It's amazing that so many people believe in this theory of global warming. Half of them haven't lived long enough to have experienced any real weather cycles other than the four seasons, and a bunch of them have never really lived through four REAL seasons. Winter in California or Florida, with their possible inch of snow, is not nearly the same as North Dakota, or Upper Michigan, or Canada, Alaska, etc. Let someone photogenic or famous tell them something is true, and they believe it until some other truth smacks them in the face... like small children who really believe there IS a man in the moon smiling back at them. Global warming is just another symptom of "The sky is falling!" Thirty years ago, the world was terrified of global freezing! They believed it, and it didn't happen.
If global warming is true, and if it's caused by an excess of carbon dioxide emissions from "stuff" - my word - then perhaps we ought to just think about one of the biggest causes of carbon dioxide emissions... and it's not cars. People and animals emit carbon dioxide when they breathe. Plants and trees replace it. I'm not into science, and I'm not going to get technical, nor am I going to toss out a gabillion - my daughter's word - facts to prove or disprove either theory. All I'm going to say is think seriously about all the things you hear, and then go find the facts that disprove it. Google it! There are websites that will give you both sides: read them. You don't have to believe them, but it wouldn't hurt to say to yourself, "What if they're right?" or, "What if they're wrong?"
If there is global warming, we could fix it easily. We could just yank all the military out of Iraq, and let the Iraqis kill themselves, and let the Africans die of AIDS, and let the murderers in the big cities kill all the people, and let the druggies kill themselves. Let Iran and Korea and the rest have their nuclear weapons, let everyone in all the countries all over the world have what they think they should have. We can let all the bad guys out of all the jails and let them have at it. Give everyone guns and then let people do as they will, shooting everyone. Once we have the world population whittled down by half, there won't be any threat of global warming. Of course, taking this just a little further, we also won't have much of a globe left, either. Radiation fields, gaping holes in landscape, dead bodies stinking up the earth because no one really likes burying people or even touching dead bodies.
Forget school, too. It's too expensive, we have to save our money because someone else wants it for themselves. And kids don't like to get up anyway, they'd rather party or watch tv all day. We should all be able to do what we want, right? Because the earth is going to just fizzle out with global warming. Yeah. Right.
Or we can really think logically about all of it. Every year, like calendars tell us, we have spring, summer, fall, and winter. No matter how wet it gets in the spring, summer appears. No matter how hot it gets in the summer, fall arrives. And no matter how much we want fall to stay, winter pushes its way in, eventually yielding to spring. Cycles. Just like nights eventually give way to days, mornings stick around for a few hours and finally give way to afternoons. Days become other days. You get 365 of them, and then start all over. And just when you think you have things under control, they toss in an extra day, and then take it away again. You start to really enjoy a vacation and it ends. Cycles. Everything is cycles. If the world was totally round, and if it rotated in a perfectly formed rotation instead of wobbling - you learn this early in your school life if you didn't already know it from before school - then there would be more dependable cycles, but that wobble really screws things up.
That wobble is like the old fashioned weeble, the child's toy that has the rounded/flat bottom and the rounded/pointy head. Knock it around a bit, and it wobbles and rolls around but it never falls down. If it would just keep wobbling forever, it would wobble in a moderated circle, going out of bounds here, inside the circle there, but it would eventually come back to where it started, sort of. And it would eventually - wobbling forever - go further outside the circle, and further into the circle, and then back around again. I don't know how many times it would have to do it to get back to the original moderated circle, or if it would exactly do that again. It's that butterfly's wings conundrum, screws things up every time. But the weeble would continue to wobble, bothering some people and not bothering others. Those who see it go really far outside the assumed path would say it's never coming back. Those who see it go too far inside would say it's going to crash and burn. And the weeble wobbles... and the weather continues to go through a cycle, warmer some years, colder others...
Actually, it isn't really important that we fix global warming. The really bad effects of global warming - if they happen at all the way the panic-mongers say it will - won't happen for two hundred years. Now, that's a really long time from today. If, by that time, the citizens of the world don't have some other game plan, some other place/way to live, then don't they deserve whatever happens? Fifty years ago, people were certain that we would be able to live on Mars or Venus by now. We didn't make it, but we did build space ships that can get that far and farther. Fifty years from now, where will we be? Underground? Under the ocean? On a different planet? Or will we be worrying about global freezing?
It's all political. And the thing about politics is that you can't just believe it because someone said it. If it sounds true, look for everything you can find to prove it wrong. If it sounds false, look for everything you can to prove it isn't false. And if you look long enough and hard enough, you will find hard, provable facts; maybe you'll be the one to discover those facts! And even then, look as hard as you can to see the other side. And remember that it's really hard to believe in global warming when the oranges are freezing in California. And even if the Arctic Circle is melting, what's happening at the opposite pole?
