Friday, March 20, 2015

Climate Change and How We've Changed

This blog was created on March 21, 2015

As kids growing up in the 1970's my dad and our uncle used to drag us up to Georgian Bay every year to a fishing camp. 

In the early 70's we used to go by boat to this guy's house with a garage at the shoreline/dock and he would sell us these big blocks of ice that he had cut from the channel ice in the winter and was stored in saw dust in his garage.  He pulled the ice out with big tongs, washed the saw dust off in the water for us.  

In the late 70's he didn't have any ice because he said the ice was not safe.  The earth was warmer. 

In the early 70's, a Canadian could put in an ice rink and it would last all winter.  With 2014 being the exception, the winters of having a 'constant ice rink' in Southern Ontario ended in the 1980s.

Also in the 1970s, summers were usually cool crisp air with the odd really hot days.

By the early 1980's the humidity had started and a Canadian figured out 'humidex' levels.

Smog has been around since cave men started discovered fire but really got going during the industrial revolution. My theory is that some of earth's smog is escaping through the hole in the ozone because with the billions of tons of green houses gases that we're dumping into the environment every year, it's a wonder we haven't all choked to death. 

Our Canadian naval sea men are now reporting that there is now half the ice in the arctic that there used to be just twenty years ago.

The sad part about it all is that cleaner alternatives to energy have been around for ever.  Wind power has been around for centuries, powering saw mills, combustion engines were created long before gas powered engines and the technology for solar is going on eighty years old.

Another sad thing is that 'trees' are such a simple solution to absorbing all the toxic emissions but due to a lack of laws from upper levels of government regarding the creation of 'sustainable communities' way too many trees are destroyed for development with out any regard to the necessary creation of green buffer zones between development that help absorb carbon and heat, and give us oxygen.  So our towns and cities have mostly all turned into these cement and pavement hot spots, thus creating toxic hot spots or cities.