Earth Day's bogus boogey-man

Gentle Readers,

For the Earth Day weekend my 12" inch b&w TV perched atop the fridge kept me company while I mopped on Saturday. At that particular time it belched forth leftist environmental propaganda about the dire consequences related to the planet's latest menace du jour Global Warming. Narrator Alan Alda droned on about such bugaboos as the rise of ocean temperatures and the melting of glaciers "as big as Rhode Island". Why do they always trot out Rhode Island for geographic comparisons? Big fucking deal. No glacier with any least bit of pride would want to be compared with such a dingy & diminutive entity. Now give me a landscape feature at least as large as San Bernardino County---now that will grab my attention. "A dense cloud of locusts as large as San Bernardino County is currently devouring people and livestock west of Liberal, Kansas. The Watch has now been upgraded to a Warning until 10:00 Monday." I'd be impressed with that. Anyway Alda persisted with how these changes in the atmosphere are: a) caused by humans and b) is something that is bad and could cause our ultimate demise. Nothing could be more preposterous for a human to postulate, as there is no way to know either of these facts with any certainty. Our limited understanding of the dynamics at work concerning a subject as daunting as the workings of the earth can be amply displayed by how weather is predicted by the experts who make the public forecasts each day. They don't do all that great (about 40% accuracy) and it's not because they are dumb, it's because the subject matter is so complex. It is not easy to grasp the intricacies of such a vast and overwhelming force as the atmosphere of a planet. Having said that, I'd like to take on both suppositions, that we are causing global warming and that it is bad for us, and look at it in a different light. That's what I'm here for.

What we do know with some certainty is that we are emerging from a recent ice age. There are many indications we may well drift back into another one, based on preliminary findings obtained from Antarctic ice core samples. What if I was to say that our ability as creatures to burrow into the ground and extract carbon (coal, petroleum, natural gas, peat and tar sands) and by introducing it into the atmosphere we are benefiting plants, which thrive on carbon and which they in turn exhale as oxygen?

What if I were to propose that burning fossil fuels (petrified sunshine) is not only a good thing to do but is a benefit to our continued existence. Yes there is more carbon in the atmosphere since the 19th-century but there is also a whole lot more oxygen too. Plants are definitely thriving in the richer atmospheric mixture created by human combustion, volcanoes, insect methane and cattle farts. We breath thicker air than two centuries ago for a variety of reasons which I would neither categorize as good or bad but just what is. Can there be such a thing in the post-modernist perspective? Can a condition exist that does not refract a political consequence? A condition that does not require a government solution through regulatory control? The Kyoto Treaty makes me laugh at the comic hubris of humans who think they know what makes a planet tick and can legislate accordingly.

I want to know why environmentalists propagate as fact that it is a bad thing if the planet warms up. Is it worse than if it gets frigidly cold? Under what form of scientific reasoning is global warming being touted as a threat? What are the dire conditions that this supposed ecological cataract would bring about? I mean if it got warmer there would be less need to heat places like Finland and North Dakota every winter, spring, summer and fall. Crops could be potentially grown in new places. New York and LA might be underwater------so big deal. The whole concept just doesn't contain a credible amount of fear inducing doom for me. Where is the concrete evidence that global warming is a looming disaster? Do scientists who believe in it really have the slightest clue about what will happen in the future? I seriously doubt it.

No friends, I'm not scared of this currently fashionable environmental boogey-man called global warming. I know a tame little runt when I see one. It's just another propaganda myth that has been created to encourage more central government control over every aspect of people's private affairs. The real wreakers of death and destruction in our midst---central governments are what I'm afraid of. I don't know about you but I'm way more scared of George W and Dick Cheney than I am of the atmosphere any day of the week.

A new blogger emerges

I didn't know much about blogging until my friend Dave in Denver sent me a link to his new site a few months back and I put it on my favorites list. I check in from time to time and think that he raises many good points about issues that are important to me, but receives back a lot of juvenile nonsense and foul sexual humor from his immature friends. I'm hoping I'll have better luck than Dave in the quality of responses I might get from you my fellow bloggers.

I'm not sure what this blog will discuss or accomplish but wanted to throw my hat in the ring and see what might happen.

Beamis was my hillbilly name from way back in the day when all respectable Zion field rangers at the Oak Creek Dorm possessed such a moniker. They had their first re-union this year and plan a second for Las Vegas next year. The photo is of me playing a stringed instrument during a recent moment of treasured leisure.

Future blogs may be about travel, nuclear testing, the war in Iraq, geological discoveries, funny situations or how much more beautiful some women keep getting the longer you look at them.

The title of the blog is a line from an old Dylan song I loved as a kid:

Buckets of rain
Buckets of tears
Got all these buckets comin' out of my ears.

I like buckets.