The Idle Mind: Global Warming, Climate Change, Zombie Apocalypse …

We are not making any kind of equivalency with the above although extraterrestrial aliens will have a confusing view. We’ve already broadcast quite a bit of information into outer space since the arrival of television and the internet so astronomers and sociology eavesdroppers aboard a passing extraterrestrial space ship will have ample data on which to base a decision to stop by and visit or move on. We can only speculate on their thought process although that would be like the Incas speculating on what Francisco Pizarro had in mind in 1532, or how the natives of Cebu Island pondered Ferdinand Magellan’s intentions in 1521.

Let’s see. Counting every broadcast from the networks, Facebook and blogs, speeches by Leonardo Dicaprio, and yes, Mr. Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth”, earth does not present a pretty picture. The space alien commander will have to evaluate whether the stopover is worth it. They’ve traveled many trillion miles with several decades of intermittent hibernation in between so a stopover is questionable if most of Manhattan will be ravaged by surging sea water as the polar ice caps will be no more … by the end of this century. Additionally, there are other perils. They’ve catalogued 452 Zombie movies – a good indicator of our deepest fears on top of climate change. The space commander must think, “Mmm … Global warming, climate change, zombie apocalypse”. Before I forget, earth’s dominant super power just had an election and about half the electorate expressed fear that the end is near and everyone is doomed. Immediately demonstrations on the street call for non-recognition of the newly elected leader by those who should either have been in school or working but chose to be unproductive instead, disruptive and even destructive in places where other people try to earn a living. Not a pretty picture indeed. Stephen Hawking’s concern notwithstanding, we may not have to worry about an alien visitation after all.

Speaking of worry, I will have to reprint here a quote on an 8-1/2 by 11 bond paper taped to the inside of the driver side window of the tour bus we were on just a month ago. It said, “Remember that half of the things we worry about never happen and the other half will happen anyway, so why worry?”

We had a Frenchman for a driver nicknamed “Frenchy” (what else) driving a huge bus that took us on a 10-day tour of U.S. National Parks that cover the area in and around Yellowstone National Park. My wife and I have this bucket list to tour as many National Parks as we can (this is our third, so far), keeping our tourist dollars here first before spending any in foreign places. “Frenchy” told me when I asked about the sign, in his still unmistakable French accent, “That’s to remind me personally because I like to deal with each day one day at a time but it is also a useful reminder for the Tour Director to frame her schedule day-to-day and to you the paying passengers who need to just focus on enjoying the trip and the vacation”.

Enjoyed we did although this was late in the year to be in Yellowstone, the Grand Teton, the Mammoth Springs, Jackson Hole, etc. There are many plus sides to that time of the year. The summer crowd is gone, the kids are back at school and there were not too many competing buses and tourists, ergo, we were catching less people in the background in countless photos we took. But, it snowed in the mountains and as evening fell, the cold stood in the way of walking under the moonlight or star gazing. But it is also at the time of the year when one gets to stay at the hotel right in front of Old Faithful. A reservation that needs to be secured two years in advance, grabbed mostly by tour operators, I’m almost certain. It was an interesting time too when hotels were closing for the season literally in 2-3 days of our checkout dates. That was how close we picked the tour dates. We asked our waitress at dinner what she was going to do when the hotel closed. She was going to Vietnam to do volunteer mission work in and around that part of Asia; a smart young woman to pick a warmer climate to spend the winter.

I mention the U.S. National Parks because there are no better examples to showcase America’s genuine desires to preserve, protect and promote its natural wonders. They are probably one of the few examples where politics and politicians succeeded to do the right thing for the environment without over reach. For the most part bipartisanship worked except on a couple of occasions when two Presidential acts may have been influenced by environmentalist supporters to proclaim as National Monuments a couple of places to preempt exploration for coal or oil and on one occasion a marine sanctuary impacting the local fishing industry.

The other thing I learned from the National Parks is the history of the people who had lived there long before it was called America. We call these people Native Americans. For thousands of years they lived, survived and flourished in the environment that kept changing. In reality they and all others around the world for eons survived through adaptation in the ever changing climate.

Deemed by one side as the number one problem the world faces, even proclaimed by the current U.S. administration as an existential threat, we inevitably keep discussing climate change to no end. “We”, however, is a mere fraction of the general population because this issue does not resonate much with the majority of the people here or anywhere around the world. These discussions play out at the rarefied air of politics and a particular social rung that is so high up there to be discerned or understood by those at the bottom of the sociological ladder. It is fought between the learned elites, college professors, environmentalists from one side and business interests, pragmatists, special interests and lobbyists on the other. The elites label those who oppose them as ignorant climate change deniers while the latter call out the former as engaging in callous hypocrisy. Labels and name calling only succeed in widening the ideological chasm without furthering each other’s arguments on merit.

A most recent but hardly covered news item highlights the argument by those who rile at the hypocrisy of climate change proponents.

From CNN on 11/14/2016: “Secretary of State John Kerry winged his way Monday from New Zealand to the Middle East on the next leg of what may be his longest trip yet, a journey during which America’s top diplomat will account for roughly 16.5 tons of carbon dioxide emissions.

That’s more or less the amount of CO2 – one of the key “greenhouse gases” blamed for global warming – produced by the average American in a full year, according to World Bank data.

Climate change features prominently on Kerry’s itinerary on his current trip, an eight-day haul from Washington to New Zealand to Antarctica – where he became the highest-ranking U.S. official to visit – and on to two Arab Gulf states and then Morocco before winging to Peru and then back home.”

That might seem an unfair example but we should keep in mind that added to that are the jet-setting habits of celebrities and Al Gore as they traverse the globe in CO2 emitting flying carpets entertaining and espousing the peril of climate change.

From the NY Daily News:

“A whopping 300,000 tons of carbon dioxide will be churned out during the two-week climate change summit that began Monday in Paris.

President Obama’s flight to the City of Lights emitted roughly 189 tons of carbon alone, burning 19,275 gallons of jet fuel, reports the Daily Caller.

His entire trip will send more carbon dioxide into the air than the combined emissions from 31 U.S. homes over the span of a year.”

The point here is that if they want support to wean the world from fossil fuel emission they must first begin to remove the appearance of the profligate use of fossil fuel. That conference, for example, could have been done with electronic media linking various locations from all over the world as one global tele-conference - if they are truly serious about their cause. Let us not forget the number of SUVs and support vehicles that attended to the incoming and outgoing conferees. Many of those vehicles were weighted down with so much bullet-proof armor plating that their mileage were in single digits in traffic and perhaps 10-12 miles per gallon at best. Climate change proponents must either walk the talk or it is just all talk or perhaps they do not really believe in their argument.

Climate change is truly an oxymoron because by its very nature climate does change. What it gets down to is what should be believed in terms of how bad the change is, how immediate and what is our capability to cope. First of all the so called climate change deniers actually believe that climate does change but, as it does, we as a species have the ability to cope through reasonable and pragmatic solutions as opposed to knee-jerk reactions and over reach to the point of actually disrupting people’s livelihood, the economy in general and the individual’s way of life in particular. We are being forced by excessive regulation and academic bullying over a perceived and immediate future catastrophe that is belied by earth’s very, very long history.

Let us put this in perspective. Imagine the present – today - to be the tip of the arrow of time. What we worry beyond that tip is a sliver of time in decades, whereas, if we must look back to a very long period of earth’s history, we see geological evidence that climate had changed countless times and in many instances with unbelievable severity, but guess what … organisms including humanity survived. Since the first humans walked upright two hundred thousand years ago there had been several ice ages and inter glacial events in between when earth was caught between severe cold periods and extreme warming for thousands of years at a time. Yet, here we are worrying about what will happen in a couple of decades.

At a time of more advanced technology, we as a species should be well equipped to deal with and adapt to the changing climate. Our ancestors with very little knowledge and technology made do with what they had amidst erupting volcanoes, changing jet stream patterns, severe solar storms, reversing magnetic poles, sea level rising and receding due to polar ice cap variations. Speaking of erupting volcanoes, Yellowstone National Park sits on top of a super volcano that had erupted three times in the past every 640,000 years or so. Its last eruption was 640,000 years ago! Well known eruptions, such as, Mt. Pinatubo and Krakatoa and Mt. St. Helens in recent recorded history had produced so much pollution and greenhouse gases to exceed a year’s worth of vehicular emissions around the world today. Yet their three combined explosions would be a wimpy fire cracker to Yellowstone’s 500 pound bomb. Earth organisms had endured and survived much more severe emissions events than what we face today where we have already-in-place managed regulations.

The London smog during the early years of the industrial revolution provided the first impetus towards understanding and eventually dealing with pollution but the production setbacks did not hinder continued economic growth because the regulations put in place were not anywhere near the stifling limits that today’s environmentalists propose. China is called out by much of the world as the number one polluter but they’re learning. Today in Dalian Peninsula in Northeastern China is the world’s largest battery capacity (in buildings over acres of land) for storing electric energy from solar and wind power. Smog is known to be responsible for thousands of premature deaths in China and India but the U.S. that has a hundred-fold better pollution management is the target by its own local activists – celebrities, unbridled bureaucrats and politicians - (mainly because freedom of speech here allows for the loudest voices to be heard).

There will be no repeat of the London smog of the 1800s but China and India must do their share to reduce their emissions. However, countries like the U.S. and much of Western Europe, Japan and a few others who have so far been diligent in coming up with reasonable measures such as cleaner gasoline, clean-burning diesel engines, cleaner processes for burning coal, exploration and production of natural gas, robust recycling practices, protecting their forests and water resources, etc. must be allowed to maintain their economies and way of life free of punishing and extreme regulations that go beyond what is reasonable and pragmatic. What initiatives these countries have come up with need to be recognized and perhaps in some cases embraced. Oppressive and politically motivated actions do not contribute much to the general public welfare other than to provide livelihood and so much power to bureaucrats and regulators that are not without financial costs to the taxpayer.

Much of the efforts and costs proposed by climate change proponents should be focused on spending for infrastructures in countries (mostly poor) that are unable to provide the necessary expenditure. These countries are in need of cleaner water, better conservation and preservation of their natural resources, but not least of all is the proper education on taking care of and expanding their forested lands. Let us note that plants and trees are the single most important consumers of carbon and other related air-borne chemicals. Tropical and sub-tropical countries in Asia and South America suffer the most from severe deforestation. Millions of acres of forested areas are now bare. Devastating flood and other side effects follow but what escapes most of the attention is the fact that for every tree, every acre of plant habitat lost results in the loss of the best recycler of carbon in the atmosphere. We share a good part of our DNA with plants and they were here first whether you consult geological records or refer to the Biblical chronology. Plants were created first. We share 50% of our DNA even with the most widely consumed plant staple – the banana.

I am of the opinion that plants around the world may yet be our greatest ally in combating climate change. Ecology begins and ends with them, yet they have no voice in the debate. Think carefully – lush jungles, rain forests and green acres of land and undersea forests of kelp, algae around the globe are hosts to countless organisms from plankton to mammals, prey and predators, etc. Money spent on conserving and promoting plant life is the better investment over arguments, debates, expenditures, over regulation and stalemated fights over climate change.

Kevin Kostner commissioned these bronze sculptures depicting a bison jump. It's been a technique that began 12,000 years ago until the mid 1500. Apparently before horses and bow and arrow the young and the brave of the tribes would cause some of the bison off the cliff or ravine killing a number of them but they were careful to kill just enough for the tribe to live off through the winter. The Native Americans, we learned, used every bit of the bison (from tail to snout; from hooves to their horns). The American Bison numbered in the millions (20 to 30 million in one estimate). Their numbers by the late 19th century were whittled down to a mere 1,091 - regrettably not in the hands of the Native Americans but by hunters and settlers from the New World. Conservation has brought the numbers up to 500,000 in the latest survey. The country eventually realized the grave mistake and responded in the nick of time to stop what could have been a horrific extinction of a species in modern times. Since then the U.S. began an active conservation and preservation efforts unmatched anywhere else.

A view from the bus of an early October snow at the National Park.

Bison is now a common sight throughout the Park.

I am not a naturalist but I must say this elk displays a classic adaptive response. It and many of its kind would come down to the populated areas as the cold weather begins because places such as around our hotel were a safe haven away from predators and hunters and there was plenty of vegetation. There were over three dozens like this one all over the area totally oblivious to people and vehicles.

The yellow tint along the mountainsides are how the name Yellowstone came about. It is from sulfur brought up by several massive upheavals throughout history from a super volcano beneath.

The Grand Teton mountain range.

River rafting on the Snake River

While Old Faithful is the famous geyser there are many more around the Park, including numerous ones at Mammoth Springs.

"Frenchy" the tour bus French driver who provided the quote mentioned earlier posed with my wife next to the huge tour bus he drove for 10 days.

Walking the Talk:

Climate change, whether man-caused or otherwise will take a very long time to manifest and could linger for a very long time as geological evidence had proven. So, like countless folks who recognize the whole idea, I and many like me and many of my friends are planting and propagating tropical plants in our back yards. Tropical papaya and guava trees are doing very well, granted Texas is not exactly Idaho or North Dakota. However, keep in mind that when dinosaurs roamed North America the whole region was not only Tropical but perhaps even sub Tropical. We just harvested papaya in November from these trees that survived last year's winter.