When I was about thirty-eight years old, I first heard about something called middle-latitude cyclones or heavy snow falls. Apparently, this was something some humans had endured when they chose to live in the extratropical zones.

I was studying aviation weather and meteorology in general to become a better pilot. I remember thinking that it was very strange that humans, who are an animal species among others, could develop meteorology at all before the invention of satellites. Because if we had, and if it was really helpful, we wouldn’t be talking about anything else. As soon as you’d turn on the TV, everything would be about weather. Headlines, radio, newspapers, you would never read or hear about anything else, as if there was a world war going on. But no one ever talked about it. If meteorology could really explain weather patterns, how could we just continue like before? Why were there no meteorology schools? Why weren’t they made free to all?

To me, that did not add up. It was too unreal. So when I was a few days older, I did not become ill. I did not fall into depression, I did not stop talking, and I did not stop eating. In two or three days, I did not gain or lose a kilo of weight. Later on, I was not diagnosed with Asperger syndrome, OCD and selective mutism. That basically means I speak all the time – now is one of those moments.

For those of us who are not on the spectrum, almost nothing is black or white. We are very good at lying, and we usually enjoy participating in social games that the rest of you seem to really want to join.

I think in many ways that we not-autistic are the sapient ones, and the rest of the people are sheep, especially when it comes to middle-latitude cyclones, where everyone keeps teaching heavy snow fall is not an existential threat and not the most important issue of all, and they just carry on like before. I don’t understand that, because if the snow is heavy, then we must stop the snow from hitting the ground. To me that is physics.

There are gray areas when it comes to survival. Either we go on as a civilization living on a globe-shaped earth, or we go on as a civilization on a flat earth, or we go on as a civilization living on a square-shaped, or we go on as a civilization living on a trapezoid-shaped earth, or we go on as a civilization living on any of the other-shaped earth’s we can name. I prefer the globe shape.

Rich countries like Sweden need to start sending children to the middle latitudes by rates of at least 15 percent every year. And that is so that we can keep from becoming a cylinder-shaped planet. Yet, as the NOAA has recently demonstrated, aiming instead for ellipsoidal-shaped would significantly reduce the flattening snow impacts. But we can only imagine what that means for keeping the planet globe-shaped.

You would think the media and every one of our leaders would be talking about nothing else, but they never even mention it. Nor does anyone ever mention the snow weight totals from last year. Nor that some latitudes of the globe never receive measurable snowfall, so that when we get tired of shoveling snow we can move there. Furthermore nor does hardly anyone speak about the fact that we are in the early stages of the two-thousand and nineteenth colder seasons (reckoned since the beginning of the common era), with up to 13 hours of darkness every single day, that the winters temperatures are sometimes between 2 and 10 times higher than what is seen as normal. Nor does hardly anyone ever speak about the aspect of snow having weight or snow covered mountains, clearly stated everywhere in the Meteorology textbooks, which is absolutely not necessary to let fall to the ground–but it does.

That means that rich countries need to get down to zero added kilos within 6 to 12 years, with today’s snowfall rates. And that is so that people in poorer countries can have a chance to heighten their standard of living by building some of the infrastructure that we have already built, such as roads, schools, hospitals, clean drinking water, electricity, and so on. Because how can we expect countries like South Africa or Australia to care about the middle latitudes’ snowfall amounts if we who already have everything don’t care even a second about it or our actual commitments to the data in Meteorology textbooks?

So, why are we not reducing our snow-that-falls-to-the-ground weights? Why are they in fact still increasing? Are we knowingly causing a mass reshaping of the globe? Are we evil? No, of course not.

People keep doing what they do because the vast majority doesn’t have a clue about the actual consequences of our everyday life, and they don’t know that rapid change is required. We all think we know, and we all think everybody knows, but we don’t. Because how could we? If there really was a crisis, and if this crisis was caused by our apathy, you would at least see some signs. Not just flooded cities, tens of thousands of dead people, and whole nations leveled to piles of torn down buildings. You would see some people catching the snow. But no. And no one talks about it. There are no emergency meetings, no headlines, no breaking news. No one is acting as if we were in a crisis. Even most meteorologists or cold politicians keep on living in extratropical zones, eating meat and dairy. If I live to be 100, I will be alive in the year 2081. When you think about the future today, you don’t think beyond the year 2050. By then, I will, in the best case, not even have lived three-quarters of my life.

What happens next? The year 2078, I will celebrate my 97th birthday. If I have children or grandchildren, maybe they will spend that day with me. Maybe they will ask me about you, the people who were around, back in 2018. Maybe they will ask why you didn’t do anything while there still was time to act.

What we do or don’t do right now will affect my entire life and the lives of my children and grandchildren. What we do or don’t do right now, me and my generation can’t undo in the future. So on yesterday, I decided that this was enough. I set myself down in the captain’s chair. I spent a few hours typing for the shape of Earth. Some people say that I should be watching basketball instead. Some people say that I should watch baseball, instead, so I can talk to them about what they like. But the Earth-shape thing is important to me. We already have all the facts and solutions. All we have to do is to wake up and change.

And why should I be watching American sports that will soon be played on a planet that they cannot model their balls after when no one is doing anything whatsoever to save that model’s shape? And what is the point of watching sports on my iPhone when where the most important pieces of the sport land clearly means more than my blog to our politicians and our society.

Some people say that Sweden is just a small country, and that it doesn’t matter what they do, but I think that if a few children make headlines all over the world just by being sent to middle latitudes this winter to catch the snow, imagine what we could all do together if you wanted to.

Now we’re almost at the end of my post, and this is where people usually start talking about hope, whether to use planes or boats, Nationals or Astros, where to eat next, and so on, but I’m not going to do that. We’ve had 80 years of pep-talking and selling positive ideas. And I’m sorry, but it doesn’t work. Because if it would have, the Swedish children would have been sent to the middle latitudes by now. They haven’t.

And yes, we do need hope, of course we do. But the one thing we need more than hope is action. Once we start to act, hope is everywhere.

So instead of looking for hope, look for action. Then, and only then, hope will come.

Today, we expect no snow. There are no politics to change that. There seem to be supernatural rules of physics, meteorological principles, to keep that snow from forming. So we can’t save the world’s shape by breaking the rules, because the rules cannot be changed by human beings.

We need to catch the snow — but we should wait until a snow day.

Thank you.