dreams. He is a lifelong, very savvy politician who has placed the planet before all else. As the son of a life long tobacco farmer, he was in position when needed to suck wealth from the heartless tobacco overlords for the good of the children. Al Gore can stop the ravages which we all face. You can, no you must, help. Do all you can to bring this crisis to the attention of Al Gore, of the United Nations, the Green Peace movement, and AARP, so that our children's children will still be able to call Florida "America's sunbelt".

Of course, I could be wrong.