DIFFERENT STROKES

Nan, in her blog All the Good Names Were Taken wrote about the gloom that accompanies the grey, bleak days of winter.

I love these grey days, when there is snow on the ground, there is no color and the world appears in shades of grey, and the wind is blowing creating a wind chill that makes you want to stay inside.  This is the type of day to set no expectations, but to do whatever feels good in the moment.   It is a day for reading, or watching TV, or sleeping, or cooking, or drinking wine, having sex, taking a nap; or all of the above.    On these days nature rules, and we can stay by the fire and let nature have her way. 

Another thing I like about these days is I don’t have to see people.   I am like the badger in Wind and the Willows: “I hate company.”    Actually, I can tolerate company at short intervals; but I always feel other people around too long are and intrusion.     

 I actually don’t mind being alone.   There are times I have relished being alone in the north woods in the winter time.   I have often hunted alone, camped alone and fished alone – always dreading the encroachment of other humans on my privacy.   Those days of chosen isolation are gone now that I am married, and that is a small thing to give up for the love of a woman.  My wife and I have never been separated more than a few days in thirty-five years.  However, we both hate company and value the alone time we spend together.

And what better alone time than a grey mousy day.

the Ol'Buzzard

IT HAS BEEN A WEIRD WINTER HERE IN MAINE

Here in Western Maine we have had a warm December, a cold but snow-less January, a February with snow storms two to three time a week and finally a March with temps fluctuating from forty to zero with a constant, unrelenting wind blowing twenty and gusting up to fifty miles-per-hour some days.

Now, unlike the Republican Congress, I am smart enough to know you can’t call climate change from a daily weather phenomenon at some particular location on a particular day.   Local weather and world climate are two different assessments. 

In my seventy-plus years I have seen years of high snow and low snow; high temperatures and low temperatures, of drought and flood.  Variations in weather conditions from year to year is a normal phenomenon.

The climate of the earth constantly changes, and has done so since the formation of the earth and solar system.   Most climate changes occur over thousands of years; but occasionally a catastrophic climate change has occurs over a short period due to volcano eruptions or asteroid collisions.

The thing we are experiencing now is rapid catastrophic climate change caused by the depletion of the ozone layer due to increased levels of CO-2 and other man made substances that have been pumped into the atmosphere.

Our present dilemma is caused by pollution, but, of course, the root cause is population increase.   About 1918 the world population topped one billion; by 1945 two billion; by 1975 we crested four billion people; by 2000 we were over six billion; and presently we have over seven billion people population the earth.  (We have increased the world’s population over seven hundred percent in less than one hundred years)

With the population increases comes an increase demand for food, water, timber, fuel, electricity, automobiles etc. which results in more factories and power plants with the corresponding increase in pollution – and a corresponding increase in waste byproducts.

  

Ninety-six percent of the world’s climate scientists confirm that we have passed the point of no return and that man-made pollution of the atmosphere (earth and water) have finally pushed the earth beyond recovery, and that rapid warming of the earth resulting in accelerated melting of polar ice caps is causing irreversible rapid change to our climate – the optimum word being rapid change.

The other four percent of scientist that deny climate change, claiming it is a natural fluctuation, are either graduates of Gerry Falwell University, or are southern fundamentalist Christians with suspect science credentials, still looking to justify that the world is six millions old and dinosaurs and man existed at the same time.

We can see this change, and we can adjust to it; but, the change is real, it is happening now, and this is only the beginning.

the Ol'Buzzard