culture fix

so just what's going on? why should we be worried? sure, we might lose some coastal areas, but the netherlands was built from reclaimed sea, right? we can do the same with new orleans?

well, let's see. we've learned now that not only is new orleans sinking, it's literally sliding off the continental shelf, because of decades of drilling for oil. and by the end of the century, not only will all the beaches in the world erode by 600 feet, the u.s. will have lost the equivalent of massachussets in dry land.

storms. sure we'll have a few more hurricanes. but katrina aside, we can weather a few storms.

here's a problem in reporting i noticed last fall. on one report, they said it was a disappointment for hurricanes last year, with nothing like katrina to hit the newspapers. but on the eleven o'clock news, as a side note, they mentioned that a 'typhoon' in china created a million and a half evacuees. here's an issue with symantics: in the western hemisphere, we call it a hurricane, while if it happens in the pacific, we call it a typhoon. same difference, folks. 2006 was the strongest year for hurricanes ever. it just happened we didn't get anything noteworthy on our side of the ocean this year.

temperature rising? break out the lemonade!

living in sunny connecticut has been a trip these past few years. i come from the south, so i grumbled every winter as i broke out the snow shovel and had to learn new coping skills (such as using a broom to sweep off the snow from your windshield). this last winter, though? it was frickin' 70 in january. how creepy is that? a little piece on page 9 said that in 50 years (and god willing, i'll be around to see that), connecticut's climate will be like georgia. nice place to retire! but wait, what does that make georgia by 2057?

so apparently, last year was the hottest year in the history of the planet. and nine of the ten past years have been the hottest years on record. what's going on?

well, so here's the deal. we're pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere like nobody's business. bush's plan to cut carbon emissions by 20% in ten years? he's talking about cutting 20% off the projected growth. he's selling an increase in carbon production by telling us it's emissions reduction. huh? oh, that's right, i forgot, this is america. where we save more by buying more.

so what's the big deal about carbon dioxide? well, the deal is the sun. the sun is a big furnace, baking the planet. so what happens is that most of the sun rays bounce back into outer space, giving any alien tourists a nice view of the earth. carbon dioxide is a warm, cozy blanket, causing a few of those rays to stick around awhile. good for us, because otherwise it would be like pluto, and we would all be freezing our asses in aboslute zero.

problem is, the planet has evolved over the past three billion years to have a fairly steady temperature. people and cows breathe in oxygen, exhale carbon dioxide. trees breathe in carbon dioxide, exhale oxygen. a nice little stasis where all the plants and animals stay happy. but then we come along and cut down all the trees! pump up billions of tons of oil and burn it! we're sucking on this giant cigarette in a small closet and wondering why it's getting so smoky.

the thing is, carbon that we put into the atmosphere stays there. carbon dioxide has a half-life in the atmosphere of 200 years. that means that even if we stopped driving altogether this minute and turned off all our factories, all that co2 we just pumped into the sky over the past century is still going to be around for awhile. and that means we would still be facing the devastating effects of global warming. but wait, we're not going to slow down, we're still planning to increase the production of carbon dioxide? and that's not even taking china, the planned successor to the united states for the leadership of the planet, into account.

al gore has a nice little prop he uses in his slide show presentations. he has this graph going along the stage, showing carbon dioxide and global temperature increases over the past sixty million year. it's a stable little wavy line changing little across the fifty feet of the stage. then it gets to now, and the line is over his head, already warmer than ever in the history of life on the planet. so al wants to show us what's coming up next, and he can't reach it. so he gets this forklift. and reveals the rest of the rising line, and it's literally off the chart. (that's called the hockey stick graph, by the way. it's famous in the circles of global warming enthusiasts.) (and another tangent: ever hear about the global warming "debate"? a recent survey of over 900 scientific articles on global climate change published in the last ten years, discovered that every single article either supported the idea that global warming is human-caused, or didn't comment one way or another on the cause. there is no debate. that's a fiction perpetuated by the media for the benefit of bush and co.)

so if you live in southern california, i hope you don't mind retiring in 140 degree summers. and dc? sure, maybe you can tolerate the 110 degree summers. but when greenland slides into the north atlantic and shuts down the ocean's thermohaline circulation, i hope you're ready for -50 degree winters as well.

but folks, that's only in a hundred years. and that's if we stopped producing excess carbon dioxide this moment! carbon dioxide, let me repeat, has a half-life of two hundred years. and it's going to keep right on baking things. ever heard of venus? oh, sure, maybe the wealthy part of society can keep on living in climate-controlled bubbles while the rest of the peons get right toasty in the 400 degree shade. but wait a minute, we haven't even been able to make a probe that can land on venus without melting.

i don't know. one of my first lessons in life was to not play with the oven. the tough news is that while some of us might be waiting for our mothers to remind us not to play with fire, she's not coming. christian fundamentalists and their savior aside, we're on our own, folks. we get to make our own decisions, we get to suffer our own consequences, and no one's going to mourn us after we've turned the gas too high and stuck our heads in the oven.