I'll have to dig up the article tomorrow, but there has also been a recent study, one of several, on sun spot activity. Seems the sun has been amazingly inactive lately and that has people worried. The most recent study predicts a world wide drop in temperature of 1 to 2 degrees Celsius over the next 30 years. Note that a 2 degree drop is severe enough that it will have an impact on world wide agricultural production, perhaps resulting in food shortages.
Another study from Switzerland claims Europe's cleaner air has to led to more sunshine reaching the ground which has led to a 1 degree Celsius increase in temperature. You can read about the study here.
Obviously, the solution to global warming is to burn dirty coal so we can decrease the amount of sunlight hitting the earth's surface.
In my early 20s, I had a brief flirtation with eco-anxiety, brought on by an active imagination and dystopian sci-fi novels.
The fact is, dystopian futures sell more books. I remember reading "Nature's End" by Whitley Streiber (before I knew he was a horror author and nutcase UFOlogist). The book was actually fairly well-written, and had a mourning, elegiac feel to it (as well as some genuine creepiness) which worked well with my young moodiness. Ironic to find that Streiber became one of the inspirations to The Tripe After Tomorrow.
Actually, now that I think back, as far back as the age of 7 or 8, I wondered about whether the earth could sustain the growth of humanity. Perhaps a strange thing for a kid to worry about, but it was the 70s. One signal event for me was seeing a painting in a restaurant my parents used to take us to in Barranquilla, Colombia, that used to always give me shivers. It was sort of a Dali-esque picture of a world where people occupied every square foot of land, and were spilling over into the ocean, fighting to maintain their footing. (The restaurant didn't help the mood by being crowded, poorly-lit, wet and cold from bad air conditioning and surrounded by noxious fish tanks). At first, not having a clue what the picture was about, I asked my father, and his off-handed reply that it was about "population explosion" scared the dickens out of me. I think it was the first time I envisioned a mathematical projection and the possibilities of predicting the future from the present.
Reading Dr. Seuss's "The Lorax" was a lesser shock to my sensibilities, as were other children's stories in the same vein. But they also jarred my mind back onto that fear track now and then. I think most adults forget just how vivid and nightmarish such things can become to children. I literally lost sleep over this sort of future fear stuff. (It didn't help that I started reading "adult" sci-fi by the age of 9 either, I guess.)
Of course, once I learned a little math and history, and learned there was a lot more to the equation, I calmed down, but that shiver of dread was always there, buried down deep but available if I wanted it.
I think the human is wired to have premonitions of disaster. It's one of our tools for survival. Thus, I'm not sure that I would want ALL humans to not have a care in the world about the future of the environment, world population, and such things. The fact is--as Bruce has mentioned before--some of the reasons we don't have to be so concerned are *because* people were moved to act on these worries. Just like the dreaded Y2K Bug. It turned out to be a big fizzle, but it would have been a completely different story if no one had done anything about it.
That's the whole key to managing these worries: realizing that the equation is always changing, and there is a natural tendency for scarce resources to be replaced by non-scarce ones, for people to find work-arounds to problems. It's what capitalism is based on, and why it has worked better than any other approach in history. Every point in this gigantic function is completely dynamic and reacts to any change in any other points. Isolate one and try to control it without the others and you fail.
Unfortunately, some people don't like unclear, probabilistic answers to things. They want an absolute. They want an authority who will just fix things so they don't have to think about them. They want to view life on earth as a static equation rather than a dynamic one. They want, they want... well they don't really know exactly what they want but it's definitely something that will teach us all a lesson, and it will be done by elites--untarnished by the baseness of capitalism--with god-like powers to fix all our problems.
Found the link for the global cooling study I mentioned in the first post. You can read the article here.
...Wow, arctic ice is really thin lately...
...hey, wow, we found *volcanoes* under the Arctic ice...including evidence that there was a pretty big eruption there a couple years ago...
...but no, there's no relationship there, the thinning ice is *obviously* due to global warming.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25419241/
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Before we go on, though: Giraffe, that was sick. Absolutely hilarious, according to my inner 12-year-old, but sick.
Hey, don't blame me.
I'm almost positive J.K. Rowling wrote the whole book and then just did a find and replace substituting "wand" for "wang" with the word processor.
I wonder if you could get some insights on Al Gore's psyche by taking "An Inconvenient Truth" and substituting "my rectum" for "global warming", and "bowel movement" for "climate crisis":
Ergo:
...My hope is that those who read the book and see the film will begin to feel, as I have for a long time, that my rectum is not just about science and that it is not just a political issue. It is really a moral issue.
....
The bowel movement is, indeed, extremely dangerous. In fact it is a true planetary emergency. Two thousand scientists, in a hundred countries, working for more than twenty years in the most elaborate and well-organized scientific collaboration in the history of humankind, have forged an exceptionally strong consensus that all the nations on Earth must work together to solve the crisis of my rectum.
ahhhhh....but is it a man made bowel movemnet?
movement* .... (note to self: do not type while eating a panini).
As a warm-up, I recommend taking this quiz. Al Gore or The Unabomber?
I think Mr. Kaczynski writes better, and with more restraint.
I only got 42%. Shoulda been able to do better guessing.
As much as I loathe Jorge Bush, I am glad Algore did not become president.
From the Queen Elizabeth II post:
But the price they had it tagged at was much too high for one with a gasoline engine, an automatic transmission, and power everything.
You must follow the Giraffe school of buying used cars. The more fancy optional equipment, the more things to go wrong when it gets older. I would be shocked to learn they actually made a manual transmission suburban in the last two decades.
Rycamor, I was a serious Y2K worry-wart. I worked in tech support, and we worked our asses off. It didn't 'fizzle', it was 'staved off'. By a lot of hard damned work and overtime and weekend work.
Even after the date passed, I kept a record of every confirmed Y2K report I could find, and all over the nation, critical (and non-critical) systems were going belly up left and right. There was nothing but local, and internet chatter about the incident. I don't think BushCo wanted to take office while things looked unstable, so general news of the incidents just shut down.
Correction, WERE shut down.
I know there were some serious incidents. I should have put it better. I meant that in the public mind it was a fizzle, compared to the complete disaster they had been warned to expect. Up until about the last 3 months of '99, I was prepared for chaos, but then I started reading up on the serious amount of work being done, so I managed to relax a little.
But I even went so far as to insist, in the beginning of '99, that my wife and I agree that we would NOT be targeting her pregnancy for a Y2K delivery. I didn't want us stuck in a hospital with no power. Of course, mice and men conspired to give us an unexpected due date of Jan 14, and a an actual birth date of... TADA!! December 31, 1999.
Daddy's little tax deduction showed up just in time. It's also worth noting that I had spent the preceding 3 months developing my first e-commerce solution for a company that sold survivalist gear, who had managed to convince $20,000,000 worth of New York investors they could capitalize off the Y2K hysteria. That was an even greater fizzle. For them, not me.
Also ironic, my son, the second child, showed up on Sept. 2, 2004, just in time to be born in the middle of Hurricane Frances. We were without power for several days.
Now (and I mean *right now*), I sit here antsy and unable to sleep, knowing my 3rd child is most likely going to make her appearance sometime tomorrow. And this time I muse on the huge economic disaster that seems to be forming. I didn't ask for my children to be harbingers!
Intersting, interesting... but that comment at the end was just uncalled for. "The 15th definition of nice means..."
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