The Cost of Climate Change     

     Is climate change real?

     If so, are human activities contributing?

     Well, we know this much is true:

     A hundred thousand daily global flights stitch contrails across our fragile atmosphere now, burning so much jet fuel it runs through pipelines to major airports. A million flights every ten days. 

     Two million plus coal-fired power plants belch their waste gasses, double the number that existed in 2000.

     One point two billion gasoline and diesel vehicles add their exhausts to the noxious mix. Electric vehicles are only making an insignificant dent, and even they depend on coal-fired plants for recharging.

     Fifty thousand huge ships ply the global seas daily with their copious diesel exhausts.

     There are thirty-five hundred oil wells in the Gulf of Mexico alone, each constantly flaring off unrefined natural gas. Thousands of other wells and refineries worldwide add their pollutants.

     Seven point eight billion people inhale oxygen and exhale CO2 constantly while ongoing slash-and-burn agriculture eats deeply into our planet’s lungs.

     This is not conjecture. These are not conspiracy theories. Not political rhetoric. They are unarguable facts, unprecedented to such an extent in all human history.

     More and more scientists agree that it’s madness to pretend all this is not affecting our climate, not inexorably warming it. And there are blatant evidences of creeping overall climate change for all of us to see. Cities like Beijing and New Delhi and Los Angeles are choking on their own smog, creating a litany of sad and expensive health problems. Seas are choking on plastics, polluting as they slowly degrade. Summers everywhere are scorching. There are more frequent and more severe storms. Raging wildfires proliferate. Areas of severe drought are spreading. Crops are failing. Glaciers and icecaps are melting. Sea levels are slowly rising.

     Look at any recent year. The thousands who’ve lost their homes and businesses to vast wildfires in California and Australia and elsewhere, or whose homes and businesses recent severe hurricanes and typhoons have stripped away, as in ravaged Florida, will not be paying taxes anytime soon, while governmental relief and mitigation of these events has been costing the diminishing tax base ever more billions of dollars.

     Logically, obviously, we have only two choices:

     We can bear the cost of adequate climate action now, up front and very soon, creating environmental jobs in the process and improving overall human health and safety worldwide.

     Or we can pay heavily for our inaction later.

Phil

www.philbowie.com

Balloon Wars

     The UFOs that have lately appeared over Alaska and Canada and been shot down by American fighters have revived those tired old fringe speculations about possible visitation by alien creatures—that whole Area 51-with-its-persistent-aura-of-nefarious-secrecy nonsense.

     Let’s think for a minute about the likelihood of such stuff happening.

     From even a relatively short distance away from our planet, let’s say another one of our solar system’s inner group of planets, Mars, we appear as no more than an insignificant faintly bluish speck, just as Mars is no more than a faintly reddish speck from our point of view. From any cosmic perspective farther away, let’s say from the nearest star outside our system, Proxima Centauri, which is 4.3 light years distant (24 thousand billion miles). From there, our entire solar system is but a tiny white spec among trillions of other specs strewn across the Universe in every direction. This means that any alien species would first have to single out our system from that almost unimaginable multitude of specs as somehow extra special, then would have to travel for 4.3 years at the speed of light, which moves at 186,000 miles per second, to get here. But achieving lightspeed is virtually impossible. At some much more likely fraction of lightspeed, the journey would take at least hundreds of our years. This would constitute a stupendous technical achievement, making such a journey intuitively unlikely. It would be further unlikely to think that such a species would accomplish that journey only to then keep it a tantalizing semi-secret from us. Why?

     It is intuitively likely that there is other life in the Universe in other systems, simply because we see the exact same electromagnetic spectrum and the exact same list of chemical elements everywhere we look, and we see a proliferation of other solar systems and their attendant planets everywhere, as well, many in that zone from their suns that allows liquid water.

     Only our arrogance would make us think there is no other sentient life out there. Such life is even logically prolific, given the possibility statistics.

     But would aliens, who would be clearly vastly superior to us in technology, travel some vast distance here, then hang back, perhaps lurking behind Jupiter, and start floating observation balloons in our skies?

     You think what you want.

     I think not.

Phil

www.philbowie.com

 

Remembering my first car

     I bought my first car used for $100 in 1955. It was a 1948 two-tone (black on the bottom, white on the top) Chevy Business Coup with no back seat, intended for use by traveling salespersons, for example. It had a bench seat, a starter button on the floor, and a three-speed manual stick shift. Power was an inline 83-hp six-cylinder engine. It could do 85 or 90 downhill if you had the temerity to push it that hard; I usually did not. Poor-man’s AC consisted of simple swiveling triangular windows just ahead of the side windows; they scooped in enough air to keep the interior quite comfortable. It had roll-up windows and a staticky AM radio. No seat belts or other safety features. No turn signals; we used hand signals back then, which worked fine except in the rain. Braking was four-wheel drums and sometimes iffy if they got hot in the hilly country of the western Massachusetts Berkshires. I did all the maintenance on it myself. I loved it and wish I still had it.

     I worked part-time then by myself manning a two-pump gas station in my home village of Williamsburg doing tune-ups, tire repairs, oil changes, and grease jobs (most cars had many under body grease fittings). I pumped the gas, checked the oil, and cleaned the windshield of every customer’s vehicle. With a car parked over the grease pit for an oil change, two or three tire repairs stacked up, and several vehicles awaiting fuel, it could get busy, but I liked that job as much as any I’ve ever had since.

     Chevy vehicles, of course, have endured over the decades. Other makes of American vehicles that were available then but did not endure and have faded into history included:

Chrysler

Plymouth

Hudson

Pontiac

Kaiser

Fraser

Studebaker

Packard

Tucker

DeSoto

Willis

LaSalle

Mercury

Crossley

Nash

Oldsmobile

Checkers (mostly taxicabs)

     Cars of that era often had manual transmissions, whitewall tires that gave an extra touch of class but were hard to keep clean, exterior visors over simple flat two-piece windshields, rear fender skirts that were a pain to remove for checking pressure or tire changing (especially in the winter), liberal use of chrome, and tough steel bodies you could sit or stand on, but which nevertheless sadly turned to lace along the fender bottoms and rocker panels after a few years of exposure to the heavily salted winter roads of the northlands.

     Our rides have certainly improved over the decades in both comfort and safety. Buyers often do not even bother to look beneath the hoods before purchasing at prices that to me seem astronomical; that was the first thing we did in days of yore, and most of us well knew every facet of how cars worked.

     I remember those simpler times fondly, but not without regrets. If two of the kids in my small-town high school, Linda Sanderson and Mack Heath, had had a padded dash, seat belts, and air bags in their car while traveling a country road in the darkness, they would likely have survived hitting a bridge abutment. Their memorial photos are in my 1956 graduation book.

     I think of them often.

Phil

www.philbowie.com