These days a person can’t escape getting involved in the global warming/climate change discussion. And the “conviction-that-I’m-right rate” is high for folks on both sides of the global warming discussion. Recently, a good friend asked how I felt about global warming. After ruminating on his question for a bit, here’s my opinion.
It’s undeniable that Earth is experiencing warmer temperatures. Thermometers don’t lie. To my way of thinking, it’s still an open question that humans are the cause of the global warm up. One thing is certain: No one knows the future with 100% certainty. The globe and humanity may indeed be on an ecological path to destruction. Or they may not be. The physical Earth has been in constant change for billions of years. Yet it has survived astronomical collisions, mass extinctions, plate tectonics and continental upheavals, global erosion, unimaginable droughts and floods, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions that caused global winters, ice ages and thaws, magnetic reversals, coronal mass ejections from the sun, epidemics, plagues, nuclear disasters, World Wars, the rise and fall of powerful empires, etc.
I’ve read that during the dinosaur era, the earth was warmer and a wide assortment of life proliferated. It was cut short by an asteroid collision with Earth. How did the proliferation of life during the dinosaur age correspond to the massive human life on earth today in terms of the carbon dioxide/oxygen equation? Who knows with certainty?
Carbon dioxide is the crucial element for life and for producing the nutrients that sustain life. It may be heating the Earth. Or it may trigger a sizable “pop” in green foliage and a corresponding surge in life-giving oxygen. The “food production zones” may gradually migrate closer to the Earth’s poles.
To my view, it’s folly to destroy the economy to achieve carbon dioxide reduction. Poverty stricken nations will not solve the problem. I’ve seen no attempts to achieve honest carbon audits for alternate energy sources. Call me a cynic, but my common sense instinct is to always follow the money to lead to the truth. The money trail for global warming/climate change, to me, suggests professional opportunism and greed, as much as response to an emergency. Are the current warmer temperatures really all that different than the sizzling temps during the Great Depression or as I remember the mid-1950s?
In short, ways of preservation, conservation and wiser use of all natural resources should be one major global research goal. The second is economic reform — which takes astute political action — to properly monetize the Earth’s natural resources to the opportunistic benefit of all, not just self-serving elites.
My opinion may be right, or it may be wrong. But, everyone is entitled to an opinion on the subject. I’m hopping down off my soap box now!
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Kindly readers have responded to recent columns with column-worthy responses. From ol’ K. Boomer in Missouri came this response about unique and dangerous ways rural folks used in the past to celebrate the Fourth of July. Here goes;
“Milo, when we were kids on the 4th of July, me and my buddy used dynamite, not firecrackers. It was a lot cheaper — three sticks of TNT for 50-cents, ten-feet of fuse for 20-cents. We’d cut the dynamite into small pieces, wrap the dynamite around a corn cob with waxed paper, see a bunch of our friends standing around, light the fuse and toss the bundle among them and watch them scatter.
The TNT bundles wuz good for fishing, too. We cooked the big fish in a pressure cooker for 15-20 minutes to soften the bones. Good cheap eating back in those days.
Looking back, we were lucky no one ever got killed, hurt, or caught by the law. If we had, we’d probably still be behind bars.”
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I got a second firecracker response from ol’ Rocky Krick at Bazaar. Kan. He wrote:
“Milo, as to firecrackers, here’s fun I learned as a farm kid. Put couple inches of water in a shallow pan. Then take a regular empty tin can, put a hole just big enough to stick a firecracker fuse in the closed end and set the open end of the can in the water. Then light the fuse and get back. When the firecracker goes off, the can flies way up — maybe 50-feet. We kids had contests to see whose can would fly the highest. If there was no water in the pan, the can would only jump maybe two-feet. We wore out a lot of tin cans that way. Back in those days, fun was cheap.”
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And, from ol’ Buzz Pfinder at Altamont, Kan., comes this response to my recent note about a good friend getting bitten by an eastern massasauga rattlesnake. He wrote:
“We live down on Hwy 101 a mile north of the old Edna airport. I read your article a few weeks ago about the lady bitten by a massasauga rattlesnake. I have killed three of these vipers in our yard since 2014. The last one had three rattles and was about 16 inches long.
Just thought you and your readers might be interested and remind them to keep their eyes open.”
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A farmer drove his old beater of a pickup truck into town. When he parked it downtown and got out of the truck, a down-and-out vagrant came up behind him, stuck a pistol in his ribs, and growled, “Stick ‘um up, Mister, and give me all your money.”
The startled farmer replied, “You’re out of luck, buddy. Things are so tough on my farm now that I don’t have any bills in my wallet or even change in my pocket.”
The holdup man shot back, “That’s nuthin’. It’s so tough out here on the streets that I haven’t been able to afford bullets for my gun for the last two months.”
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Wise words for the week: “A lawyer will read a 10,000-word document and call it a brief. A politician with ‘a few words to say’ will talk for an hour.” Have a good ‘un.
