Alarm Bells
Listen! The alarm bells are ringing. Actually, the bells began ringing shortly after WWII as the first half of the 20th Century was winding down.
Remember the duck and cover drills in the schools to protect students from the rain of Russian nuclear missiles that were sure to be falling on the country at any moment. As the students were learning to protect themselves, their parents were building and stocking bomb shelters to tide the family over for a while when the missiles began to fall.
The alarm bells began to soften a bit as the U.S. and Russia began to adopt Mutually Assured Destruction strategies. They revved up again, however, when Rachel Carson published her “Silent Spring” in the 1960s. According to Carson, American farmers were killing fowl, animal, and human populations just to grow more and better vegetables.
The culprit this time was the DDT the farmers were using to protect crops from pesky insects. To heck with those people in third world countries who needed DDT to protect themselves from mosquitos and other disease carrying vectors.
As Dupont and other chemical companies began bowing to the clamor and were phasing out DDT, the alarm bells began to tone down. Not for long though. We had to be kept on our toes by fear.
This time, it was Alar. According to the new crop of fear mongers, this was another dangerous chemical used by farmers trying to put food on America’s tables. Alar was a chemical designed to slow the ripening of apples and to give them a better color. The bell ringers on this scare claimed Alar was detrimental to the health of anyone who ate an apple a day to keep the doctor away.
As most of the claims about the dangers of Alar were being debunked, another group of alarmists grabbed the alarm ropes. These were the weather experts who were warning that we were on the brink of another ice age.
Remember those experts with computer projections in their hands? That was only 40 years ago. There could be no doubting the computer generated data that proved we were in the midst of a cooling climate change that was going to be devastating to food production and human life itself.
Then along came Al Gore. He smilingly told those weather men that their computes had it all wrong. His computers told him that we are about to burn up. We are not going to get colder. We are, instead, entering a period of global warming.
As Gore was riding that train into the realm of millionaires, more weathermen came out of the woods to suggest he calm the rhetoric a bit. His global warming threats were not be supported by their computers.
Those computers indicated the earth was warming a bit, but this fluctuation in the thermometers was merely reflecting another weather cycle. To keep their research grants coming, however, they had to find a booger-bear in the statistics.
Surprise, surprise, they found the culprit. The driver of this cycle was homo sapiens who has been trying to ruin the earth ever since he inherited it. Greedy man is always trying to make life better for himself. He is destroying the planet by burning fossil fuels just to keep himself cool, warm, well fed, lit up with artificial light, and the ability to travel anywhere on something other than legs and feet.
Their computers, however, cannot read and interpret history. So the facts of three ice ages lasting millions of years that receded and disappeared under warmer climates when no humans were around to burn fossil fuels cannot be factored into the calculations. The millions of years when Europe was a semitropical forest that moderated into its current temperate state under normal cycles of climate change also have to be ignored by the dumb computers.
As the fear factor of the man made global warming/climate change arguments began to fade, there was a simultaneous moderation of the alarm bells.
As the media cannot live and prosper without alarm bells to ring vigorously, another nightmare had to be created. Now the alarm bells are tolling, at least locally, for our dwindling supply of drinking water. Those alarmists are shouting for the government to take control of the ground water because lesser humans who are not politicians cannot take care of themselves.
This is the silliest scare tactic of them all. As someone recently asked, “Why is this planet called earth? Shouldn’t it be called water, as almost 80% of the globe is covered with water that is many miles deep in some place?”
Twenty seven of the fifty states border an ocean or the Great Lakes. There are numerous procedures for making all that water potable. Ships and submarines exist on “salt water.” Ninety percent of the water used in Qatar comes from the ocean.
If we can lace the country together with thousands of miles of four or more lanes of super highway and even more thousands of miles of buried oil and gas lines, transporting safe drinking water from the oceans to where it is needed should be easily engineered.
So here’s the perspective.
When will the nay sayers lay the blame, if you want to call it that, for all the climate changes the earth has survived during its millions of years in existence where it belongs? Isn’t God or nature responsible?
When will those who believe that we will soon be dying of thirst begin putting their money into research and plans for getting the plentiful desalinated water to every locality needing it?
enough
