A Message

On The Climate, Pollution, Machines, and Organic Food . . . and more.

I'm no expert on "the climate" . . . or anything else, except maybe photography, and even that is questionable, since I have not been formally educated on photography, and I have never made a decent living as a photographer. In other words, I'm no successful pro photographer, so why would anyone decide to believe what I have to say about anything photography related? Back to the climate.

CivilizationA typical urban area, where many humans live. Is this sustainable? Could it be, if these people put solar panels on their roofs, and grew fruit and vegetables in gardens on and in their buildings? I think so.

It is my belief that we just don't know what's happening (in many things, not just the climate). Yes, I'm denying the so-called "science" of those who believe the climate is changing for the worse, and that today's climate change is due to human activities. There is plenty of science that indicates that the climate has warmed and cooled in the past. Take the Medieval Warm Period, as an example. Did everyone die? No. Did it kill off half the population? No. In fact, when the climate warmed it allowed people in the north to grow more crops! It was apparently a time of plenty. When that centuries-long warm period ended many people starved to death. Crops would not grow. Land would not produce (at least not as much as it had in the past few centuries). A cooling climate may be far worse than a warming climate. The one thing we can be sure of though is that the climate will change. It always has. Yes, there are times of relative stability, but every time that happens it eventually ends with a time of climate change. In other words climate change is nothing new. Do you know they used to call it "Global Warming" once? It does look like the climate may be warming back up again . . . after it cooled down for a while. That may or may not have something to do with human activity. I don't know, and I don't believe you know either, whether you are a believer or not.

Why do I think these things?

Well I have read some stuff - history, and science articles, and done my own research, based on records that are readily available from various government websites. After the age of the steam engine and the industrial revolution, along came World War I. That was more than a hundred years ago. In that war human kind polluted the planet more than ever before. Then came an even more polluting World War II, at which time our factories belched out smoke like never before, and the burning of bridges, farms, ships, and entire towns and cities polluted the atmosphere like nothing that has happened in my lifetime. (I'm 55 now.) We humans even dropped atomic bombs! Then came the Korean and Vietnam wars, and of course the popularity of the automobile. For more than thirty years after WW II people around the World, but especially people here in the U.S.A. bought cars and trucks, and burned gasoline like it was going out of style! Then, around 1975 there was a cold spell. The climate got cooler, while we polluted like crazy! How could this be, after a hundred years of human pollution of the air? If our pollution causes the climate to warm, then what happened? Does it make sense to you that all that pollution caused the climate to cool? You could say that the climate cooled in spite of what humanity did for the entire century before that (steam engines became popular about a hundred years before the cold times in 1975 and 1976, when it snowed in south Florida, where I lived as a child). Well, now the climate seems to be getting hotter, and for about fifty years now that has been the case. It's easy to be short-sighted and arrogant, and think that something humans are doing must be causing this, but does it really make sense?

If you look at the climate over the past five or ten centuries, rather than just the past fifty years, I think you'll have a different view of the changing climate. If you look far back, as far as the ice ages, you will understand that what is happening right now may be almost insignificant. At least we're not heading into an ice age, which might cover half the land masses on Earth with ice and snow, right? Imagine the levels of extinction that we'd see in such an event? Such things take many thousands of years though, so nobody on Earth today will ever see such things happen . . . unless we figure out some technology to prolong life to more than ten times our current lifespans. I definitely don't see anything like that happening in the next century. Sure, it could happen some day, now that we're inventing A.I. In fact, it could be that the coming computerized beings will live to see ice ages come and go, but most likely not humans, and almost surely no human who is alive today will live for hundreds of years, let alone thousands of years.

The age of machines is upon us.

I believe that (the invention of robots and A.I.) is something worth worrying about much more than climate change. The climate has always changed. Evidence of that has been found by archaeologists and others for centuries. We know that people in the Americas were dramatically affected by long droughts (climate change) many centuries ago, long before the industrial revolution. Much has been published in the past, even before the whole "Global Warming" scare became a popular news topic.

There used to be "science" articles claiming another ice age is coming soon.

Did you know that Newsweek published an article titled "The Cooling World" on April 28, 1975? There were many other articles published back in those days about the possibility of a coming ice age, and they were "based on science" back then too. The fact is that drama sells newspapers and magazines, and it makes for good headlines. What has changed? It's different drama today, but I believe it is all just drama. Sure, they talk a big game about all the science involved and all those old natives around the world who are in touch with nature, and how this has "never happened before" . . . What? You don't think they were saying the same kinds of things in the articles back when they were selling magazines and newspapers with headlines and articles that said the climate is cooling? Of course they did. There were all sorts of scientists who jumped on the bandwagon, and old natives talked about how it was getting colder, and how they couldn't catch enough fish or deer or whatever. But it was all a lie, sold to us by the media. Who's to know if they're telling the truth today any more than they were in 1975? Are they just selling us a big lie once again? I don't know, and I'm willing to bet that neither do you. Hey, I'm just the messenger. Don't shoot the messenger.

;)

That said, I still don't like fossil fuels.

I acknowledge the fact that kerosene and gasoline have had many positive impacts on humanity. They've allowed us to do amazing things, and transport would likely not be the same without fossil fuels. All that is not to say I think we should just keep driving gas-guzzlers, with no regard to how much pollution we are spewing into the atmosphere though. In fact I think there are many reasons not to. The biggest is the horrible health hazard posed by pumping carbon monoxide into the air we breathe in our cities, where most cars are driven. On cigarette packages it says that carbon monoxide causes cancer. Both of my parents died from cancer. Maybe it was pollution in the air that killed them both. Maybe it was the rampant use of pesticides, plastic food containers, fluoride (a poison) in our water, chemicals in our soaps, skin lotions, and shampoo, or so many other dangerous things in our "civilized" world that caused my parents to get cancer, and maybe all the pollution and bad stuff in the products we use and eat is killing us all. Ever heard of Teflon? Amazingly people keep on buying pots and pans with that crap applied to the cooking surfaces of those pots and pans. Did you see that movie about Dupont Chemical Company? Maybe "climate change" is just a thing to distract us from what's really going on, both here in the U.S. and around the Globe.

Words like these may get me killed.

Yes, even today there are people who literally hate anyone who doesn't agree with them, and when the "norm" is to believe something is one way, and you believe something else, then most people . . . that's millions of people . . . will disagree with you, and some of those people are lunatics, or what one might call radicals, similar to those who in centuries past would claim someone who believed the "wrong thing" should be burned at the stake. I hope nobody kills me for writing and publishing this, but what if they do? So be it. This is a country where we have something called the First Amendment to assure that we are free to say what we want, write what we want, and publish what we want. People need to know that there are others out there who think something different. People need to understand there are people who believe things that are not the conventional "wisdom" of the current times, and that it is indeed o.k. to believe something that maybe not everyone else believes. Without diversity in our beliefs, how can we have diversity in anything? Without diversity life would indeed be quite boring.

I am anti-pollution.

I am a fan of Tesla, because that company makes cool cars that run on electricity, which does not pollute the air we breathe in our cities. Sure, it's possible that one might pollute a lot when making electricity and/or the infrastructure to deliver electricity, but it can be done cleanly too. We can use dams to make hydro-electric power, which is about as clean as it gets. We can use small vertical-axis wind turbines or those massive wind turbines they put in the sea off the coast in places where there are constant on-shore breezes, or on hills in places like north Texas, where there is lots of wind to produce electricity, and we can use a few warehouses full of big battery packs to reduce the amount of pollution produced by those natural gas fired power plants they used to take up the slack, when the wind dies down in the local area. We can use solar panels too, because it is absolutely certain that the sun will come up every day, and be in the sky for a few hours, and we can make electricity with solar panels every day (though I do acknowledge that some days are better than others for making solar power, with clouds blocking out a lot of sunlight on occasion, and in some places more than just occasionally). Elon Musk seems to believe that if we were to use conventional solar panels to cover just one small piece of one corner of one state, like Arizona, New Mexico, or Nevada, that would produce enough solar power to power the entire United States. I believe that if we put a few solar panels on each of the roofs of most houses, warehouses, and low commercial buildings, such as retail shops, small office buildings, and factories, then we will be making enough electricity to supply most of our electric power demands. I'm not a proponent of nuclear power. I believe humans have demonstrated time and time again that they can not be trusted to build safe nuclear power stations. They can not be trusted to store the deadly poisonous, radioactive waste from nuclear power stations in a safe manner either. Ever head of the Hanford Site?

I eat and drink a lot of organic products.

This is because I don't want to pollute my body with pesticide residue, hormones, and other bad stuff. I try to buy products that come in glass jars and bottles, rather than plastic containers. (I believe chemicals leech out of the plastic into the food and drinks kept in plastic containers for days, weeks, or even months before we buy them.) I prefer flour that comes in paper. I prefer boxes made of cardboard, rather than boxes made of plastic. Cardboard boxes last for decades, but very few plastic boxes I have ever seen were able to last for more than a few years before cracking. Most plastic is garbage, and it's polluting our planet!

We're polluting our planet with plastic like never before!

Ever heard of an ocean gyre, and the massive "islands" of garbage that float out there? That garbage is mostly plastic - buckets, bottles, plastic bags, plastic nets (made of nylon, polyester, and or some other plastic), and so many other items, like those little plastic bottle caps that come on water bottles and soda bottles. Sure, you can make something cheap by using plastic instead of aluminum, steel, stainless steel, or something else that will last longer than some cheap plastic. Why? Why would you want something made of plastic, when it could be made to last longer by making it out of something that will last? Wood, steel, aluminum, stainless steel, titanium - ultimately we have many materials we can use to make things that last longer than if they were made of that cheap, garbage we know as plastic. I prefer things made of other materials, obviously. That's not to say I won't buy something made of plastic. I bought Milwaukee Pack-Out tool boxes. They're made mostly of plastic, but I just prefer other stuff, like glass bottles, cardboard boxes, rather than plastic ones, tools made of all steel, rather than tools with plastic handles, knives with stainless steel handles, rather than the ones with handles made of plastic, etc. I recently bought a rolling tool box. It's stainless steel, with a wood top.

And what about clothes? I try to buy 100% cotton, wool, or silk, rather than stuff made of polyester, nylon, rayon, or some other plastic.

So what is this rant all about? Really it's just to let you know where I stand. Obviously this is not an extensive discussion of all the things I've mentioned here, but who wants to read something so long and boring anyway? Go have some fun!

:)