SOMETHING HAS CHANGED
Written June 2007
Something has noticeably shifted in the consciousness of America. Enough average citizens have finally gained awareness of global warming to begin to change the climate in which politicians and corporations live. The shift occurred in late 2006. Enough critical masses had accumulated to shift the debate from denial of global warming to face the facts and implications of global warming. The corporations and their politicians could no longer continue to deceive, stall or fool all the average Americans all the time. What changed to cause the awakening?
Was it Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth movie? Another alarming U.N. report? Time lapse pictures of the melting ice caps? Was it the hurricanes of 2005, the droughts, the continued record high temperatures plus the record high gas prices and the record high oil corporation’s profits? Was it the voice of the overwhelming majority of real scientists testifying to the evidence of global warming that was finally heard over the noise made by the hired hacks of the corporations? Maybe it was President Bush’s admission that “America is addicted to oil.” Or maybe it was the Bush’s Iraqi oil war and over 3,000 American deaths (God only knows how many innocent Iraqis). Perhaps it was the letter written to President Bush by a group of evangelical preachers expressing their concern for the environment? Or maybe it was the rest of the world imploring us to wake up. Or maybe it was the long, steady efforts of a few visionary environmentalists who finally helped America see the light and feel the heat? Something happened. Suddenly it’s cool to be against global warming. Suddenly the corporations are turning green, discovering there’s a profit to be gained by advertising and appealing to people’s environmental awareness and guilt. Now more politicians are finding it in their best interest to appear to be green. Something has changed. Denial and deception are more difficult to do. Global warming is now an obvious fact to almost everyone except those resistive to changing.
Nature has rapidly and permanently been changed by humans and will never be the same again, will never again be natural.
The question now is how bad is the damage that we’ve done? It was bad 20 years ago when Bill McKibben wrote his book The End of Nature documenting global warming and predicting the consequences if dramatic and immediate global action was not taken to limit CO2 emissions. Environmental damage increased through the 1990s and the world community began to respond in 1997 with the Kyoto Agreement (treaty). The United States, which accounts for at least 22% of CO2 emissions, refused to sign it. Now after 10 more years of inaction, America is finally beginning to wake up. It’s too bad it’s too late. A study recently released by a team of international climate scientists suggests that a global increase of just 1 degree Celsius above the 2000 level would cause dangerous consequences. Previous studies and computer models indicated a higher temperature increase would be needed to trigger dangerous disasters.
In another report by the Global Carbon Project, indications are that world wide CO2 emission rates rose to 3 percent per year from 2000 to 2004 compared to an annual rate of 1.1 percent in the 1990s. Factors involved are increased industrialization in developing nations, particularly China, and increased reliance on coal burning in China and the United States. There is also evidence that natural absorbers of CO2, oceans and plants, are reaching their capacity to absorb additional amounts of CO2. The accelerated increase in CO2 emissions are higher than even the highest previous CO2 levels predicted by the United Nations Panel on Climate Change.
Not only is the world in a hole regarding CO2 emissions but we are rapidly moving deeper into that hole. The major structures for burning oil and coal are in place and unlikely to change in the next 20 years. More coal fired power plants are being built almost daily. Will my driving less, or using florescent light bulbs or hanging my laundry on the clothes line, or buying food grown locally, or my recycling make any significant difference in reducing global warming? No! Will 6 1/2 billion people in developed and developing economies replicating my efforts change the disastrous consequences of the hole we’re in? No! It will take a whole lot more than symbolic efforts to get us out of the hole we’re in. It will take real sacrifices and soon just to slow our downward digging. It’s too late to reverse the damage that’s been done and once average Americans realize the significant human sacrifices needed just to save a place on the planet themselves, they will return back to sleep. I’m sorry to say the sky has fallen.
So what can be done? I would suggest that the scientists and the faith-based community join their efforts together. The scientists should pray to God for some divinely inspired technological miracle to save us from a global warming hell. The faith based believers should hope for some type of evolutionary adaptation or mutation in order for humans to be fit to survive the global climate changes. It’s going to take something extraordinary to change the future we face.
The end is near?
Written June 2007
All my life (I was born in 1954) I have lived under a cloud of gloom and the potential of planetary doom. I was born after the invention and dropping of the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Since then the nuclear age quickly expanded with the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, not only by America and Russia but many other nations. The years of the cold war constantly sent chills down my spine. I have never felt safe. Armageddon and the apocalypse have always been on the verge of being revealed and realized.
Small groups of humans have always lived with natural disasters of droughts, ice ages, volcanoes, floods and asteroids. And small groups of humans have always felt threatened by other small groups of humans in regional wars. Even World War one and two were regional wars, limited in the scope of manmade destruction. Even human empires come and go. Never, however, in the six million year history of humanoids have we ourselves had the power of destroying not only almost all humans but almost all life forms on planet earth. In an all out nuclear holocaust very little life would survive on a planet that created life over three or four billion years ago.
Most humans have the awareness of their own death lurking in the back of their minds. Now we also have to worry about the death of the planet.
Added to the threat of nuclear annihilation we humans have gained the power to pollute ourselves and the planet to death. In the past 150 years humans have set the conditions for accelerating climate change, mainly by the burning of fossil fuels. If humans do not drastically and immediately change these conditions, life as we know it will not survive long on this earth.
I’m not sure why the death of the planet and the human species should disturb me as much as it does. I seem to be reluctantly accepting my own death. Death is part of life. Death leads to rebirth, reincarnation, new life, or maybe to a paradise in heaven. If I have to die, along with other life beings, then why not the human species or the living planet? Perhaps humans and the planet are aging and ill. Death may come as a relief, like to an old man dying of cancer. Death may not be as bad as we believe. With death a new beginning will begin. I should rejoice and be glad. I should be happy that we have the power to make this time, our end times. But somehow I still feel sad, a deep sense of grief. Our suicidal death does not seem to be from natural causes. Death by nature is one thing but death by the hand of man is unacceptable. Humans deserve to die if they end up killing themselves, but not the planet, not almost all other species of life.
In the end surely cockroaches will survive and life on earth will evolve again. Eventually a new species of humans will be created by the Earth. Maybe in a 1,000 years, 100,000 years, a million years or a billion years. Chances are however nature or the gods will never again give humanoids the intelligence or the ignorance or the power to overrule nature or the gods.
Global Warming
Written on 3/30/07
I was watching T.V. last night and heard Al Gore talking about the seriousness of Global Warming and the need to take immediate meaningful action to greatly reduce the United States and global output of carbon dioxide. He reported on the accelerating history of global warming over the 20th century and record high temperatures around the world just in the previous 10 years which have caused ice melting, weather changes, famines, water shortages, diseases, plant and animal failings. Al Gore was predicting worsening consequences in the future if the world failed to act. Al Gore was delivering his speech to the Kyoto Conference in Japan in 1997. I was watching this rerun on CSPAN’s history channel.
In the past 10 years almost no meaningful action has taken place in the United States or the world to reduce global warming. Any reduction savings have been wiped out by CO2 output expansion by more energy use, industrial expansion, increase in population, city and farming expansions, and the political and corporation stalling and sabotage. Al Gore and President Clinton were not able to change much or ratify the Kyoto CO2 reduction standards because of republican and corporation controlled congress. George Bush and Dick Cheney have supported the oil and energy industries and spread skepticism and thus complacency by using corporate fake scientists to deny human causes of global warming. They believed that the forces of God were responsible for “climate change” as has happened for millions of years of evolution. I find it rather odd how those evangelical Republicans can preach a long history of God using natural evolutionary climate change and occasional weather mutations to bear false witness against overwhelming scientific facts of recent human factors. Any meaningful political action has been frozen by the Republicans over the last seven years of the Bush administration. Meanwhile global warming has accelerated and is melting the polar ice regions, and the manmade weather related changes have become obvious.
Can the Republicans’ God save the world now? Perhaps. Maybe God will send plagues upon the earth to wipe out most humans except for a sustainable number less than one billion, well less than the six and a half billion current and quickly expanding population.
Can the corporations’ God of technology and free market capitalism save the world now from the suffocating effects of global warming. Perhaps. Maybe the corporate controlled political powers of the world will fight over the remaining dwindling oil reserves left in the world and then unleash their nuclear and chemical weapons of mass destruction to wipe out most of the world population by spreading radiation, pollution and disease around the world to make the effects of global warming a mute and insignificant problem.
Do I sound like a skeptic, pessimist and a doom and gloomer? Yes. Can I find much hope for the future in the past 10 years? Not enough to save the future.
Where Will I Go Today?
The world outside my front door is huge. Everyday when I step outside into the world and lock the door behind me, I am confronted with an infinite number of places that I could choose to go. I usually just go to work or take the dog out for a walk in the neighborhood. My world is usually quite small. I am the one who keeps my world as small as it is. I do not very often give myself permission to think about going far from home. I must be in love with my home and my own little world or else I wouldn’t live there; I would travel far and wide more often. Perhaps I stay close to home because traveling usually costs a lot of time, money, and energy. I have an abundance of energy, that’s not the problem. It’s the time and money that seem more rare to find to invest in traveling away from home. Perhaps I stay close to home because the world is too big, too unknown, too scary. Perhaps I prefer the comforts of home, to the open road and the life of a vagabond. Perhaps dreaming of freedom and adventure is better than the reality of being free or having an adventure.
The world really is a big place when I stand on my door step and dare to dream of the possible places I could go. At any given moment’s notice, I can go to Aspen, Austin, Baltimore, Chicago, Colorado Springs, Des Moines, Detroit, Houston, Las Vegas, Los Angles, Memphis, Nashville, New Orleans, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, Seattle, Sioux Falls, Tucson, Wichita, or Washington D.C. I could always go to the Delicate Arch, or the Grand Canyon, or the Snake River, or the Everglades, or Mammoth cave or Carlsbad cave, or the Sierra Mountains, or Death Valley, or go to see the saguaros or the sequoias. At any time, on any given day—I choose. And then there are all the places I can go to see beyond the borders of America. I can go see the seven seas if I want to. I can even go to the other side of the mountain to see what I can see. I am free to see—if I see that I am free.
Robinson Creek Kayaking
Kayaking Robinson Creek on a rainy spring day.
A clip from the film Down the Black River.
My Dog is my Zen Master
My dog Raven is teaching me to be in the here and now, fully alive, awake, and aware.
A clip from the film Down the Black River.
Morrison Creek – Winter Walk
A clip from the film Down the Black River.
