Bury Your Head In the Sand

GLOBAL WARMING and ECOLOGICAL DESTRUCTION
Left Wing: Very real problem; is changing and is going to drastically change Earth's climate as we now know it.
Right Wing: Scare tactic by liberals.

This might be kind of a long post. I still can't finish it because I'm bogged down by everything else in life. Dave Matthews Band Concert this weekend in Alpine Valley baby! This is only part of my post that I've been working on forever now. I'll finish it when I get back, because it's not even close to being completed.

It's not just global warming, but water pollution, forest destruction and the annihalation of endangered species that bothers me. Every sane scientist in the world will tell you that the destruction of the ecology of our planet is very real. It isn't some natural variation in climate change. The planet is warming up faster than it ever has, and it's our fault. The destruction of forests and other environments that we depend on for our very existence is happening every second of every day all over the world, and it's our fault. Never before in the history of Earth has one species had the capacity to have such an enormous and direct influence on the environmental system of the entire planet. With great power comes great responsibility.

Life began on Earth because of carbon dioxide. Now through the same man-made emmissions, were speeding up the process by which Earth will become uninhabitable for most species of animals who now call it home and were doing this by pumping too much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide is a 'greenhouse gas', which in short contributes to the rate at which our atmosphere absorbs solar radiation. The more CO2, the more solar radiation is absorbed, the warmer the planet becomes.

If you look at our two terrestrial neighbors, Venus and Mars, you begin to understand the impact that the gas has on planet temperatures. Venus has several times as much carbon dioxide in it's atmosphere, and it's extremely hot. Mars has very little, and is extremely cold. Both are uninhabitable. Our planet is the goldilocks of the solar system; not too hot, not too cold. This is in large part because of our distance from the sun, but the amount of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere has a huge impact.

The Earth is a living system, just like your body. It's extremely complex. The planet has it's own natural way of "staying healthy" just like the immune system in your body. Like your body, the earth isn't in perfect equilibrium, and sometimes like you, the earth can catch a cold now and then. Instead of white blood cells, Earth has trees, plants and algae that take CO2 in the atmosphere and convert it into breathable oxygen. Unfortunately our forests are being cut down everyday at extremely alarming rates. We are destroying our planet's ability to rejuvenate itself and pumping dangerous toxins into the atmosphere, delivering a one-two punch. We should be the protectors of our environment intstead of it's destroyers. After all, we wouldn't be here without it.

Not just CO2, but Methane, increases in solar activity and earth's positional orbit in relation to the sun can all have an effect on global warming. See: Study: Increase in Solar Radiation

Not only are we potentially endangering the livelihood of our future generations, but today we're putting enormous efforts and resources into perpetuating our state of complete and total denial. The Bush Administration is the leading force in this war on information. You would think that when you're the leader of the free world, you would be concerned about the future of the planet. You would hire scientists, or at least people who knew what they were talking about to lead agencies in charge of scientific research. You can't expect that kind of logic to apply to a person who thinks "it would be a lot easier if I were a dictator"....

Bush hired Phil Cooney to head the White House Council on Environmental Quality. Who is Phil Cooney? He's a lawyer, and was a lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute before coming to the White House. If that doesn't make you want to kick and scream, I'm not sure you should be allowed to have children. But thats not even the best part. Mr. Cooney is the official White House "editor" of reports done by NASA climate scientists. All of NASA's climate reports are sent to the White House for verification.

Here is the entry for Phil Cooney on Wikipedia (I love Wikipedia if you haven't noticed):

Phil A. Cooney was chief of staff for White House Council on Environmental Quality for the George W. Bush administration, an institution that shapes much of America's environmental policy. In a position that may be viewed as requiring scientific training, Cooney is a lawyer and holds a bachelors degree in economics. Prior to joining the Bush administration, Cooney was a lobbyist at the American Petroleum Institute. In early 2005, Cooney came under fire for radically changing a number of 2002 and 2003 official reports on climate change, mostly to increase a sense of uncertainty around the scientific data on climate change. As a New York Times article reports:

In a section on the need for research into how warming might change water availability and flooding, he crossed out a paragraph describing the projected reduction of mountain glaciers and snowpack. His note in the margins explained that this was "straying from research strategy into speculative findings/musings."

In June, 2005, Cooney resigned his position in the Bush Administration and was hired by ExxonMobil [1].


NASA recently came out with a report that found that the alarmingly fast warming and melting of the arctic is due in large part to summer smog pollution, and not just CO2 emissions.
Here's the story: NASA: Summer Smog Impacts Arctic Melting

San Francisco Chronicle: Tim Barnett of the University of California's Scripps Institution of Oceanography. "The debate is over, at least for rational people. And for those who insist that the uncertainties remain too great, their argument is no longer tenable. We've nailed it."
SFGate



I'll finish my post with an excerpt from The Future of Life by Edward O. Wilson, the author of two Pulitzer Prize-winning books, recipient of many of the world's leading prizes in science and conservation, Research Professor at Pelligrino University and Honorary Curator in Entomolgy of the Museum of Comparitive Zoology at Harvard University:

Environmentalism is still widely viewed, especially in the United States, as a special-interest lobby. Its proponents, in this blinkered view, flutter their hands over pollution and threatened species, exaggerate their case, and press for industrial restraint and the protection of wild places, even at the cost of economic development and jobs.

Environmentalism is something more central and vastly more important. Its essence has been defined by science in the following way. Earth, unlike the other solar planets is not in physical equilibrium. It depends on its living shell to create the special conditions on which life is sustainable. The soil, water, and atmoshere of its surface have evolved over hundreds of millions of years to their present condition by activity of the biosphere, a stupendously complex layer of living creatures whose activities are locked together in precise but tenuous global cycles of energy and transformed organic matter. The biosphere creates our special world anew every day, every minute, and holds it in a unique, shimmering physical disequilibrium. On that disequilibrium the human species is in total thrall. When we alter the biosphere in any direction, we move the environment away from the delicate dance of biology. When we destroy ecosystems and extinguish species, we degrade the greatest heritage this planet has to offer and thereby threaten our own existence.