The long haul

Penore is in it for the long haul. She is old and plans on being much, much older. Global coolings and global warmings have come and gone and cycled through again.

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To humans, keeping the Sahara a desert and making sure that the ice in Antartica never melts is the only way to feel safe. If anything changes then we must be committing some kind of sin and the gods are punishing us.

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Penore sees things a little differently. To her the earth is always changing. She remembers when the Sahara was a savana and when Antartica held wonderful animal and plant life. Some of our legends, including dragons are buried under all that ice. And Penore would like to see it uncovered again and as such is one of the few that is actually rooting for global warming.

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But she is worried. What is worrying her are the disinfectants that claim to kill 99.94% of germs. That means that only the meanest nastiest ones survive. And when they divide and multiply the germ population becomes meaner and nastier. Kind of like if a plague wiped out humanity and left only people who were isolated in prisons and asylums. And then that generation of criminals locked up their meanest and looniest people and the plague once again knocked off everyone outside and so on for 100's of generations. 

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She is not sure what to do. She is used to being able to add a little something here or there to "turn the tide". You know, dislodge just the right pebble that starts a landslide that takes down half a mountain and causes the pressure on the lava below to be reduced leading to a massive volcano at just the right latitude to heat up the planet a little in just the right places.

She is currently working on getting rid of Panama. Ever since Central America pushed its way onto the Pacific tectonic plate the flow between the two great oceans has stopped and that has caused a cycle of ice ages that has become rather bothersome.

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Her plan started with the Panama canal - a whisper in just the right ears got the little strip of water now between the oceans. The next phase involves widening and deepening so that the water will actually flow between the oceans and begin to even out the salt concentrations which, of course, will produce more moderate temperatures world wide.

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She won't say who's ears she is whispering into but when I ask her about it certain pictures come to mind: the person whose ears she whispers into has some kind of uniform and the computer screens in the eyes next to the whispered ears are looking at the earth from a place where the wind don't blow.

***

But Penore is stumped about the germs. They are so small and so many and they multiply so fast that there doesn't seem to be any "pebbles" that will turn this tide. So she sits and ponders and worries. Germs... germs... germs.... not to mention viruses - but don't get her started!!!