C’thulu Told Me To Recycle My Plastics
Everyone should be very familiar with “global warming”, well I am old enough to remember “global cooling”. In all of my 41 years on this planet, I have been bombarded by fears from all angles. From the cold war, I remember having nuclear bomb drills and having to hide under my desk with all the other small children. It gave me nightmares for years that the world was about to be destroyed in a fiery blast from some communist threat that wanted nothing less than to destroy my simple American life. All the way to today when I read my science articles and the biggest threat is from Elon Musk saying that we have to stop working on Artificial Intelligence now before its too late. According to some, Skynet is about to go live and enslave mankind for all of eternity.
Today, were talking about the fear of global warming or better yet, climate change. According to NASAs website on the subject. Global warming is the increase in Earth’s average surface temperature due to rising levels of greenhouse gases. Climate change on the other hand is the long-term change in the Earth’s climate, or of a region on Earth (Dunbar n.d.). There is a HUGE difference in these to definitions. The first states specifically that the world is getting warmer because of human manipulations, the latter testifies to a natural constant that will happen as the Earth itself changes. I found this nifty chart in a reputable site that shows the past 2000 years, which would constitute GW. One would have to go back much much farther to consider the effects of CC.
The thing is, that all these fears have one thing in common; there is nothing I can do about it. The US government was making nukes along with the Russians, and Elon Musk himself owns an AI company called Open AI where they are pursuing the technology too. Meanwhile, I just keep on keeping on waiting for the next news feed that will give me my next nightmare. Its all quite ridiculous.
Don’t get me wrong, I will sit back and golf clap at your feeble efforts to control the complexities of this global spanning socio-economic industrialized machine that spews out the evil toxic fumes which will evidently one day consume us all, I may even pat you on the back and tell you what a good person you are, perhaps even take a moment of introspection and think, “Gee, I should be doing something like that.” But I won’t, and neither will the coal industry here in the US, or the steel plants in China, or the various textile plants in India. Once again, there is nothing you can do except feel good about yourself knowing you tried to make a change.
I rest easy at night, at least on this subject, knowing that there actually is one thing that will save us all. That is the advancement of science and technology. If we took all the money that is frivolously spent trying to “save the planet” and put it into actual research that can save the planet, that is a change that I could make and support.
So, Is it hot or is it cold? What about the poor sea otters that will all go extinct? Do you care? Well if you do then your a better person than I am, because I really don’t. I drive a hybrid because its cheaper than buying gas all the time. I don't recycle, leave my lights on when I'm not in the room, and I flush my toilet every single time that I take a wiz, sometimes twice (I like asparagus). What I am trying to say is that I spend as little time as possible contemplating global climate change because either way, cold or hot or just right, were all still screwed. If its not the nukes or the robot overlords or an asteroid or the great slumbering C’thulhu then it might just be the temperature.
Dunbar, B. (n.d.). What's in a Name? Global Warming vs. Climate Change. Retrieved August 23, 2017, from https://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/climate_by_any_other_name.html
Loehle, C. 2007. A 2000-year global temperature reconstruction based on non-tree ring proxies. Energy and Environment, 18, 1049-1058.