Whatever is in store for us, we have to be prepared to survive it

Author's Note: The book cover images in the side margins of this blog are my own publications of eBooks available at both Amazon and B&N. Please take a moment and go to the sites and read about them. Then if you like it, buy one or two.

Let's put Global climate Change in its proper perspective. What ever the causes, whatever the magnitude, we humans need to figure out how we will live in the New Equilibrium.

Humans are only one of the direct causes of atmospheric greenhouse gas buildup. We are also the indirect cause of a lot more than by the mere burning of fossil fuels. In some of the cases listed below, one event creates another and the other feeds back and increases the cause.

We used to learn that there was a "food chain". This was a linear progression from plankton in the sea and ended with humans triumphantly standing at the top. Each animal ate a smaller one and up the chain to us. But then we realized that it wasn't a line but a web, a network of predators and prey. One predator was keeping another predator in check by eating the food the other predator wanted to eat. We kill off the one predator so we can have the salmon or the cod but the other predator takes over and eats even more of the fish we want. This is to say: nothing happens in isolation.

This description won't make sense at first but keep reading. A figure skater starts a slow spin to impress the audience. He or she suddenly accelerates to a very rapid spin, then slows down again and stops with a flourish and wave of the arms held high. We are impressed. It is physics that allowed the skater to accomplish that very rapid spin. The skater starts with arms outstretched and he/she accelerates when the arms are quickly pulled in close. The spinning mass out far has the same energy as the mass close in, so the speed must be faster to compensate. The opposite applies for slowing down again.

This applies to the Earth as well. When the atmosphere gets warmer it expands and the rotation of the Earth slows down a tiny amount. When the water that is at the poles as ice melts it flows to the equator and the Earth gets wider in the middle. This slows the rotation a tiny bit too. This may only be a few microseconds but over time it adds up to longer days.

Now for a list:

• Heat doesn't ever really go away. It radiates off the planet into space otherwise the sun's heat would melt it. Nuclear reactors liberate a lot of heat into the air. Burning coal, oil and gas also directly heat the air as well as add greenhouse gases.
• One degree of temperature rise from 60 to 61 or 90 to 91 is a small change. On the other hand a rise from 31 to 32 causes glaciers and snow pack to melt.
• Tundra and permafrost lands are peat bogs with a lot of dead vegetation that is inactive because they are frozen. When they thaw out, they become biologically active and produce copious amounts of methane. Methane buildup traps more solar heat and further thaws the permafrost areas releasing more methane.
• There are dozens of deep ocean volcanoes and fissures that are off-gassing carbon dioxide into the water. The depths are so deep that we do not see and bubbles. The gas is there nonetheless. It gets into the atmosphere too.
• Methane that seeps into deep cold ocean water "freezes" into a solid form called hydrate. Methane hydrate keeps billions of tons of methane out of the air where it would trap solar heat.
• Hydrates are unstable and can erupt when sufficiently shaken. A deep water earthquake, even a small one, or a volcano can cause the eruption of the methane from the hydrate.
• People breed livestock in great numbers. Cows, pigs and chickens being the most prevalent are also manure creators and have copious amounts of methane flatulence. We eat the livestock and create our own manure and produce out own methane flatulence. Seven billion people produce those gases, too.
• People and livestock all breathe. Their respiration includes higher levels of carbon dioxide on the exhale than on the inhale.
• The sun shines on a field of grain. The grain grows and removes CO2 from the air. Livestock and people eat the grain and we eat the livestock. The carbon is returned to the environment. A lot of the carbon is held in the humans' bodies for many decades. Incidentally, obese people sequester more carbon in their lifetimes than do thin people.
• Cows are fed grains, pass gas and respire for about 2 years before slaughter. Pigs do it for 4 months to 1 year. And chickens live 30 days to 6 months. While they contribute to GHG loadings they also cycle carbon into the food web and into our bodies where it stays the longest.
• A field of grain growing takes carbon out of the air during its growing period. If you just burned it, it would immediately return all the carbon to the air. If you eat it some of the carbon will still immediately return to the air while the remaining carbon that stays in our bodies will return when each of us dies.
• If you grow a field of corn it takes carbon out of the air during the growing cycle. If you distill it into ethanol and burn it in your automobile engine, all that carbon is returned to the air in the same year for a net zero carbon gain. This is the same no matter how efficient or inefficient the distillation process is.
• If you cut down a twenty year old tree and let it rot on its own or you burn it in your furnace, the same amount of carbon is released as was removed during the twenty year growth of the tree. So on a carbon cycle, 20 year, it is a net zero.
• Growing grass in your yard removes carbon from the air, but when you mow it, the clipping rot and release the carbon right back into the air for a Net Zero 14 day cycle.
• Deciduous trees remove carbon from the air during the spring and summer only to release all of it in the fall and winter minus the amount turned into wood. Nearly Carbon Zero – 1 year, definitely carbon zero when the tree dies.
• Making trees into paper cycles carbon very fast. Making trees into lumber for houses keeps a lot of the carbon out of the air until the house burns down..

There are so many cycles that carbon makes as it is moved around for both the benefit and the detriment of people and the other species on the Earth. Some of these cycles are insignificant while others are disastrously potent. It is up to wise thinkers and planners, and not the people and businesses which prosper by not doing what is right, to make sure we are following a sustainable path.

Four messages to keep in mind:

1. That which we relied upon to bring us through the last century will not see us through the next.
2. "Men go and men come. But the Earth abides" ~ Ecclesiastes.
3. The Earth doesn't care how high or how low sea level is… We do.
4. Whatever is in store for us, we have to be prepared to survive it.

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The Truth About Chemtrails

Any conspiracy theorist worth his salt can tell you that governments are poisoning the human race with the dispersal of airborne chemicals, heavy metals and even viruses. They point to the white trails that aircraft make as the criss-cross the skies. Somehow they see a difference between the contrails that high altitude jets make as they disturb the stratosphere with their wings. Some of the condensations ultimately comes from the burnt aviation fuel but mostly the moisture was already there but invisible until the jets stir up the air and the water condenses. Usually the condensation just re-vaporizes and disappears from our sight.

The theorists claim that the trails that remain for hours are the results of a covert plan to do something sinister to the planet and to mankind. Such claims range from manipulation of the weather so as to control food production and thereby maximize profits for agri-businesses to population control by lowering sperm counts and virility of men. Other claims are to induce cancers and viral diseases that will cull earth's human population to about 1 billion people. Another claim is that they are poisoning the human race as collateral damage to an attempt to stem global warming by reducing the amount of sunlight that heats the oceans.

There seems to be little consensus among the many Internet-based purveyors of theory. What each person has in common is the notoriety he or she receives from a cadre of followers who believe the conspiracy because it was couched in terms of a conspiracy which the listener want to be true.

The facts are that cloud seeding has been going on for decades in order to provide microscopic particles in the atmosphere onto which water molecules can attach and make rain droplets that will precipitate. If the shadowy presence wanted to decrease solar heat accumulation through the atmosphere they certainly would not do it over land. It would be far more effective in equatorial ocean areas where no one would be seeing it done.

What is most interesting as a characteristic of the conspiracy theorists is that they put forth sinister governmental/corporate actions while ignoring the obvious vectors of doom that mankind is doing to himself without a master plan to do so.

The theorists are silent on the billions of tons of carbon-dioxide that we pump into the atmosphere each year that is causing the warming that "someone is trying to counter". Why not just stop the cause rather than seek a remedy?

Agri-business and pharmaceutical companies have been producing toxins and body/mind altering chemicals for decades. These substances leak into our water and air in huge quantities. The EPA even has a permitting process by which corporations can dispose of chemical byproducts by injecting them into old oil and gas wells. These substances pollute the ground water that is either withdrawn by domestic wells or leaches back to the surface through other old well casings that they did not consider.

Agri-businesses regularly create and distribute genetically modified organisms without proving their safety in the environment at large. One single field of GMO corn or wheat is capable of polluting the entire crop of every field across the nation. Millions of square miles of crops can be permanently contaminated with seeds that carry the mutant genes. We have little knowledge of what this altered gnome will produce as it mutates itself outside the laboratory that created the initial changes. Where is the conspiracy theorist to warn us of the dangers there?

Coal burning electric plants emit millions of tons of pollutants into the atmosphere every year. Among the substances are sulfur, mercury, antimony, lead and other trace heavy metals. All the chemtrail aircraft cannot hope to keep pace with the coal industry in disbursing the same quantity of pollutants in the air.

There are 104 nuclear reactors licensed at 65 sites in the United States. Additionally there are decommissioned reactors and military reactors in various places. None of these reactors has any plan for the ultimate disposal of their nuclear wastes. They all archive that toxic waste on-site in cooling pools that must be maintained lest they over heat and release massive amounts of radiation. While under normal circumstances the wastes are well protected and pose little danger, the kinds of abnormal events such as the earthquake and tsunami that devastated the Fukushima Daiichi plane in Japan do happen and all safeguards that were imagined fail to protect us from that danger. Planet Earth has been polluted with radiation from that plant for 10,000 years at least.

Even though the prior explosion at the Chernobyl plant in the Ukraine added to the radiation loose on the planet, the 100's of air, ground and underwater nuclear detonations have added more toxic isotopes than either of the two "accidents." Such levels of radiation far surpasses anything that a fleet of jets could disperse in a chemtrail. Ultimately the governments of the world did something about the problem with first the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty than the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. That stopped the contamination of the planet with stupid insistence on detonating nuclear bombs. The biggest peril that humans face is not war. It is not hurricanes. It's not a pandemic disease. It's not even sea level rise due to Arctic ice melt. What it is is the change in weather patterns that impact the availability of fresh water and the growing of food crops. The summer of 2012 brought with it a US Heartland drought that decimated the crop yields. The East Coast received more than its share of precipitation as the weather patterns had shifted a thousand miles eastward. So far the world has only been inconvenienced by Supply and Demand price increases. Two or three years of this shifted weather pattern could make the total amount of food produced be too little to feed everyone.

Climate change driven by a warmer atmosphere will do several things. Changes in crop yield is but one. Warmer oceans will cause algae blooms and smaller fish and crustaceans. Much of the world depends of protein from the sea. The third item is the snow fall in high elevations that remain through the Summer to feed the rivers in otherwise arid regions. When the water stops flowing, that region may be doomed.

The Mighty Mississippi River was humbled this year by the drought in the Midwest. If that persists, we could be in for some terrible times ahead. So chemtrails or not, our bigger concerns are just what nature has in store for us from our neglectful treatment in most everything we do.

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