The Positive Power of SCIENCE!

The birth of LAMLANDIA!

I am so happy today! LamLandia, the country of my fervent dreams, has become a reality! Through careful long-term planning I have secured a nation for myself; but not some conceptual nation of the mind! No, not by a long shot! LamLandia is a physical place in the world and I am its leader! Granted, it’s not the biggest nation in the world, and - in fact - it may be one of the smaller ones but it is mine, all mine!

So where is this nation you ask? Right now it is slowly pulling away from one of Antarctica’s ice shelves and will soon be zooming - with me along with it - around the Roaring 40s! LamLandia will be a stable and self-sufficient nation of the Southern Hemisphere, where it isn’t boiling hot like it is in the Northern Hemisphere! It will have an endless supply of ice for keeping drinks cool and refreshing and it will a great number of penguins to keep the inhabitants of LamLandia entertained and in a good mood!

There will also be plenty of blubber and blubber-related treats to keep everyone on LamLandia “fat and happy,” as they say!

So exactly, did I accomplish this feat? It was all very simple. A few years ago I invented a technique for traveling backward and forward through time by circling the North Pole in either a clockwise of counterclockwise direction. For every time I go around the North Pole counterclockwise I travel back in time by one day. My plan, which has worked flawlessly, was to travel back to the mid-19th century to encourage the development of a carbon-heavy industrial economy, one that was sure to increase certain chemicals in the earth’s atmosphere.

Before I embarked on my plan, I gathered the greatest scientists in history and brought them to my compound. This I did by traveling back to their days by traveling around the North Pole counterclockwise, going to their houses, explaining I was ANDY LAM! and that I was from the future and needed their help. Of course because they were all scientists they were curious and came along with me. Once they were by my side, we went back to the North Pole and zoomed around clockwise until we were back in the current time and I could take them to my compound where they were given something nice to eat and were lodged in a very comfortable science-themed bunkhouse.

Who were these scientists? Oh, only the greatest minds (me included!) ever collected! There was Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, Imhotep, Marie Curie, Galileo, Zhang Heng, Euclid, Homi Bhabha, Charles Darwin, Louis Pasteur, Momoun Beheiry, Copernicus, Thomas Edison, Heo Jun, Nikola Tesla, Michael Faraday, Heungseon Daewongun, Alexander Graham Nynex, Muhammad Abduh, Niels Bohr, Su Song, Gregor Mendel, Archimedes, Cai Xitao, Max Planck, Jang Yeong-sii, Johannes Kepler, CV Raman, Leonardo da Vinci, Coching Chu, Antoine Lavoisier, Carl Linnaeus, George Washington Carver, Dmitri Mendeleev, Edwin Hubble, Yi Mu, Robert Boyle, Rachel Carson, Ye Duzheng, Robert Hooke, Visvesvaraya, Blaise Pascal, Enrico Fermi, Alessandro Volta, John Dalton, Paul Dirac, Tertullian, Ibrahim Njoya, John Ogbu and me!

As you can imagine, having this many scientists in a room can be a challenge but as soon as I spoke they realized my natural superiority and followed my careful logic and direction! I explained that my goal was to create a new nation - but not a nation of the mind but one of physical fact - and that calving off a chunk of ice from one of the Antarctic ice shelves was the best idea. They all agreed with me. Next we got a bunch of paper and pencils and maps and stuff and began looking at the map of Antarctica. I think it was Euclid who spotted what he thought would be the perfect spot and the rest of the team waited to hear whether I agree. I poured over the papers and data and finally agreed.

Everyone was elated and set to work calculating the best way to have a giant iceberg break off. It was Michael Faraday, I think, who suggested that a small rise in global temperature would probably be enough to weaken some of the natural fissures in the ice to the point that they would break clean through, freeing LamLandia from Antarctica’s grip!

Albert Einstein and George Washington Carver went off into a corner to decide how much the temperature would need to rise and they came back with a number (I can’t share it because I promised not to reveal many of the key details of the science behind my brilliant plan.)

Armed with that number, another working group started working to determine the best way to achieve that temperature rise over time. There were two groups - one that advocated a sudden local warming and another that recommended a slower and more global increase. This became the source of a bitter debate but I, in my wisdom, told them to please be quiet because I needed to think. The rapid local warming may have made sense but it would draw too much attention to itself. I mean how could we explain a localized spike in temperature in one small part of an ice shelf? I couldn’t think of a way to do that so we shelved that plan.

The Gradualists eventually carried the day, thanks to my support, and all of the brains set to work on ways to raise the temperature over time. Because we didn’t want to mess up the flow of history it was decided that we would have to use available technologies to achieve our goal. Yes, I could have travelled to the future to bring back a laser or something but that could through the earth out of balance! Much better to encourage the use of fossil fuels over a long stretch of time and achieve our temperature that way.

This required the teams to go back to their own times and develop ideas and technologies that would lead to the mass exploitation of the earth’s reserves of coal and oil in a relatively compressed timeframe. I knew, from history, that oil would be discovered at Oil Creek in Pennsylvania, for example, and if we could get some big name investors behind it it would take off like wildfire! Coal, too, which had a much longer history, would need to be used A LOT MORE to achieve my end and so we decided that an industrial revolution powered, eventually, by coal, would increase the amount of chemicals and stuff being pumped into the atmosphere.

All of the scientists agreed that this was the smartest thing to do and happily returned to the past to set the wheels in motion! I have been tracking the slow rise in atmospheric and oceanic temperatures for some time now and measuring the cracks in the ice to see when my new nation would be born. It has been a slow process and there have been times when I thought maybe these scientists weren’t so smart after all! But lo and behold! The science of climate change really did work as planned! By pumping massive amounts of CO2, Methane, Chlorofluorocarbons and other neat stuff into the atmosphere for the past 150 years or so the temperature of the world was driven up very gradually so no one noticed and got suspicious and now I, ANDY LAM!, have LamLandia! An ice nation all my own to sail around the Great Southern Ocean in search of fun and adventure!

It really goes to show that if you put your mind to something, no matter how complicated it may seem, you can achieve BIG things! And it you have the GREATEST minds in history in your corner nothing is impossible and nothing can go wrong!

The proud owner of the world’s newest land, I am . . .

ANDY LAM!!!