June 23rd, 2011
By Dan Miller
Forget about the Sun. It vanishes at night when we need it most, is about ninety-three million miles away and neither what it does nor doesn’t do significantly affects whether Mother Earth has a chill or a fever; the Sun doesn’t care whether She perspires or shivers. Even if solar activities mattered there wouldn’t be much we or even Gaia could do about it. She moves in countless ways Her wonders to perform but is not omnipotent. I know these are truths because Gaia herself told me so during a vision of the night just after I had dozed off while reading that the Air Force, like other enlightened military services, is now doing its best to accommodate earth centered religions such as Wiccans, Druids, Heathens and Pagans. During this vision, Gaia seemed pleased with the Air Force’s innovation but became heated and sweated profusely as she made obscenely disparaging references to former Vice President Gore, Michael Mann (formerly of the University of Virginia and a well known hockey stick artist) and even Peter Cottontail of Elmer Fudd’s green vegetable garden.
says the world’s oceans are being damaged in so many ways that the situation is far more dire than they originally thought.
Scientists will present a new report on the oceans to the United Nations on Tuesday. They say the troubles are from global warming and other man-made problems. Those include dead zones from farm run-off, overfishing, an increase in acidity from too much carbon dioxide, habitat destruction and melting sea ice.
The report is from the International Programme on the State of the Ocean. The combination of damaging effects on the seas suggest there’s a brewing worldwide die-off of species that would rival past mass extinctions.
According to Thomas Friedman, climate change is a really big problem. No matter what the Sun does, we humans will continue to make the planet warmer (or colder). We simply have to stop, lest really bad things happen. Mr. Friedman wrote in the New York Times on June 7th,
You really do have to wonder whether a few years from now we’ll look back at the first decade of the 21st century — when food prices spiked, energy prices soared, world population surged, tornados [sic] plowed through cities, floods and droughts set records, populations were displaced and governments were threatened by the confluence of it all — and ask ourselves: What were we thinking? How did we not panic when the evidence was so obvious that we’d crossed some growth/climate/natural resource/population redlines all at once?
It’s even worse, far worse. In the United States alone, more people die each year than during any year of the nineteenth century. Indeed, people are dying now who had never died before and the same may happen to everyone. Panic! Now! Soon it will be too late if it isn’t already. There is no time left to think; panic is quicker, easier and therefore better, even though it leads to rapid breathing and the release of more carbon dioxide and even dihydrogen monoxide into the atmosphere more quickly than does calm respiration. Lots more social change funding can come from panicking than from merely thinking so the benefits must outweigh any environmental costs. More panic-induced green energy usage and more shovel ready green jobs at least help some of us to feel better regardless of whether it’s already too late to ameliorate the underlying problems. Even our currency is green so the need to use it in green ways is obvious.
It is beyond rational dispute that “climate change” has occurred. Correlations can be drawn with our many problems — our wars on drugs, racism, poverty, terrorism, obesity and acne have been ineffective and the problems keep getting worse. If climate change were eliminated these wars might be more effective. Expensive Intensive studies by reputable climate scientists of academic bent who have already demonstrated their intellectual rigor mortis, assisted by their counterparts in the social sciences, could quantify the causal effects and in so doing demonstrate how shockingly great they (the effects) are. A hockey stick chart is essential and federal funding is needed to fudge confect it. Countless green jobs could be saved or created. However, we can’t afford to wait for these studies to be researched, arrive at the desired conclusions, be peer reviewed and eventually published; we must act now. Strangely, distractions such as these may actually help to diminish the far more costly productivity of these experts in the way suggested below.
It was reported on June 9th that in Australia, where camels are many and people are few, carbon credits may be granted for killing feral camels to reduce global warming. That’s a start even though the camels probably don’t consider it a good one. However, in the United States, where people are many and camels are few, it is not a viable solution. We have tried green buses, but they seem to run (when they do run, rarely) in the red. There is a far better way which even PETA will bless and the cost of which will be negligible.
Just as the fact of climate change is beyond rational dispute, so also is the fact that humans contribute to it. Only the ways and the extent to which we contribute and whether it can be diminished by human activity are matters of contention. However, there has been no focus at all on the really obvious causes. Sadly, even though Republican presidential candidate Romney thinks man-made climate change is occurring he disclaims any intention to make it stop. Even St. Al the Wise Gored hasn’t convinced enough of us to stop man-caused global warming and its many related evils because his focus has been on lucrative gaseous schemes involving the mere reduction of greenhouse gasses.
Here are just a few of the most obvious ways in which humans really do cause global warming and they have nothing to do with the emission of greenhouse gasses:
The normal body temperature of a human is about 98.6o degrees Fahrenheit, higher than the average ambient temperature. We thereby increase the ambient temperature. We also raise animals and thereby increase their number. The animals we raise also have body temperatures higher than average ambient temperatures and thereby increase the ambient temperature.
We heat our homes when it’s cold outside and some of the heat escapes, increasing the ambient temperature.
We cool our homes when it’s hot outside and the heat extracted by our air conditioning systems is discharged into the atmosphere, making it warmer.
We actually cook some of our food and lots of heat is discharged into the atmosphere – outside our houses from the barbeque grill directly into the atmosphere; when we cook inside our houses, the excess heat is removed by air conditioning systems and discharged into the atmosphere also making it warmer.
We drive cars and ride in buses, taxis, trains and airplanes; the engines create heat which is discharged into the atmosphere.
Other causes might be diminished, but only slightly, through half-way but very costly measures such as cap and trade, use of solar power, alternative fuels, and other means suggested here. To do that makes no sense; we must stop fooling around and get serious and we must do it right now.
St. Al the Gored recently offered another less than even half-fast solution: stop having too many kids. The only solution is for Zero Tolerance; everyone, globally, must abstain from all actual sexual activity; just Say No! That’s why we have been blessed with the Internet, Twitter, Facebook and all the rest which permit and even encourage Gaia-friendly and therefore virtuous sexual activity instead. The Honorable Member Weiner helped us to find the answer and therefore deserved his very own (virtual) Nobel Piece Prize rather than wiener roasts and calls for his resignation or expulsion from the House. As an obviously unrelated aside, even President Obama has pledged personally to send Twitter messages. El Presidente Chávez of Venezuela has done that for a long time so it is clearly a good idea; Venezuela is a far better nation because of it.
Now that Mr. Weiner has resigned, gracefully, to end the distractions caused by his enemies’ envy, questions have been raised as to what he should do. In response he said,
“I’ll be looking for another way to contribute my talents,” Weiner said at the packed news conference at a senior center in Brooklyn, New York. “I got into politics to help give voice to the many who simply did not have one.”
The answer: he should devote his life to Twitter and to similar green pursuits; there need be no “ignominious pause if not an end in a once-promising political career.” There remains much that he can do, far more important to Mother Earth than anything he ever did or could have done while in the Congress. It’s a big and hard job but we need his wise guidance and he can hack it. After he has dealt with anthropomorphic global warming he can get back into politics or something else if he wishes. A gig on Al Gore’s network might help him financially but would be a sad waste of his principal talent until his essential task, set for him by Gaia, has been completed.
The solution suggested in this video would help but not enough.
Total abstinence is the only preventative that always works; other common ways to evade the results of actual sexual activity are not completely effective. This is a lesson we must learn if we are to be firm, upright and outstanding. Hard, perhaps, but Yes, We Can!
This solution will cost hardly anything, will be completely effective in the long run and will save money even in the short term: prenatal care, obstetric care and raising children cost lots of money and with few exceptions infants as well as older children are costly rather than profitable. Since bumper sticker slogans are necessary, the program could be called “No Child Left Behind®.”
Only a hundred years or so — a mere second in geological terms of reference — will be needed to eliminate the entire human race and therefore all of the global climate change and everything else bad that humans cause. There will be significant social benefits: the number of children living in poverty will begin to diminish in only nine months and the number of one parent households will also decline; soon they will vanish altogether. So will Islamism, racism, sexism, jingoism, librulism, Communism, Socialism, unionism and all other isms. Unemployment will decline gradually until eliminated; government will become smaller and eventually cease; the number of obnoxious media personalities will decline until there are none left and those remaining until then will have fewer upon whom to inflict themselves; ditto CongressCritters, pundits, lobbyists and other members of the political classes. Cities will become less crowded, traffic jams will fade into distant memory and then end, starvation, terrorism, wars and man’s inhumanity to man (and even to camels) will cease — the list could go on and on.
The ancient Manicheans, so named because the founder of their sect was a Persian sage named Mani (mani, in Spanish, means a type of nut), had the right idea: sex is wicked and must be eschewed, even in marriage and even when for procreation. (N.B. — this is, of course, a gross oversimplification of a religion with many other comparably salutary doctrines as well.) The most devout members of the sect did as they preached and it withered away.
We owe it to Gaia and to all of her endangered creatures to take this proposal far more seriously than expensive and gaseous non-solutions. Unlike all others, we can and must make it work. Sí se puede!
(This article was also posted at Dan Miller’s Blog.)
Articles written by Dan Miller
Tags: anthropomorphic, change, children, climate, Gore, satire, warming
Categories: Humor, Politics, Science | Comments (1) | Home
(To avoid spam, comments with three or more links will be held for moderation and approval.)
Copyright 2023 Opinion Forum
Interesting how the leading lights of the
global warmingclimate change movement have personally enriched themselves along the way, all the while leaving huge personal carbon footprints behind. Folks like Al Gore and, as has recently been revealed, James Hanson of NASA have done pretty well for themselves. That’s also true of the various scientists, some of them real and some not, who have scooped up the grant money available for those whose ideology is on the right side of the question.If we learned nothing else during Watergate, we learned that if you want to know what’s going on you have to follow the money.