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by Peter A. Belmont / 2009-01-25
© 2009 Peter Belmont
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We can no longer afford to treat global warming as a someday-later thing. The causes began years ago. The effects are already showing up. The western US pine forests in Colorado and Montana, for example, are dying very quickly due to a decade of drought (which may be an incident of climate change) and due to bark beetles, which have become an epidemic due to warmer winters which have killed far fewer beetle eggs.
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The headline reads: “Bark Beetles Kill Millions of Acres of Trees in West” N Y Times story.
But Americans cannot be bothered. If you don’t want to be scared of global warming or if you really don’t want to do anything about it (apparently the dominant attitude of American businessmen, media, and politicians—and the population generally), then no evidence will move you to action.
I am 70 years old and expect to live out my life before the worst effects of global warming occur. I doubt New York City, where I live, will be submerged in melt-water from the rapidly melting Greenland and Arctic and Antarctic ice sheets, though I’ve advised my son to seek higher ground.
But I am concerned not only for my own and for mankind generally but also for the natural order (which, in my feeling if not by religious belief, I consider to be “God’s Creation”).
And so I wish, so strongly, that mankind had not decided to destroy the earth, that mankind had paid attention to the injunction that “no man shall put asunder what God has put together”, in this case the natural order.
Mankind has decided to destroy the earth? Really?
Well, yes. Just as a person has a brain which allows him/her to know and understand things that a foot or toenail may not be able to know or understand, so too has mankind a scientific community which was able to predict the onset of global warming 30 years ago even though the non-scientific communities (the majority of people) lack the knowledge and understanding and imagination to foresee the outcomes of human interventions on earth.[1]
But just as a human being has a brain which allows passions and instincts and desires and greed and wilfulness to predominate over rational thinking, so too has mankind got politicians and businessmen and media and criminals and ordinary people all of whom are caught up in their traditional undertakings, and all of whom are—for that reason—oblivious to scientific matters and to most threats which are neither military nor immediate.
The death of forests is an accelerating mechanism for global warming. When trees die they are made ready to decay, and decay releases CO(((s₂s))) (carbon dioxide). As the climate warms, and the plague of pine bark beetles takes over more and more forests, the dead trees will decay and add to the earth’s oversupply of greenhouse gases. And global warming will be accelerated.
What should be done? Well, how about making the US’s electric generation fossil-fuel free, say 10% per year? Spend some of that money we suddenly realize we have so much of for “emergencies.”
Global warming is an emergency!
By 2007, the Spanish province of Navarra had already converted 70% of its electric generation to wind-power..
If Navarra, Spain, can do it, the US can do it! (he stoutly maintained).. More to the point, we must do it! And, to ask the traditional question, “If not now, when?”
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[1] I mean no disrespect when I compare most people to feet and toenails. My friends are musicians and computer programmers and human-rights activists and lawyers and, generally, they are not scientists. Generally, like everyone else, they (indeed, we!) live out our lives without over-great concern for global warming.
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