| Home | Is it too late? Most pantheists and panpsychists claim to be environmentalists. We are concerned about "global warming." We would like to do something about it. With 5% of the population, the U.S. uses nearly 25% of nearly every resource. I programmed my furnace to turn down when no one is home and I drive a car with an EPA-estimated 41mpg. But I drive too fast and waste gas. I drove slower for 300 miles and yes, I did get better mileage. Driving at 50MPH (20 miles an hour slower than the traffic) with cars slamming on their brakes and then zipping around me was actually a hazard; and no one else was doing it, so the next week I was back with the crowd. I'm old enough to remember the gas rationing during WW2. Not even Al Gore would seriously suggest rationing gas to cut down on CO2 and greenhouse gasses. Even with such drastic measures, would this solve with the "global warming" problem? Mankind causes only 10-20% of the warming, so it wouldn't help enough but it would make the air cleaner and we would not need as much foreign oil. Al Gore has a lot of good ideas but we are not totally responsible for it getting hotter. The main problem is the sun, which is going though a brightening cycle. This might have been hard to believe this winter in northern Europe, which had the coldest winter on record, but this too was the result of "global warming." Cold water from the melting of Greenland’s icecap shifted the Gulf Stream and it will get worse. If enough of this cold freshwater flows into the Northern Atlantic we will have another Ice Age. Sorry Al, but you are too late. Even if Americans all started riding bicycles, we will still have to contend with 1/2 a billion new cars in Asia and thousands of new factories. (I wonder what kind of mileage Al's car gets?) Some of the Chinese cities are already the most polluted in the world. This will continue to get worse with more Chinese and other Asians demanding cars and consumer goods. Along with the polar icecaps, the permafrost under the tundra is melting and the rotting tundra is releasing vast amounts of methane, contributing to the composition of the greenhouse gas makeup. Many believe this will become worse than the CO2 problem. The sun brightened about a thousand years ago when it was one degree centigrade warmer than it is today. (This was before the industrial revolution). This was followed by the “Little Ice Age” which occurred about 700 years ago. So the cycle appears to be happening again! In the meantime we're in for a rough ride. 10/7/06 |