READ EUGENE ROBISON'S POST ON CLIMATE CHANGE.

 

About as definitive as anything I have found to portend that the climate is changing.

CLIMATE CHANGE

the Ol'Buzzard

JANUARY FIRST 2019: TEN DAYS INTO THE NEW YEAR

CRAZY WEATHER HERE IN MAINE

 Today we have snow followed by rain, followed by temps in the single numbers.  We used to be proud of our winter weather in the western Maine mountains.  I have seen snow so deep that if you stepped off your snowshoes you would sink up to your chest; and February always had two weeks of below zero temperatures.   Real Mainers didn’t complain.

 

However, in the last few decades climate change is changing Maine.  The last three summers have been the hottest in recorded Maine history.    My wife and I lived in the Main woods in the early eighties for four years, in farmhouse with no electricity, water or plumbing.  We planted a garden, carried water from the stream behind our house, bathed in the stream, I cut firewood from the swamp in front of the house, we had a German Shepherd; and never once in those four years did we have, or know of a tick.    Now you can’t step outside without tucking your pants into your socks and spraying your ankles because the ticks are so bad – deer are covered with them, moose are covered with them, and the winter doesn’t kill them.

The local news reported that Maine lobster men are concerned because the increased ocean water temperature off our coast is driving the lobsters farther north.

This is the new norm and we have to live in it.  It is what it is.

 

Man is responsible for climate change.  We are the most destructive life form on this earth.  You can have your own opinions, but not your own facts.

Which brings me to one of my pet peeves:
 In the calendar that was modified by the Catholic Church to coincide with Christian holidays, today is January 1^st - New-year’s day. 

Yet, the solar New-year began on December 21 – a far less arbitrary date to begin a calendar.

the Ol'Buzzard

  

IT IS NOT ABOUT US

I am living in a kaleidoscope of color – it’s breath taking.  The color peaked two days ago then yesterday it rained and today the wind is stripping the trees.  Outside there is a carpet of copper dotted with gold and red; the trees are in their final yellow and gold dispersed with orange and vermilion, and it is raining gold and yellow and red as the trees give up their leaves.

While in the southeast death rode swinging his scythe of destruction and leaving in his wake ruin and sorrow. 

Is there a lesson to be learned from this?   Only if we think everything is about us. 

We are only observers on this ship earth that charts its own course; and when we have past, the ship will move on without us in a new evolutionary winding – or not.   Perhaps it will be content to be a ghost ship looking at the past epoch as a failure.

the Ol’Buzzard

FOUR HURRICANES IN TWENTY-SIX DAYS

Four hurricanes of a category three our higher have been recorded since Harvey hit the coast of Texas twenty-six days ago.   This is not an all-time record, but it is among the records. 

According to Bob Henson, a meteorologist for Weather Underground, a forecasting service, “We are running about twice the pace of a typical season.”    Henson notes, “Ten of the fifteen most active hurricane seasons since antebellum America have occurred in the past two decades.”

It is not possible to trace any of these hurricanes to a particular incident of climate change; but, it is an accepted scientific conclusion that man made climate change, caused by the uncontrolled dumping of carbon into our atmosphere, will result in more frequent hurricanes and more violent hurricanes.  

'The good thing about science is that it is true, whether or not you believe in it."   Neil deGrasse Tyson

As ice caps melt sea levels will rise and the salinity of the ocean waters will change.   As seas become diluted oceans currents will shift causing a change in climatic zones.   Warmer oceans, the results of greenhouse effect, will spawn more frequent and more violent storms.

All of this is already happening. 

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