Skip to main content

Climate Change Deniers and Heat Redistribution

Once, when the world was young, we lived in a rather large brick house in a rather small town in northeast Iowa.  There was a fireplace in the living room.  When it got cold, outside and in-, we sometimes started a fire in the fireplace.  It was a way to try to warm the outside by pumping slightly warmer air up the chimney.

Early on in our life there, we took out the fireplace and installed a new, large wood stove.  It is, I know, still doing winter duty, creating a warm spot in the world when the wind howls outside, and when the last thermal unit of heat has gone looking for refuge.
Midwest winters are not all about crystalline mornings and moonglow vistas.  They are about dying in the cold.  Huffington Post reports that, right now, with Polar air tumbling down over Canada to the Upper Midwest, there are 100,000 people without electricity in Canada.  There will be thousands more, all the way to wherever the sea begins.  It might be that most of them do not depend on electricity for heat, but even if they depend on coal, oil, or gas, when the electricity fails, other things begin to fail, too.  An old-fashioned wood stove, pollution and all, seems at least a temporary comfort.

So here we are, burning coal, pumping hydrocarbons into the atmosphere in such quantities that it is goofing up the climate of earth itself, resulting in hot spots, hotter than ever, and colder-than-a-corncob-in-an-outhouse spots in other places:  places like Manitoba and North Dakota and Michigan.

The only thing that is keeping climate change from happening faster than it already is, is the blather of people who don't see the problem.  You could heat the schoolhouse with the hot air they generate.  The plane still might slide off the runway, and the truck off the interstate, but the kids might stay warm.  That's how climate change works:  hots spots here and there; ice in the oceans; hurricanes along the coast.

I suppose we should be grateful for the idiots we have elected to office, and for the people who elected them.  We should think of it as a redistribution of hot air.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

Nice to Run Into You Again

We do not see things in enormous time-frames.  We human beings are fairly new at figuring things out for ourselves.  For instance, some  people today still think of the earth as a newly created thing, perhaps ten thousand years old.  Earth is actually about four-and-a-half billion years old.   That is to say, the earth is 450,000 times older than the Adam and Eve story, and the universe is three times older than that! I recall first hearing that continents were slowly drifting around the earth, and that there quite likely had been several times when the continents were squeezed together.  But people could stand on the edge of their own continents, and not see Africa or Asia getting closer.  It took at least fifty years to figure things out. We called our continent something special. But sure enough, there have been numerous times during several-billion year history of the earth, when supercontinents formed, and eventually drifted off. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...
Post a Comment
Read more