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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Oil and Water and the Principle of Imminent Collapse

What you don't know about the Principle of Imminent Collapse will kill you. It will kill many people, animals and plant life on which we depend. One only ignores the Principle of Imminent Collapse at the peril of our lives.


The 2010 hurricane season is soon upon us and there is oil in that there water that will be spread over the land in a fashion never before seen. It is not a matter of if, but when the storm will come. There are 14 to 24 major storm events predicted by NOAA for this year. Hurricane intensity numbers of 2, 3, 4 and 5 will have a much lesser degree of importance than whether the storm track coincides with the oil-laden waters of the Gulf of Mexico and possibly the East coast of the US if the oil tracks around the southern tip of Florida.


Hurricane Rita roared into the Gulf of Mexico and then skipped across the southern portion of Florida from the Gulf side to the Atlantic side. Katina took aim at New Orleans and made a storm surge of 17 feet carrying gulf water far inland. Flooding raised toxins and petro chemicals from the rivers and out of the damaged industrial plants along the Mississippi River. Now that the "source water" is so heavily laden with crude oil, it will be pushed ashore and be lifted by the evaporation and convection forces of the storms that make their way into the Gulf. We may even see oily rain coating everything for hundreds of square miles of land area far from the Gulf Waters.



The rupture of the pipes at the Deepwater Horizon well and the resultant spew of crude into the water may only be the smaller portion of the damage done to the global environment. When the oil reached the coastal marshes and beaches, that is when the greater damage was done. The oceans do have a large albeit finite capacity to mitigate the oil itself. Oil is an organic compound and there are natural processes that will degrade it over time. There is also the "Dilution Solution" where if it is churned enough, the concentration will fall. But the halving effect of adding equal parts contaminated water to uncontaminated water may indeed reduce the concentration of the oil but it doesn't eliminate it. Time will do that part.


The problem with allowing time to solve this problem is that we have so little of it until the first tropical depressions start heading toward the Gulf and the oil there. The 75 to 100 mph winds of even moderate hurricanes will pick up the surface oil and whip it inland. Oil plumes, still deep in the water will be pushed landward and be heaped up on the shores in a manner like never before.


As of the early month of June 2010, the oil has only been in the Gulf waters. The ecological damage to the shoreline was 24 miles of beach and marsh. That would only be the beginning. Thirty-three percent of the Gulf waters were placed of-limits for fishing. What we say about the magnitude of this oil drilling blow out in October 2010 will be the more significant.


When an Engineer ignores the Principle of Imminent Collapse he/she can set off a catastrophe of global proportions. It is not very comforting to think that everything could end with someone tripping over the extension cord.


One could argue that it was not a terrible decision to circumvent a safety measure for a system that has a small change of needing to be activated while it is off-line. Ordering a small change in a complex mechanical system may seem innocuous , but doing that was the cause of the skywalk collapse in Kansas City Hyatt Regency in 2001 that killed 114 people in 1981. Writing a test procedure that involved using a candle flame to check for air leakage around foam insulation in a nuclear power plant almost touched off a disaster of Chernobyl proportions at the Browns Ferry nuclear facility in 1975. One could argue that the use of 20/20 hindsight is not a good predictor of future events.


Past performance is not an indicator of how well a stock will do in the marketplace, is what every financial advisor and purveyor of recommendations to buy has to say to cover their butts. This being true doesn't exempt professionals from the responsibility of looking into the near future and saying, "if I do THAT, will THAT come back to bite me?" All too often the question is asked, "what is the worst case scenario?" Almost as often, the answer is wrong. The Carlson Corollary says that Murphy was an optimist.

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