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Kenley, I really appreciated this.

Kenley, thank you for this reminder to see the whole of Life from a spiritual perspective...

The transience of the phenomena we call life is fleeting. From the epochal geological and
evolutionary changes that have occurred episodically after major events such as meteor stikes upon earth which caused significant enviornmental changes on earth such as the event that occurred approximately 65 million years ago that led to the catastrophic ( from the standpoint of the many species that went extinct soon thereafter ). Ironically , from a mammalian and then ultimately a human species standpoint this was actually fortuitus, in the sense that our early mammalian forebearers were uniquely able to survive those events while many species that were predators or competitors perished leaving an enviornmental niche in which mammals were able to thrive and evolve. Opportunity, if you will presents itself curious and unanticipated ways.
So does the obverse. Humans' benifiting ( if we allow ourselves a bit of anthropomorphism and conjecture about there being a sense of directionality of development ) what were a series of propitious events have evolved to a level that entails the capacity for consciousness, mind , self awareness empathy and culture while also developing the cognitive capacity for science and technology for understanding, mediating and impacting the natural world for " good " or " ill " for ourselves, other species and the earth itself. We are all one.
So, the dilemma presents itself. Various religious metaphors and cultural-historical -mythologial archetypes have resonance. Greek tragedy with the beckoning of the chorus, original sin - being cast from the garden, the notion of the " way" and the inchoate attempts to find the way - or straying from the way,; and the paradox of all suffering beginning with desire.
Do our seemingly unique qualities and capacities as a species give us the the ability to
create a metphorical and at times in a literal heaven and somewhat impending self created, self imposed hell in a fashion as depicted by William Blake. Is is it witin our will to sustain or do our excessive wants betray our true human needs in a manner that exceeds our grasp ?

George Bailey

Here is a really good book everybody should read:

http://www.amazon.com/Skys-Not-Falling-Global-Warming/dp/0976726947

B.Cox - As a librarian, I would never discourage someone from reading a book. In fact, I often try and read the point of view of those I may not agree with (I've even read Ann Coulter!).

When working with students, I encourage them to explore the background and credentials of authors in order to help frame the discussion. My best example of this is a Professor at Northwestern who has published articles that say the holocaust never happened; but with a little research we find he is a professor of electrical engineering. The credentials don't match.

The author of The Sky's Not Falling, Miss Holly Fretwell, is an example of this. She is a natural resources policy expert, adjunct professor of economics at Montana State University and research fellow at PERC--The Property and Environment Research Center. According to their financials, PERC has largely been funded by ExxonMobil.

Please read the book, but know who is writing the materials. Most of the scholarly research on global warming has concluded that we are having a negative impact on the earth - we simply can't add 3.5 billion people to the planet in last 50 years and expect anything different.

It's sad to me that a segment of our society has the mindset that man is the evil element on the planet. Those of use who see humanity as an asset to the future and man as beautiful part of creation, he has the intellect to unlock the secrets of our world and the ability to apprietiate it. I'm glad that my kids will grow up enjoying our still wonderful world and knowing that they are an asset to the world.

B. Cox - I apologize if I implied we were not an asset to the planet; this was not my intention and I am not sure what I said caused you to think this (perhaps you can clarify?). The lion will be a lion. The tree will be a tree. The human can think and solve problems where the lion and the tree cannot. It is because we are an asset that we can take care of this earth, give what we can, and take what we need. We have a huge responsibility as one of the higher order animals sharing the planet with animals, plants, and minerals.

Kenley,

Don't be surprised by Brian's comment. Of course you didn't say man is evil or anything of the kind. But his is a tactic (familiar to me from other blogs) of those who object to people who stand up for the welfare of the non-human contingent on this planet. You right away get blasted, very aggressively, for being anti-human, and however earnestly you protest, you won't be able to shake those people out of that mindset. (Not that you shouldn't try anyway -- who knows, maybe a miracle will occur in Brian's case.)

[I apologize if I implied we were not an asset to the planet; this was not my intention and I am not sure what I said caused you to think this (perhaps you can clarify?).]
Kenley,
Here are the things you said that caused me to make my comments:

(If our modern civilization is destroyed, it also follows the law of impermanence. If our human race continues to live in ignorance and in the bottomless pit of greed as at present)

(Our mother, The Earth, the green planet has suffered from her children's violent and ignorant ways of consuming. We have destroyed our Mother Earth like a type of bacterium or virus destroying the human body)

( After the great flood caused by global warming takes place, perhaps only a very small portion of the human race will survive.)

Do you consider yourself a bacteria or a virus? Bottomless pit of greed? How uplifting can you get!

What David doesn't understand is that the so called experts like Al (energy guzzling hypocrite) Gore are doing is political not eco-friendly.

WARNING: This may not be uplifting. :-)

Brian - I may not personally feel "like" a bacteria or virus, but our civilization as a whole has certainly behaved in that manner. We have destroyed entire ecosystems unnecessarily. We live such a greedy manner that rather than fix things, we simply buy new things. We have warehouses of storage (see the new giant facility on Bryant) for all of our stuff and we continue to create and buy more. We package everything at the expense of our landfills. We buy new cars every few years, many of which get pathetic gas mileage.

Here's a simplified example of impact. A group of four people living in a house will have a significantly smaller impact on the house environment than a group of seven people living in the same house. A group of 2.5 billion people (in 1950) had a significantly smaller impact than the 6 billion people on the planet today. As far as I know, no other organism has grown so dramatically in such a short period of time. We have lived for millennia on this planet with little overall impact, but since about 1850 we started down a different path.

It is very discouraging, but I don't despair. There is hope. Rather than deny the problem exists, we have an opportunity to see the problem and create a solution together. Humanity is so intelligent. Technology can be so powerful. We have the chance to use our intelligence and our technology to solve some of these problems. The science is very clear and the discussion shouldn't be about whether global warming is happening or not, but what can we do about it. I will not debate this with you. However, we can come together for your children and mine to be certain that humanity can be here for many generations into the future. Earth is a beautiful place.

Though I dearly love Bill Hicks, I'll have to take issue with his assertion that "we're a virus with shoes!" I don't think we're a virus. I think it far more likely that we are a bacteria. Bacteria often live in communities and they show all the normal signs of life, respiration, reproduction, growth, waste elimination, etc. Viruses are a different thing all together. Nothing like us.

The earth is warming yes, it has been for millions of years. If it wasn't we would be under a lot of ice right now. North America was completely covered with ice. The ice caps on Mars are receding now also but I don't think man is causing that, solar activity affects the earth as well as Mars. There are a lot of positive thing that occur when the Earth's temperature cycles to a warmer period, such as the ability to grow more food in the higher latitudes. With a colder earth we have starvation as what happened during the "little ice age" where the Thames actually froze and many people died. We should use our technology to stop pumping more pollution into our environment, like what comes from burning coal and natural gas for power plants.
The science is not very clear. The past three years the hurricane forcasts have been off every single time. The predictions of worse and worse storms did not come to pass. I don't know what technology you are talking about Kenley, I hope in is not solar energy because that is not really a viable solution.

Brian, I don't know what technology either -- I am referring to technology that could be created if we put our intelligence and resources into this effort. Unfortunately, our political and business leaders do not (yet) have the political will to put this on the table. If we made an effort, like the race for the moon, you can be sure that something new and amazing could happen.

On May 25, 1961 John Kennedy, speaking at a joint session of Congress called for the Moon landing before the end of the decade. Less than a decade later, July 16, 1969, we were on the moon. We put our best minds and put the money out there to make this happen.

We can do something like this for the earth, but we need leadership from the very top.

Well, rather than wait around for some unknown technology to come along we already have a technology to solve many of these problems and that technology would be nuclear power.

Seems like Thomas Friedman has been listening in on our little dialogue here.... this is from this morning's New York Times..... Kenley, is this not pretty much what you had in mind?

The People We Have Been Waiting For

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: December 2, 2007
It was 60 degrees on Thursday in Washington, well above normal, and as I slipped away for some pre-Christmas golf, I found myself thinking about a wickedly funny story that The Onion, the satirical newspaper, ran the other day: “Fall Canceled after 3 Billion Seasons”:

“Fall, the long-running series of shorter days and cooler nights, was canceled earlier this week after nearly 3 billion seasons on Earth, sources reported Tuesday.

“The classic period of the year, which once occupied a coveted slot between summer and winter, will be replaced by new, stifling humidity levels, near-constant sunshine and almost no precipitation for months.

“‘As much as we’d like to see it stay, fall will not be returning for another season,’ National Weather Service president John Hayes announced during a muggy press conference Nov. 6. ‘Fall had a great run, but sadly, times have changed.’ ... The cancellation was not without its share of warning signs. In recent years, fall had been reduced from three months to a meager two-week stint, and its scheduled start time had been pushed back later and later each year.”

You should never extrapolate about global warming from your own weather, but it is becoming hard not to — even for professionals. Consider the final report of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (I.P.C.C.), which was just issued and got far too little attention. It concluded that since the I.P.C.C. began its study five years ago, scientists had discovered much stronger climate change trends than previously realized, such as far more extensive melting of Arctic ice, and therefore global efforts to reverse the growth of greenhouse gas emissions have to begin immediately.

“What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future,” said the I.P.C.C. chairman, Rajendra Pachauri.

And sweet-sounding “global warming” doesn’t really capture what’s likely to happen. I prefer the term “global weirding,” coined by Hunter Lovins, co-founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute, because the rise in average global temperature is going to lead to all sorts of crazy things — from hotter heat spells and droughts in some places, to colder cold spells and more violent storms, more intense flooding, forest fires and species loss in other places.

While the Bush team came into office brain dead on the climate issue and will leave office with a perfect record of having done nothing significant to mitigate climate change, I’m heartened that our country is increasingly alive on this challenge.

First, Google said last week that it was going to invest millions in developing its own energy business. Google described its goal as renewable energy that is cheaper than coal — adding: “We’re busy assembling our own internal research and development group and hiring a team of engineers ... tasked with building one gigawatt of renewable energy capacity that is cheaper than coal.” That could power all of San Francisco.

Its primary focus, said Google.org’s energy expert, Dan Reicher, will be to advance new solar thermal, geothermal and wind solutions “across the valley of death.” That is, so many good ideas work in the lab but never get a chance to scale up because they get swallowed by a lack of financing or difficulties in implementation. Do not underestimate these people.

Last week, I also met with two groups of M.I.T. students who blew me away. One was the M.I.T. Energy Club, which was founded in 2004 by a few grad students discussing energy over beers at a campus bar. Today it has 600-plus members who have put on scores of events focused on building energy expertise among M.I.T. students and faculty, and “fact-based analysis,” including a trip to Saudi Arabia.

Then I got together with three engineering undergrads who helped launch the Vehicle Design Summit — a global, open-source, collaborative effort, managed by M.I.T. students, that has 25 college teams around the world, including in India and China, working together to build a plug-in electric hybrid within three years. Each team contributes a different set of parts or designs. I thought writing for my college newspaper was cool. These kids are building a hyper-efficient car, which, they hope, “will demonstrate a 95 percent reduction in embodied energy, materials and toxicity from cradle to cradle to grave” and provide “200 m.p.g. energy equivalency or better.” The Linux of cars!

They’re not waiting for G.M. Their goal, they explain on their Web site — vds.mit.edu — is “to identify the key characteristics of events like the race to the moon and then transpose this energy, passion, focus and urgency” on catalyzing a global team to build a clean car. I just love their tag line. It’s what gives me hope:

“We are the people we have been waiting for.”

Thanks David. Exactly. Nobody truly has an original thought and I probably heard the concept somewhere along the line. It is funny to note that Friedman would not be classified as a leftest, in many senses of the word. The truly sad part is when he wrote, "While the Bush team came into office brain dead on the climate issue and will leave office with a perfect record of having done nothing significant to mitigate climate change..." What can we do to be certain our next President is more awake?

Thank you David. I hope everyone reads this!

This always gives me the chills, (in a good way:
“We are the people we have been waiting for.”

Wow! That makes us truly feel responsible for our lives and precious, brief time on Earth...

Kenley, how did you manage to make those words in your post BOLD?

Suza, you can use use basic HTML in any comment. You can see some examples of what is possible on this HTML Text Formatting page. If Tyler ever upgrades his blog software, some of these features are available as editing buttons.

Kenley - i tried a WYSIWIG plugin on another blog, and it was very buggy. i'll keep an eye out for something else. i'm also exploring moving the Post to a more interactive platform at some point.

Interesting You Tube video re: climate change action or inaction:

Whoops. Guess I can't embed You Tube video here. A link instead:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDsIFspVzfI&feature=related