Re: [Paddlewise] Winter in a time of Climate Change

"I look around me and see cold on the weather map..."

Why limit specious comparison anecdotes to car models when global  
weather patterns and geologic historical records are visible from
the chair on my back yard deck?

Why not compare the purchase and average annual operation of a Prius  
to that of a dishwasher, or a digital photographic darkroom,
or a Lear Jet, or a suburban, strip mall StarBucks?   It's a pointless  
piece of PowerPoint sophistry.

But why limit global climate crisis to ad hominem attacks, tu quoque  
one-liners, and the pathetic propositional logic of singular personal  
'observation'?

I'm sure 45 seconds and a Google Search will allow me to prove the  
Holocaust never took place, the U.S. never landed on the moon,
and we're not draining the Ogallala Aquifer dry by subsidizing Kansas  
'wheat farmers' to grow yellow dent corn so that we can all
enjoy our 99 cent Happy Meal Cheese Burgers.  Wait, I'll need another  
45 seconds to first line my hat with tin foil.....

The 'planet' is not in danger of demise.
The ability of the planet to sustain critical mass of certain life  
forms, including human beings, is in direct doubt and the subject of  
serious, juried-by-peers, scientific inquiry.

The recent thread involving proliferation of plastics (and not JUST in  
shopping bags) is sad commentary on the state of discourse in this and  
other forums.

Plastics degrade.  The Pacific Gyre is now 'home' to a mass of  
discarded plastic refuse so large it provides ample subject of serious  
scientific inquiry.
The sea turtle and other creatures do indeed die or become injured by  
these items.  But that's anthropomorphic pathos by the time it becomes  
'news'.
The steady degrading of plastics enters the oceanic ecosystem and so  
becomes part of our food chain.
So enjoy those mutagens, carcinogens, and pathogens with every swallow  
while you read about the sea turtle and remark how that
grocery sack is just a fact of modern life and death.

Natural systems don't give a rat's ass if you're left, right, in the  
middle or undecided.
Weather isn't personal. It just is and it has zero investment in our  
sustained existence as a species.
On the other hand, I would argue that humans do have a vested interest  
in our sustainability as a species.
Humans may 'hunt' tornados...but the reverse is impossible and  
suggests the sort of ego capable of sustaining only Stephan Segal....
But human endeavor does influence the closed system that is our  
planetary ecosystem.
And the preponderance of serious, juried, peer-reviewed, and rigorous  
scientific inquiry does effectively and conclusively argue
that human activity has influenced a measurable rise in climate  
temperatures; that this influence appears to be compounding
at an exponential rate; and that present social, geo-political, and  
economic models map a future trajectory that is bleak,
if direct intervention is not undertaken to slow, halt, or reverse  
these trends.

Paul Ehrlich argued that population growth was a 'bomb'...then  
'technology' 'fixed' that problem by finding ways to provide ample  
protein sources
to sustain larger demands upon food sources.  And so Ehrlich's  
argument was subsequently dismissed.
But what people did not consider was what would happen when that same  
expanding population began to 'consume' more than protein.
You know, like, infrastructure and appliances and life-style  
consumables.

If you're going to deny the present global climate crisis, please do  
me the favor of reading Stephen Johnson's wonderful book,
The Ghost Map.   It's about a famous public health debate that took  
place during one of Victorian London's cholera outbreaks.
And the salient point here is that the conventional wisdom of the  
Miasmatists, that blamed all disease on smell and the conditions that  
created ill-odors,
embellished their positions of advocacy and authority on sensate  
observation raised to moralistic reasoning.
And in their 'wisdom', they turned the entire Thames into one large  
cesspool.

It was the scientific inquiry of Snow and others that was subversive  
and persistent.  And correct.

-Will
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