« Sometimes I wish. . . | Main | If there is a Hell. . . »
January 23, 2006
It's as if. . . .
Mother Nature creeped up on the libbies and leaned in close to their ear and then screamed:
HA! There's your Global Warming for ya!
Seriously tho', I don't subscribe to the Global Warming nonsense. Sure there's evidence that the earth is getting warmer, but there's also evidence that it's getting colder. There's plenty of evidence that our Sun is cranking out more energy than ever before and that our planet and it's various ecosystems are responding in kind.
[NOTE:It's important to realize that our Sun is going to keep getting hotter and hotter over geologic/astronomic time until it cooks us right off the planet and absorbs the Earth into it's ever expanding disk just a few million years before it collapses back upon itself. So if you want to bitch about "global warming" and use the SUN as your boogeyman, that's fine, but pretending that WE HUMANS are the culprit is just ludicrous at this point in our scientific/industrial evolution.]
In essence for me, it just seems as if we simply don't have enough of a grasp of global climate change or even the global climate in general to understand what the last 100 or so years of data means. That's really all we have ya know, about 100 years of "somewhat" reliable data on temperatures. Not to mention that MOST of that 100 years of data was collected within big concrete heatsinks that make up our cities. Those sinks keep getting bigger as cities grow so it's not really surprising that collecting data in our universities and our city-based weather bureaus over the past 10 or so decades has skewed the temperature data upwards. We're doing much better now with satellites since people began pointing out the heatsink effect of cities.
There are plenty in the Global Warming crowd that will harp that we have THOUSANDS of years of data, but that's mostly theoretical data at best and wholely fabricated at worst. Although I do just LOVE this graphic from the IPCC via the Wall Street Journal some time back.
In all intellectual honesty we simply don't have enough information to say that WE are doing THIS or doing THAT with regard to the climate, even with ice cores and tree ring fossils.
Sure pollution is bad, but industrialized societies compensate for pollution with wealth. Yep, I said it, wealth. Think about it for a second. I'm not rich, rich, rich, but I'm Bill Gates when it comes to most of the third world, and I do something with that wealth that many people take for granted. I landscape my yard. That's right. I have a lawn, I have flowerbeds, I have trees and schrubbery that not only enhance the value and appearance of my property, but also absorb far more CO2 and produce more O2 than the same piece of property would if left to the natural state. I'm not alone either, there are MILLIONS of us doing this. Think about it.
Now I'm not about to say that nice lawns and landscaping are the cure for global warming, but I do know this, they certainly help quite a bit. In case you hadn't noticed, North America is a NET ABSORBER of CO2 (That's one of dem der "greenhouse gasses" ya know). Yep, that's right, even with all our cars, our power plants, fireplaces and heavy industry, we still absorb more CO2 than we crank out. I suggest that's mainly because of our land use practices, especially our more modern ones (post WW2). We rarely let land go to "waste" in the United States. We do hold some aside and we do have some that doesn't appear to be doing anything, but the vast majority of land in the U.S. is managed in one way or another.
That management can take many different forms, it could be local and individual, as in the case of my house, which is surrounded by a green lawn in summer, regularly watered and cut so it's always growing and cranking out O2 and absorbing CO2 at a fair clip. I also spread rye grass in the winter to keep a lawn growing, then I have fruit trees, decorative cypress, some schrubbery and plenty of other decorative plants which I try to keep healty and do my best to avoid them becoming deer food (which I'll come back to later), as well as another area set aside in it's natural state to provide a bit of habitat for critters, birds and the like.
There's also the big agri-business land use and management on the other end of the scale. The United States produces ALOT of vegetation for foodstuffs, and that vegetation has a significant impact on the CO2 level. This vegetation has also been selected, domesticated and hybridized to produce a fast growing crop, maximizing both the amount of food produced and also the amount of CO2 and O2 processed and produced (not necessarily intended, but definately a benefit). We grow far more than we need as a "people" and then we sell the extra to others who don't grow quite so much because either they can't, they won't or they try and fail to produce enough to feed their own people. We also grow alot of food for fun (private gardens which hardly every outproduce commerical farms economically) and then we do strange things like grow corn in Indiana, ship it to Alabama and then spread it out in our backyards to encourage a deer population that's already over-abundant to visit our yards and eat our ryegrass, but hopefully not to eat the pansies in the front yard or kill our fruit trees (go figure).
Then we have trees. Lot's and lots of trees. The libbies are going to react to that statement and bitch and whine about logging, but that's ridiculous. Responsible logging, like that practiced in North America and most other industrialized areas of the world, is GOOD for the environment. Sure, it might be better, if we let wildfires rage out of control every few years to take out our older forests, but managing the forest seems to be a little better for all concerned. So we cut down a tree and we plant 7 in it's place, and those 7 young trees are going to process more CO2 and produce more Oxygen over a given reasonable period of time than that one older tree did. Then that tree is going to be processed into lumber for a house that's going to have a lawn and landscaping around it. So yeah, I'll say it. Logging is GOOD for the environment.
I know this is all VERY VERY simplistic, but I didn't really intend to write this at all. I just wanted to point out that just when you think the clamor about Global Warming can't get any louder or be any more insane, Mother Nature herself tosses us a curveball to just point out how little we actually do know and throw all the proconceived notions about climate change and how evil us humans are right out the window.
I also love the recent "Global Warming CAUSED by plants" info that's recently surfaced. Showing that we plainly and simply have no freaking idea what we've been talking about, are talking about or think we might be talking about.
So in short, Europe, break out the winter gear, it's probably going to continue to be a chilly one for you. As for me, I'll keep working on my lawn and hope that one day I can match my Dad's skills in cultivating the perfect patch of grass. For the rest of you out there, stop worrying so much about global warming and start concentrating on just being good to yourself and those around you, get yourself a hybrid if you're worried about it, grow some plants, blacktop that driveway instead of concrete, or vice versa (think about reflection vs. absorbsion) and stop worrying about Global Warming (which we don't really know exists anyway).
I suggest you start worrying about REAL ENVIRONMENTAL THREATS, like the nutcase in Iran who can't wait to start splitting the atom in the open atmosphere in order to bring about the 12th coming or something like that. Freaking nutcase.
How's that for a RANT!!!
Oh yeah, there's always THIS IDEA too.
--Jason
PS - The above was provoked by someone who e-mailed that I hadn't been ranting enough on my blog lately. Is that good enough for ya!?!?!?!?!
Posted by JasonColeman at January 23, 2006 5:15 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.jasoncoleman.com/MT/mt-tb.cgi/296
