| Globally warm enough yet? |
| Tuesday, 07 August 2007 00:00 |
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It had to happen sooner or later. Eventually I’d get around to global warming and it’s effects on me. That is, if you believe all you hea. I like to play outdoors and I love the summer. When it’s nice and warm, with a gentle breeze or still air I can go and get one of my model planes out and fly around. My newest additions to the fleet are park flyers. These are foam aircraft built with very light wing loadings. They fly slow and are very sensitive to turbulence. They are just so perfect for the lazy summer evenings that used to abound. This year of course they haven’t seen the light of day. So it’s pissed down daily. We have new records for rainfall in the summer, and it’s all down to global warming. Just cast your mind back a few thousand years. Can you hear the cries? “The lack of fires is causing global cooling”. “We need to burn more oil.” How were they to know that the ice age was coming and that it wasn’t Neolithic mans fault? What could they have done to prevent it? How did they cause it? It seems to me as a reasonably intelligent member of the local community that we live on a planet, and that planet operates in cycles. We have the cycle of day and night, the cycle of seasons, the annual cycle. Forensic archaeologists (did I just make that up?) tell us that the planet has suffered in the past from both heat and cold. So is it so unreasonable to assume that the planet heats up and warms down every now and then as well (unless you believe in creationism, in which case you’re on a different planet).  I remember from my physics days at school a few choice phrases. Stuff like “for every force there is an equal and opposite reaction”, or that energy is not made, it is simply converted from one form to another. So as my small mind analyses this, I can understand that there is some price to pay for running a central heating boiler, switching on three bars of an electric heater or driving to work every day. Somehow, somewhere we must be paying for all that, but I’m just not sure it’s enough to plunge the planet into disarray, yet. I’d go so far to say that we’re probably just the cancer on the planet, and we may make things just a little bit worse than they might be, but not necessarily be totally responsible for everything, not all the time.From what I can gather, the science of measuring global warming (or that big ice age) is a little immature at the moment. I have no doubt that it will improve in terms of accuracy and continue to gather momentum as time passes, but I can’t help but feel that were all being manipulated by some strange force out there. Now who could possibly gain from all this? I’m taxed to death. The nanny state has more involvement in my life that any other country. More laws are produced than ever before. We live in a surveillance society and have more cameras per citizen than any other country (don’t look at the aircam project; it’s exempt and just for fun), and we are about to bring in a new national ID card system. Well that’s all our problems solved isn’t it. Footnote to employers: In order to help reduce my carbon footprint I am prepared and offering to work from home with immediate effect, right now and forever. That means that you won’t see me, and I wont have to look at you. Add your comment |