01 oct 06
"Are humans responsible for global warming?"
five days -- pretty bad. "ask the box" will cheerfully refund your money. or, you could just sue me for breech of contract ("In a bit (rougly 1-3 days), read the response, linked in the other box").
i only have two questions on my plate (now, three), but i haven't been doing much with them, simply because i can't find the energy reserves to do so. i designed someone a new website (if you payed me to answer questions, i'm sure i'd do them faster), and have been working long days at the chicken factory. yesterday, i pulled a 10 hour day -- after 10 hours of driving, i start to feel headachy and woozy.
i'm not sure how much effort i'm going to be able to put into these questions. i miss my blog. i wonder if there's some way i could format it so i can do both blog and "ask the box"? probably. i also wonder how many thousands of lines would accumulate on the index page. i guess it's not a big deal -- pages load top-down, and do so quickly when they're all text, especially for those of us on broadband. for those who are not and are tending to the season's bean harvest on the village plot, well, i guess they won't be able to read my blog.
no, that's not true -- even over dialup these pages should load quick. the worst limited-resources offenders are, i think, myspace pages. when i was using a 700mHz machine with 256MB of RAM, myspace nearly killed it, even over broadband. trying to put in all of those banner ads, background images, and ridiculous implanted sounds/movies would stick in the pipeline like molasses through a mcdonalds straw.
but ok, global warming, really quick, because i have to leave for work in about half an hour, and would like to at least get started on these two questions. i read a little bit about it when i first got this question, and there's a pretty reliable scientific consensus that emissions are largely responsible for global warming, whether that means 85% or 99.999%.
it's true that people jumped on the "global warming is all our fault" bandwagon prematurely, but now it turns out that it was the right bandwagon, even though their behavior remains impulsive and dumb. the main thing i don't like is that polar bears are going to go extinct pretty quickly (fitty years); they're already finding them drowned, because the ice floes they swim to and from have become so far apart. isn't that awful? to think of some poor bear just getting exhausted in the water, looking for his ice floe, and then drowning?
but this is the problem with environmental issues -- it's very easy to let emotions become entangled in it, which makes rational discussion and solutions difficult. i always picture the same bunch of 20-something san franciscans waving protest signs. that bunch has been annoying me for a few years now, whenever i think about a social or environmental issue. i wish they'd just leave me alone; their yowling makes me want to throw away soda cans out of spite.
i have the same issue with environmentalism that i do with liberal leftism in general -- that if i'm going to espouse these lofty principles and ideals, then i'd better damn well tow the line, so to speak. if i'm not out there on the highway picking up trash at 5am, then i'm not an environmentalist, no matter whom i vote for, what i write, what t-shirt i wear, etc. like everything else, my convictions here remain abstract, and fluid. furthermore, i recognize that this is a terrible thing, and that people like me ought to just keep quiet about issues they aren't involved in.
i once remarked that an "earth-religion" seemed to me the only form of focused and channeled spirituality that would even begin to make any sense to me; a reduction of "all that is" to the ground we walk on, water we drink, air we breathe, etc, seems almost reasonable. but, this is something for the excitable.
i think i might do a blog.
oh yeah! check this out:
i am now an official whoremonger. i still have to do the zeitgeist for october, but i really don't feel like it. a demonstration of how distracting the internet is: just for kicks, i brought up the october zeitgeist, and of course knew nothing about anything on it. i clicked the fourth one ("mary carey"), and discovered her to be a porn actress who is running for office under the GOP. then, i started reading an list of big-breasted celebrities on wikipedia.
the zeitgeist perpetuates celebrity -- if a search is on there because it was performed a lot, then it's going to get performed even more, because people like me are seeing it there on the zeitgeist and wondering what it is. it's going to upset the statistical trends it's seeking to reflect. heisenberg, maybe, but i don't want to get into that -- i've had enough misapplication of poorly-understood pop science to "cultural analysis" (crap i see on tv and read in wikipedia).
anyway...
humans are responsible for global warming. logically, that sentence could be argued to mean that they are partially respnsible for it, but that's not how most people would interpret a sentence like that. at any rate, it's impossible to be 100% causal, unless it's totally abtract. but let's say, for simplicty's sake, that humans are responsible for global warming, because they're the principal cause, as well as the one we can do something about.
why does environmental prudence contingent upon whether or not the earth is about to explode? isn't it a good thing, in and of itself, that should be a priority regardless of immediate catastrophe? we, as humans, have a long history of solving problems at the last minute, which i suppose often works just fine. but in the meantime, a lot of polar bears drown.
the effects of global warming are sort of vague, uncertain, and not as unambiguously bad as you might think. here's a really reductionist synopsis:
rising sea levels, altered patterns of agriculture, increased extreme weather events, and the expansion of the range of tropical diseases. -- you-know-who
no one wants more tropical diseases or extreme weather (from a practical perspective, and not one of "tropical diseases and extreme weather are cool"). sea level rise is undesirable, as well. but the agriculture one is iffy -- for instnace, i read that in iceland, they were recently able to grow and harvest barley for the first time. yay!
i've stopped writing for this with enthusiasm, it seems. well, maybe it's premature to draw this conclusion based on one bad egg (which is something i've done before). i have two other answers to do here. fuck. this project sucks. i think i'm going to have to re-think exactly what i'm doing here.
it's mainly that i'm not used to working this much. six days a week. yesterday, i drove for ten hours. i'm taking two classes. i have free time, but it's still quite exhausting. i'm lucky i don't have friends or buy anything, or i'd really be drained. as it is, at least i can sit around and write, or just read email and chat. i'm having some quiet time now, and it's pretty nice. just to sit here, and write, the only sounds being my fingers on the keyboard, the hiss of the hard drive, and the hum of the speakers. good lighting is important.
i don't understand why people go on this way, just working all the time. i mean, what's the point?