Pulled this from the local newspaper over a month ago and forgot about it. He writes opinions for the Stillwater News Press paper and , I think, is really good at capturing the thoughts necessary to convey his point. Do a search here and read some of his other posts: Ott Johnson
I too have a problem with the limited amount of data we are now using for issues about environment and Global activities… the earth is measured in billions of years for age. I also remember being taught that to define anything we need multiple data points and one data point will not define a direction. But, that said we are basing current earth changes on human life times. 70 years against the billions of years of the earth do not define any more than one data point… you can’t extrapolate it into multiple points no matter how you try but yet we are defining Global warming, and various other long term events on that one data point.
I often have to make the point that “I am an environmentalist” in that I believe we need to find ways to “co-exist” on the earth as it evolves, but that those who are labeled “Evironmentalists are really Preservationist” and they don’t want any OTHER human to distrube or change things… although those same persons won’t give up their cars, or electricity, or new devices for comfort, but push that everyone else must… WD0AJG – read on as Ott puts things in a much better perspective than I can.
We are riding through space on a giant ball. We call it earth. For some eons, back when it was just another ball of hot lava flying through space, it became trapped from the gravitational pull of surrounding masses, including the sun and a host of other space bodies, each having its gravitational pull on surrounding objects.
Stuck in its orbit around the sun with a moon stuck in an orbit around the earth, it began cooling due to its reduced
speed, among other factors. As any mass cools, it develops cracks and depressions along with a rigid crust that always has some movement as cooling continues under the crust, constantly changing its shape. In effect, this ball we are riding through space has a cool exterior, hot lava core and constant movements primarily from the lava movements that sometimes finds its way to the surface as volcanoes.
Most common in the ever cooling and movement of the earth are earthquakes. As we know, most materials expand when heated. Likewise they shrink when cooling. The rocks formed by the cooling of the earth, with other forces altering most of them, created a hard, thick crust on the exterior. As more lava cools, the movement and shrinkage forces lava to the surface through existing weak areas of the earths crust reviving old volcanoes or faults (cracks) in the surface crust.
It’s a rather long story when all the details we know about are tied together.
At one time glaciers extended southward to the junction of the Ohio-Mississippi Rivers. Then the ice retreated back to Canada. So there was global cooling followed by global warming. Fortunately, there were no environmentalists around to neither play the blame game nor spend the peoples’ hard-earned money in an effort to slow or stop natures’ evolvement.
Still, some of the strangest theories keep popping up that are normally without merit but often with humor, as with the theory of exploding sandstone into shale, then draining natural gas from the shale!
However, finally we know for certain that we have global warming. There is no question about it. Three of our most knowledgable scientists on this subject; namely President Obama, past Vice President Al Gore, and Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe have agreed and stated that global warming is a fact! End of argument! Case closed?
So, apparently the earth’s environment was near perfect until homo sapiens appeared and began to populate the thing. After all of those years, perhaps a few million of constant population growth, everything moved along very well until about year 1975. Blap! The limit was reached. The world was falling apart. However, all would be saved through the advent of the Environmental Protection Agency. Our savior had arrived! So, naturally, all is well that ends well.
Still, I often wonder who determined the earth’s temperature and air quality was just fine prior to 1975, before the advent of environmentalists that created a need for another federal agency?
Could this quasi-science be a contributing factor in causing some older men to be a bit grumpy?
Ott Johnson is a Stillwater freelance writer.