Fun
With Mr. Buzz-Kill
 "Incontrovertible"
is not a kind of car. It means something that cannot
be denied or disputed... like evidence
that humankind is directly responsible for soaring
amounts of greenhouse gases into
the atmosphere, the side-effect of which is rising
temperatures,
melting ice-caps, and future mass-extinction of, you
know, us.
You may have your
eyes closed and your fingers in your ears going "LA-LA-LA!
LOOK AT MY NEW SUV AND MY BIG-SCREEN TV AND GODDAMIT
SOMEBODY
TURN
UP THE AC!" at the top of your lungs but, whether
you accept the data or not, the Earth is currently
racing past the tipping point for the greenhouse effect.
Let me say that again because it's kind of important....
we're past the tipping point for the type of ongoing
environmental disaster that will spell the end of NFL
football.
Do I have your attention? Good.
Unless
we
take drastic
steps
to
lower the rate
of greenhouse
gas emissions immediately global temperatures
will, by the end of
this century,
soar
to levels not
seen since the Permian-Triassic extinction event die-off
250 million years ago, when fully 90% of all species
on Earth perished. For those
that missed the inference that means another 90%
die-off... or 90% of what we haven't already driven
into extinction by then.
Awww, but what do we care? Barring major advancements
in human longevity none of us, nor many of our children,
will
be around to suffer
through the final days of mankind's miserable
slog on Earth. Let's dance and be jolly while the oceans
boil.
On the bright side, and there is one for those who
care about the continuation of the species, here
are
three
simple things you can
do to help stave off disaster:
(1)
Stop eating meat, or vastly reduce your intake. The
protein pipeline is rife with greenhouse gases.
(2) Insist that your country,
and all countries, begin investing heavily in renewable
energy, both solar and
wind. The
sooner
we remove
coal and crude oil from the energy matrix, the better.
(3) Suffer a little. If you're lucky enough to have
a thermostat, set it in the high-80s in summer and
the mid-60s in winter. You can do this. (However, if
you generate your own renewable energy supply, go nuts.)
It would also help if we start taking population control
seriously. In America, let's limit the tax benefit
for the number of children at two. Have all you want,
but pay for them yourself.
And,
to a lesser degree, we need to reduce our Pavlovian
response to
all the
shiny new
gadgets
that appear in
the marketplace. We are, after all, a country that
has elevated the hoarding of consumer goods to an
art form, but all that novel new technology requires
both energy and natural resources, each of which come
with a price at the expense
of the environment. It therefore makes sense to mandate
standards for the manufacture of major goods
that require them to not only last longer but make
them easy to repair.
Above all, we need to stop wasting trillions of dollars
fighting wars for the benefit of oil companies and
marshal our resources against our real enemies... methane
and
CO2.
If you have other useful suggestions, apart from building
vast fleets of interstellar spaceships to ferry us
all to the next poor, humanity-benighted planet, I
welcome you to offer them in the comment section below.
=Lefty=
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