WMail ezine "Cooling The Planet" Essay

        A hundred years ago, problems were local. You worked a seven day week, in the city or on the farm, tried not to get trampled by a horse or die of typhus, to not get wiped out by blizzard or drought or locust plague. But everybody was in the same boat, the same struggle to make a go of Life, to survive and have the next generation carry the torch.
        Now, in the XXIst Century, we are losing the Class War (the American Middle Class is near extinction), the United States is bankrupt, life is made frantic by the false urgencies of the electronic media, and the planet's ecosystems are changing radically – or dying before our eyes.
        What we are handing off to the next generation is a dire, civilization-threatening mess that they do not deserve.

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PHYSICS OF HEAT
The last time I visited the family cabin at Mammoth, I learned by observation to think of heat as a liquid. I added wood to the fireplace in the evening, went to bed in the room in back of the fireplace, and would then wake up at 2 a.m. or so and throw off the covers: the heat from the stone fireplace would 'flow' thru the walls and ceiling, so that even though the fire itself was now out, or at least mere glowing coals, the heat had physically moved clear across the bedroom and warmed me to toasting.

I can't remember exactly where I saw this second phenomenon, perhaps in the garage at my parents' house (among other possibilities). The visual is of a wall sconce type of lamp, with an ancient and dried out lampshade. Over the years, the heat of the 60-watt bulb had scorched the shade, so that there was a brown spot on one side of the shade, with a very dark center. Not a rapid heating or burning, but a long-term buildup of the effect of heat, such that scorching occurred over time.

If you put a bucket of water above a typical skinny birthday candle, you will not suppose that the water in the bucket will be made to boil. But keep the candle replaced, and over time the bucket will heat and the water will heat and eventually the water will absorb enough heat to begin to boil.
Place a tight cover on the bucket, and the water will boil sooner.

This is the truth of Global Warming: Planet Earth is absorbing the heat of the sun, and over time the B.T.U.s are accumulating, and the temperature of this planet is rapidly rising. The problem with carbon dioxide (CO₂) and methane (CH₄) and ozone (O₃), the primary 'greenhouse gases', is that they act as a cover and increase the rate at which the heat builds up within the atmosphere as well as in the oceans and on the land.
The mass of Planet Earth is given on Wikipedia as 5.9742×10²⁴ kilograms, or roughly the numeral 6 followed by 24 zeros (6 septillion kilograms); counting on my fingers, that is 7,000,000 trillion megatons.

The twits who pooh-pooh Global Warming say that there is no significance in the Earth's ambient temperature rising a mere one degree (whether Fahrenheit or Centigrade). But here is the thing to get here: the mass of the Earth has absorbed an incredible amount of heat for the mean temperature of ocean and air and rock – with a mass of 6 septillion kilograms – to raise that single degree in a mere 50- or 100-year span.

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RECENT EVENTS
•       The Amazon rainforest is drying up.
•       An ancient ice shelf in the Arctic Ocean, 40 miles long, broke away in late December.
•       The North Atlantic Ocean rose 1.7 degrees above the 1901-1970 average in 2005 (per Mother Jones Magazine)
•       The location of melting glaciers in Greenland has moved 300 miles northward (per Mother Jones Magazine)
•       The independent Global Carbon Project has found that the rise in carbon dioxide was a steady 1% per year until 2000,
        but that increase has suddenly risen to 2.5% per year (B.B.C. report November 2006)
•       Last year was Britain's warmest since 1659 {Fahrenheit invented the mercury-in-glass thermometer in 1714};
        last winter was the warmest in Moscow in 150 years; last year was the warmest period in the Alps in 1300 years
•       Scientists are reporting major die-offs of polar bears in the Arctic and penguins in the Antarctic; Portugal is experiencing
        a huge die-off of cork trees; the Chinese river dolphin is the first mammal to go extinct in recent history; and
        "About 90% of the ocean's big predators – like cod and tuna – have been fished out of existence." (per Time Magazine)
•       240 species of birds in the U.K. have moved 40 to 60 miles north of their previously recorded habitat.

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LET'S BE COOL
        So that brings us to the titular topic of 'Cooling The Planet'. With all this heating up going on, how do we 'throw off the covers' and cool the planet down?
        The bad news is: There is no way to cool the planet. The good news? You tell me; I'll be glad if anyone can find 'good news' here.

Al Gore's movie "An Inconvenient Truth" woke a few people up, but the folks most in need of rational input refused to see the film. A closed mind is a terrible thing, and Bush's appointees to bureaucratic positions at the E.P.A. and at the Energy Department, and committee chair-people in the just-ended Do-Nothing 109th Congress are all nay-sayers about global warming. When the Bush administration doesn't like the facts, they have ordered the government scientists to alter the conclusions of their reports, under threat of job/career/pension loss.

There is no way to cool down Planet Earth. All that we can do is cut back on the 'fuel' of Global Warming, i.e. the human practices that make the heating of the planet escalate beyond Nature's ability to correct and beyond the will or ability of the brain-dead political management of every jurisdiction to take corrective action.

Get ready for a bumpy ride, folks.

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The WMail Newsletter EssaysVolume VII - Issue #66 - December 2006

"Cooling The Planet"

The WMail Newsletter Essays
Volume VII - Issue #66 - December 2006