Global Climate CHANGE. (look it up)

Why oh, why is everybody having SO much trouble with the concept of climate change?
If you've been outdoors lately, it should be obvious.

Oh, yeah. Science. The devil's workshop. The devil's "Call of Duty".
Science. The one thing that hurts God more than the scourging of Jesus.
Science. The battle rages on between science and, uh, who?

Temperatures HAVE gone up. It's a fact that has been recorded for a loooong time.
If you have ever studied meteorology or climatology, you know that all weather patterns are caused by changes in temperature. Changes in temperature are caused by how much of the Sun's radiation reaches a certain part of the planet, land OR water. The relationship between hot areas and colder areas cause high and low pressure zones, which combined with the rotation of the Earth, causes wind. Pretty simple. Amazing how powerful the Sun is! Hey, why doesn't someone figure out a way to harness all of that power? But that's another subject.

Then there are the semi-deniers. "Oh, there is a change in the weather, but there's no way it can be man-made." Really?  God gave us the Earth to do with as we see fit. Take all the resources and use what we want and throw the rest away. If I need a little bit of gas, why shouldn't I pump thousands of gallons of some toxic chemical soup, the contents of which, I won't tell you, into the ground to filter wherever it happens to go. Once we get the coal, who cares where the ash and waste from the process goes?

The way I understood it, God gave man Dominion over the Earth, to be a good caretaker. If I hired a caretaker for a facility and that guy threw trash all over the place, and refused to clean up, I for one would fire him. What if my caretaker treated all of the men women and children, as well as all of the animals, as if they were just an inconvenience, out the door. Pink-Slip.

The big fallacy is throwing things away. There is NO AWAY. The Earth is a closed system. Suppose you lived in a deep sea diving suit, with a tank of air and a years supply of food and water. Within a few days your suit would start filling up (from the bottom, you know, gravity). After a few weeks, you'd be sloshing around in a soup of human waste products. How long do you think it would take till that suit was filled? And you Drowned in Your Own Shit? But thank god, it's not man-made.

The Closed system that is Our Earth is the same way. People that DON'T believe this are either incredibly stupid, or are interested in something other than long-term survival for the planet. If your greed blinds you to these simple truths, I hope we are all gone before you drown in your own shit. Maybe you can build a life raft out of your money. I sincerely hope not.

Those of you who believe in saving the planet, keep working!
Baby Steps...

Sometimes thing happen just like you planned.

In a past post, I mentioned that you might be able to ask your landlord to consider making some changes that would affect our impact on the planet. Well, by golly, my landlord did just that.
Recently our complex installed hot water-on-demand in all of the buildings. Not only does the water operate on this system, so does the heat (which is hot water). I'm not going to pretend that their motives were environmental and altruistic, in fact, I'm sure they are just enjoying the HUGE energy savings, but I'll take what I can get.
In fact, that is exactly how it works. Once businesses realize that they can actually save money by doing the right thing, hey, look at that, they start doing the right thing.
Baby Steps...

Stand up for Dinner.

Okay, I admit I wasn't there when it started, and even if I had been, I probably would not have done anything to stop it.  I mean, come on.  Who knew?  I’m sure I would have been one of the stupid ones.

Ever since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution,we haven't known what to do with all the waste products that we were producing.  So we just let them go wherever they went.  We just threw them away.  Of course, one of the biggest ones was coal.  All the smoke, and all the dust.  And of course, all that soot.  Soot is the physical byproduct of burning coal.  It's a black, oily dust that gets all over everything.  Everywhere.

You've seen pictures of all those cute little ragamuffins during the Industrial Revolution all covered with black soot.  They looked sort of like the Little Rascals all smeared in black-face.  So the smoke and dust got into the air.  Then there was the slaughterhouse waste.  And all of the leather tanning chemicals.  Since we didn't know what to do with it, we just let it go and gravity did the rest.

Fast forward to now.  For several hundred years now, we've been letting our waste get into our water, and therefore, into our food.  But allowing it to get into our food indirectly wasn't good enough for us.  Oh no.  Because of agribusiness and its incredible greed, we are putting the poison directly onto our plants.  Hell, we are modifying our plants, to the extent that that we don't know if they are poison or not.  Same with our livestock.  Pump them full of antibiotics and steroids and test the results on the consumer market.

As a result of all these stupid farming practices, there is a movement toward slow food, grown naturally and organically.  In order to be certified as organic, a grower must go through rigorous regulations and testing.  It doesn't help when a neighbor is spraying pesticides and fungicides onto their fields because the wind bends to no man. If this airborne stuff gets onto the organic crops, it invalidates the reason for the natural process and gets the “Organic” designation lifted. Thanks guys.

So, if you prefer to eat better, you may still be at risk from those who don’t give a manure, as long as there’s profit in it.

Funny thing. Because of the extensive use of pesticides and antibotics, the bugs and the infections (bugs) have become immune and stronger than ever. And, it turns out, monoculture in farming will deplete the land very quickly. By the way, this fungicide that they’re using can kill the mycelium layer in the soil, a fungus that literally makes growing anything possible.

Where I wouldn’t have been able to do anything back in the 1800’s, that isn’t the case today. We have really got to start looking at the big picture.  Everything has consequences.  For my part, I try to avoid buying products from companies that don’t or won’t employ sustainability best-practices. Vote with your wallet.  Money is the only language these pigs understand, and I say we get all Rosetta Stone on their rumps.

http://www.grist.org/food/2011-09-09-its-raining-chemicals

http://soils.usda.gov/sqi/concepts/soil_biology/fungi.html

http://www.grapes.msu.edu/pesticideResist.htm

http://arizanagallery.blogspot.com/2011/02/types-of-industrial-waste-that-can.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_pollution