Climate Strange -or- Global Warning

There comes a point where this “debate” about climate change needs to be shocked into reality. I had been OK with letting things go along as they do, without my input, until I caught Monday’s episode of “The Daily Show” while starting the fire in our wood stove insert so that we could avoid burning oil for our heat Tuesday night.

A segment called “The War on Carbon” pushed me into action.

The argument here rests on the highly sophisticated reasoning that global warming must be a hoax because it’s cold when I go outside.

In Tuesday’s Standard-Times, Page A8, a story called “Polar vortex keeps coming” explains quite clearly why things are cold. Let me paraphrase: Frigid air normally confined to the poles is being infiltrated by warmer air rising off the warmer oceans and disturbing the previously stable polar mass.

I think of it this way: “Climate” is not defined by the 2-square-foot column of air that rest upon my shoulders and head, despite Donald Trump’s assertion (see “The Daily Show” clip above). The “climate” encompasses the whole globe. When something warmer than typical becomes part of the system, it creates volatility or instability. So the cold we’re feeling right now isn’t “new” cold due to cooling, it’s polar cold that used to stay at the poles. In the current case, it gets broken off from the northern “vortex” and spins off to the south. Why is this so hard to get?

And while we’re at it, why not stop paying attention to whether the weather is wetter or warmer, and look at your oceans? Scallop, clam and lobster shells need calcium. Coral needs calcium, but acidifying oceans means the chemistry those ancient creatures expect in their environments is different, and makes fewer calcium radicals available for use. Sorry to say, they are not going to be able to evolve as quickly as the ocean chemistry is changing under our “stewardship.” There is no argument you can make that reasonably denies that carbon sent into the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels is being absorbed into the oceans and changing their chemistry to the detriment of these creatures that evolved to use carbon.

My interpretation may seem radical to you, but it seems to me that our planet was zipping around the sun for billions of years before any mammals ever exhaled a molecule of CO2. An object at rest tends to stay at rest, I was taught in physics class, so why not look for ways to allow those fossil fuels to stay at rest below the surface of the Earth?

Obviously, we’re not going to stop using these fuels overnight, but why aren’t billions of research dollars being spent on making better batteries, so we can store solar, wind or tidal energy? Potential supply far surpasses demand.

If I was smart, that’s what I would do.


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