Date: Tue, 26 Jan 2016 03:16:02 -0500
From: “John R Dykers”
Subject: Climate Change Advisory Committee (R/PxT=Q, Vol II.)
I noted that Tom West, Paul Revere, and my good friend, Brian Bock, could not help poking fun at the climate committee being unable to meet because of ice.
Brian also warned about potential future abuses and economic repercussions of actions by this committee.
A word of prayer from an old Goldwater Republican.
The weather(today) and climate(decades) are two different things.
We find fish fossils in deserts, so we know there have been many dramatic climate changes, ice ages and warm spells going on for eons. We also know that various species have become so dominant from time to time as to outgrow their food supply, lose their adaptability, and become extinct. We know we humans are a species that has grown in number exponentially in the last few centuries.
If you wrapped a good size grapefruit very smoothly with a single layer of saran wrap you will have a good model with the saran wrap representing our atmosphere where all of us live, and all of you who have been up in the mountains understand how thin the oxygen gets by 5000 feet, only about a 3rd of the way up to no oxygen at all. We humans breath in oxygen and breath out CO2 to live; plants use photosynthesis to breath in CO2 and breath out oxygen to grow. Plants store up CO2, and millions of years ago many plants sank in the primordial mud and became oil and natural gas and coal and diamonds. We learned how to set fire first to wood, then to coal, oil, and natural gas. (whale oil actually gave us our first lamps, only to be replaced by kerosene)
What with volcanic eruptions and sunspots and multiple other natural events affecting our climate, it is easy to minimize the effect of humans on climate. But it is also not difficult to imagine that as we near 8 billion of us on this tiny planet and all living and dependent on that thin layer of saran wrap/atmosphere, that humans MIGHT, with all our tools that can move mountains, cars and trucks that move us and all our food and gadjets, go to the moon, explode atomic and hydrogen bombs, build magnificent dams creating enormous lakes and drying up even the Colorado River, turn swamps into cities, build artificial islands and fight over them, we just MIGHT have some influence on our climate. With the multiple inputs into climate, it may be tricky to say exactly how much influence, but there are a lot of roofs that don’t soak up water on purpose of keeping us dry, roads and parking lots that don’t soak up water on purpose of keeping us out of the mud, multiple millions of barrels of oil/gasoline burned every minute to keep us warm and move us around, and cook our pizzas; 8 billion of us just MIGHT be contributing to change in that thin saran wrap of atmosphers. (Just in my lifetime; I was in Beijing in 1977, and autos were so rare our bus could speed up and coast down to save gas on our drive into town from the airport where on Friday afternoon our group debarking and walking to the terminal was the only thing moving!) Just 40 years later the traffic jams and smog is so bad that you see the pictures on TV and nobody wants to take a job there because of the air; I had a patient quit his job and come back to Siler because of chronic respiratory illness. WE just MIGHT be doing some things that make our saran wrap atmosphere unlivable. There are 8 billion of us.
And some of us live here.
Volcanic eruptions, the dust from meteor craters, sandstorms,and our smog drift in that thin atmosphere from west to east in that famous ‘jet stream’.
We are lucky to live where we still have some fresh air but the CO2 % is rising and the asthma if getting worse. We still have drinkable water in some of our wells, but we have to dig deeper to find it. We best keep an open mind and try to keep our options open and focus some attention on keeping our climate livable. We farmers call it “pertecting the land”, and have been doing it for generations, hence ‘pertecting’ instead of ‘protecting’. (But even some agriculturists used to rape and burn and move on untill we ran out of places to ‘move on’ to. We slaughtered the buffalo by the millions; made dust bowls out of ignorance) We have learned better the hard way.
Yes, we need to be wary of know-it-all committees, but we also need to be wary of not reading the hand writing on the wall. I remember one of my little nieces saying to the other; “Open your eyes; you might see something”.
Be careful. “When knowledge and belief conflict, belief will prevail.” Much to the chagrin of all of us who need public policy based on the best knowledge available. Think about it; the more of us there are the easier it is to foul our own bed; it gets harder to drink upstream from the herd. It gets harder not to —- where you live and eat and drink.
John Dykers