Last week I bought a small wastebasket. Checking out, it was placed in a bag and when I got home, I threw that bag out in the wastebasket. There’s something wrong with that. It’s like buying a car to get to a gas station to fill the car with gas to go out and buy a car. Are we doing this going green thing right? Here’s my personal primer on the issues.
The Ozone Layer: The ozone layer is quite important to life, just like our skin is important to our bodies. Imagine walking around with no skin. That’s what it would be like with no Ozone layer except that people would be screaming in pain all the time because they have no skin. This alters our lives significantly. For example, you couldn’t hear what the teacher was saying because every student would be screaming, and not because of the standardized testing. Not only would the sun-block industry go bust, but we won’t be able to recognize George Hamilton. Note to people under the age of 40; George Hamilton is not a relative of Alexander Hamilton of Broadway’s Hamilton fame, he’s just a really really tan movie guy.
Ocean warming trends: more than meets the eye?
The average world-wide water temperature has reached a record of 62.6 degrees according to world weather records kept by the National Climatic Data Center. Why? It may be that locally, Miami and Fort Lauderdale beaches are a magnet and the sun and fun centers for tourists and locals alike. They arrive on the shore and stake out their territory on our beaches and swim in our waters. Lately, vacation habits have confirmed what we already know. Budgetary restraints have brought tens, if not hundreds of millions to the world’s beaches for a quick and easy ‘stay-cation’. Day trips have dominated and without a place to stay, they have probably been relieving themselves here, and in the oceans of the world en masse thus, to an extent, raising the temperature of the waters.
Despite pleas to hold their water, bathers are doing what they have done in pools forever. Manatees are the only mammals that have not complained due to their proclivity for warm water. Oceanographers have studied a great number of recent whale squeaks which have been deciphered as “We don’t swim in your toilet, don’t pee in our ocean”.
Fun Facts: People who live in homes with those rare incandescent 100-watt bulbs, can use candles in aluminum cans. They will be saving an amount of energy almost equivalent to driving to a local store for some of those curly light bulbs. It only takes a few hours to turn sand into glass but approximately one million years for a glass bottle to break down in a landfill. A million years from now the inhabitants of the planet will think a Miller Light is what we used for illumination. Some people think like that today.
Don’t litter: When people throw their discards on your trash pile it can really get out of control. They are doing that because they don’t want their neighbors to see what they have thrown out. Mount Trashmore’, a south Florida landfill at a height of almost 150 feet started as a carelessly thrown out gum wrapper back in the 1970’s.
Note: Although many believe the hot air emanating from Washington D.C. may be responsible for a significant uptick in the heat index there, most of it is captured while Congress is in session and used to power recreational balloon flights over the Capitol.
When a politician says, “I’m not a scientist” or “It’s not settled science”, refer to James L. Powell, director of the National Physical Sciences Consortium and a member of the National Science Board under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.
He studied more than 24,000 peer-reviewed papers on global warming. Only five reject the reality of rising temperatures or the fact that human emissions are the cause. “It’s now a ruling paradigm, as much an accepted fact in climate science as plate tectonics is in geology and evolution is in biology,” he told MSNBC. “It’s 99.9% plus.” There was a dip in harmful global emissions in 2020, but since facts are non-starters among some, the rest of us will still have to step up and toss that gum wrapper in the trash.
