Sep 06
9
Environment
Technology is exciting. But ultimately it oversells and underdelivers.
When there is a problem, people say, “Why don't they fix it?” The “they” in most cases is the government. And “they” can't fix it, because they have no idea how. Governments are just elected managers. Sometimes they do a good job. Sometimes they don't.
And ultimately they only have one tool that they can use to create the leverage to fix anything – that is to throw masses of money at the problem. Because the taxation engine that the government manages is quite awesome in terms of the amount of money that it can harness.
But there are some things that money just can't fix regardless of how much the people may believe it can. Money is not going to change the laws of physics. It is not going to change the laws of human nature. And it is not going to change the environment back to what it was.
And our environment is sick. The people who don't believe that global warming is something real have a right to have a view, just like people who believe in one religion or another have a right to a point of view. But beliefs are not necessarily realities. And the degradation of the environment is a reality.
Here are two articles I picked up this morning. One from the New Zealand Herald is about the Brazilian Rain Forest.
Though
they condemned the way that, on average, an area roughly the size of
Wales is cut down each year, this did not seem to endanger the forest
as a whole, much less the planet.
Now
they are changing their minds in the face of increasing evidence that
deforestation is pushing the Amazon and the world to the brink of
disaster.
Dr Antonio Nobre, of
Brazil's National Institute of Amazonian Research, told the floating
symposium of unpublished research which suggests that the felling was
drying up the entire forest and helping to cause the hurricanes that
have been battering the United States and the Caribbean.
The
hot, wet Amazon, he explained, normally evaporates vast amounts of
water, which rise high into the air as if in an invisible chimney,
drawing in wet northeast trade winds, which have picked up moisture
from the Atlantic.
This, in turn,
controls the temperature of the ocean – as the trade winds pick up the
moisture, the warm water left gets saltier and sinks.
Deforestation disrupts the cycle by weakening the Amazonian evaporation which drives the whole process.
One result is that the hot water in the Atlantic stays on the surface and fuels the hurricanes.
Another is that less moisture arrives on the trade winds, intensifying the forest drought.
It may not be what you want to hear but it is what is true.
Here is another from the San Diego Union Tribune. This one is about the wiping out of amphibious species.
“For the first time in modern history, because
of the way that humans are impacting our natural world, we're facing
the extinction of an entire class of organisms,” said Claude Gascon, a
herpetologist with Conservation International. “This is not the
extinction of just a panda or a rhino; it's a whole class of organisms.
Certainly if it were impacting mammals, we would be taking this a lot
more seriously.”
Amphibians are more susceptible to changes in
the environment than other animals because they have permeable skin
that absorbs water and oxygen, and their lives depend on clean, fresh
water. Almost one-third of the 5,743 known amphibian species worldwide
already are threatened by a combination of habitat loss, climate
change, pollution, pesticides, ultraviolet radiation and invasive
species, with up to 122 having become extinct since 1980. But
scientists believe both figures could be underestimates because they
cannot evaluate species quickly enough.
It is not enough to just read about this and bemoan the fact that the weather is changing.
What are you doing about it?
And don't tell me, there isn't anything that you can do. Everyone of us has a voice that can be counted. It is important that we all start making our voices heard.