Tag Archives: climate

Accessing the Big Bag O’ Tangents

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At work I got to talking about the climate and climate change. About how all the weird weather is just going to get worse and how stupid all of it is. From Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth that nobody much cared for because they just don’t like Al Gore is where a lot of the foolishness starts. I started to riff on a theme after that, noticing on the way that a lot of rich people seem to cluster around the water’s edge. I got to laughing as I considered what a pretty good rise in sea level would do. Say goodbye to New Yack, buh-bye Florida, and then there was this: “Oh yes, we have a house in the Hamptons… we’re so filthy rich and ohh-la-la.” … “We had a house in the Hamptons, but that’s all under the sea now.” I shifted gears and thought about a anthropomorphized mother nature beating the tar out of Florida. I don’t really care much for Florida, they have citrus, rain, oppressive heat, and really adorable under-the-sea-level-but-still-dry land contours. What happens when the sea rises? Florida will be covered with sea water. It’s going to be very hard to grow any citrus after an anthropomorphized mother nature is finished SALTING THE EARTH, after all, seawater is saltwater! Anyhow, I eventually returned to climate change and got to talking about how methane is a much worse gas than carbon dioxide when it comes to the greenhouse effect and that got me talking about how American stockyard animals all fart and release Methane.

Then I remembered the little bit of trivia that marsupials don’t host the bacteria that convert sugars into methane so animals like Kangaroo just don’t fart. Kangaroo Obviously I wasn’t done, and I needed to end it on a humorous note and I pulled down some points in the column of ‘obnoxious and obscene’ and posited that we should switch out cows, pigs, and chickens for their marsupial counterparts, like kangaroos and such and that would be better for the environment. It didn’t actually stop there, I got to thinking about how one dispatches chickens – you decapitate them and then them run about until they exsanguinate and stop moving, then you pick up the dead and dress it and you’re all set. Naturally I thought about what one could do in my fictional America where we’ve switched out to Kangaroos. What if you decapitated a Kangaroo and let it bound about? Kangaroos are big, lots of blood and energy and without a brain they’d probably take off bouncing along. Here’s the good part, imagine a new reality TV series where people bet online to see which Kangaroo, once properly beheaded gets as far as it can bounding off without a brain. Make it a national lottery, pack it with ads, boy, that would be a huge moneymaker.

There will be a full moon in two days. So, you know, that’s my excuse for all of this. People who know me shouldn’t even bat an eye at any of this. 🙂

Christmas Cards have all been sent…

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Work is all said and done. At Western we are released from our obligations, at least this year, on Friday December 21st. Then to save money and give employees time to celebrate the holidays the University just closes down until the day after New Years. It’s a benefit that doesn’t really get a lot of play until you are in the thick of it and then realize just how fortunate you are to have something that nice that you can take advantage of.

So, for the next gaggle of days there isn’t work to be done. So I can concentrate on being at home and resting and relaxing, which naturally means that I’m going to be a jungle-gym for affectionate felines. It’s not that bad either. 🙂 One thing that I have discovered is that I’ve got bad addresses for lots of my family, so if you don’t get a Christmas card, it’s not because I’m daft or ignorant, it’s because I had a bad address and sent the card willy-nilly off into the ether, and they’ll probably eventually come back undeliverable. I don’t know whether to just edit them and send them back out when they start coming in with good addresses or just do my best to the family that moved next year. We spent about $50 in stamps, money well spent I think because we love sending out Christmas cards every year, except for the gaggle of returns that flood back around the 27th and 28th. If you are online, I’ll try to reach you and let you know that next year our list will be better.

Amongst all the cards we get, the cute ones, the beautiful ones, and the sappy ones there are a few loaded with pictures of my adorable and beautiful family scattered all about. Specifically I received the card from Steven and Lacy, and in it is a picture of Peyton. I treasure these pictures and I keep them in places where I will always see them and think about all of these beautiful wonderful children that grace our family. On the fridge in our kitchen, the heart of our house we have Peyton’s baby pictures as well as Xander and Jackson. On my phone I have Odin and Leif, Aiden, Ashton, and Ethan. It warms my heart to see them all, I just wish the distance wasn’t so very profound between us all.

Winter has come to the lower part of Michigan, at least in terms of violent winds, proper temperatures, and the appropriate precipitation, finally. The ground is still way too warm for any snow to accumulate but the grass doesn’t mind holding a record of what little fell in the previous night. I’m holding out hope that we have a white Christmas instead of a brown or green one. It may not be that the weather is really that damaged after all, but one thing I can say beyond a doubt is that the seasons are shifting. Winter is coming late and staying way into where Spring should arrive, and then Summer comes in a hurry and lasts far too long itself. It’s like the entire seasonal dial is off by about fifteen to twenty degrees of rotation. My fear is that it just gets worse, or even more disastrous, that we miss Spring and Fall altogether and it just becomes a battle between Winter and Summer. Only time will tell, so we’ll have to wait and see, perhaps there will be a saving grace that the environment can play to help keep us safe, even from ourselves.

Stuck on a Theme

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My surprise gift for Christmas 2010 was from Scott, it was an iPod Nano to replace my dead iPod Touch that died months earlier. I’ve been chugging along with my podcasts since then and when I got the iPod Nano, I moved all the podcasts onto that device and started to chew through the backlog of programs.

One of those programs, actually a series of them are the Scientific American series of 60-second science podcasts. They publish a main feed and then sub-feeds according to various disciplines. I’ve been catching up, so I created a playlist and I’ve been nabbing down these 1-minute shows on my drive in to work and my return home at night.

Today I can say that I think I may have had enough with Scientific American. Yes their podcasts are of excellent quality and their reporting is beyond reproach. The quality is absolutely there, however the content and message is about as selective as a berserker with a sledgehammer. Scientific American has a monomaniacal preoccupation with climate change and evolution. 60-second Earth is pretty much 60-second Climate Change Whining, and their main podcast 60-second Science almost pushed me to dump the entire series altogether when they brought up the dire concern of anesthetic gas and it’s relationship to climate change. That the gas that doctors use to put their patients to sleep in order to perform surgery is 1600 times worse per unit of CO2 when it comes to climate change. Really? We really need to start nitpicking THIS? I damn near got to the point where I was going to march into my office, attach my iPod to my Mac and just dump the entire podcast series. I still may. After a while and a thousand miles being beaten over the head about climate change and evolution starts to have the opposite of the intended effect. I’m getting to the point where if I hear another whining voice carrying on about millions of tons of CO2 this and Methane that, that I very well may start rooting to leave this planet a burnt smoking husk when I die! Yeeearrrggggh!

There, I feel better now. 🙂 If they don’t get some new violin strings for their orchestra I’ll be flushing them down the toilet. I can’t wait for the podcast where they discuss the carbon footprint of a bowel movement. Gah.

Frozen Oranges

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I smile when I see reports of 36 degrees in Miami Florida. My pleasure is manifold, first hit is on the smug southerners who pridefully proclaim that “It never gets that cold here! Nyah Nyah!”, well, now it does. The second pleasure is for the snowbirds, you seriously thought you could outrun it?

The main pleasure comes in a kind of satisfaction regarding climate change. Sure, global warming is definitely a chapter title in this book we’re currently reading out of, but this is just a mild little precursor, a microscopic fluctuation, the prologue so to speak. As the climate changes, the weather patterns will change. Global warming is coming and it’s making some places warmer and other places colder. This year is an El Nino year, with the North American weather pattern being dictated by the blotch of warm Pacific Ocean water and I believe it to be the principal driving factor behind this years minty-fresh winter. Even with El Nino, you can’t easily dismiss a low-temperature record that was broken since 1927. It may be El Nino, but you can almost catch a whiff of something else out there, a little something extra riding on top of the natural variation. Only time will tell what global warming will do to the North American weather pattern. Maybe it will make everything stronger – hotter summers and colder winters, or maybe instead it will muck about with the seasons, Spring and Fall starting and stopping at different times.

On Facebook I mused that our planet is in a constant state of trying to find the perfect balance. I don’t see anything that disproves that idea. There is something deeply satisfying however in the notion that humanity, through it’s own shortsightedness and resistance to change forced our own planet to seek out a new balance, one that doesn’t have our desires in mind. A kind of species schadenfreude, and the joke is only now starting to unfold. True hilarity will take another hundred years to suss out, to quote a favorite movie, “This is all far from over…”