June open forum
Climate change on many minds after a crazy month
What a difference a month makes, right?
At the beginning of May, there was still ice on the lake outside my window and the trees were still bare. Now, as you can see in the picture above, we are in full spring mode (compare with the picture in the May open forum post).
As you know, the weather has been weird in these parts recently. We had a massive wind/rain storm that knocked out power to hundreds of thousands of homes in Ontario and Quebec. My home was without electricity for 7 days.
And we’re being told to expect several possibly violent thunderstorms in July and August.
It’s a trend that is happening around the world: extreme weather events and high heat are affecting much of the globe, and it is only going to get worse, according to a report today on The Guardian site with the headline “We cannot adapt our way out of climate crisis, warns leading scientist.”
Says Katharine Hayhoe, chief scientist for the Nature Conservancy in the U.S. and professor at Texas Tech University, who warns the world is heading for dangers unseen in the 10,000 years of human civilization: “People do not understand the magnitude of what is going on,” she said. “This will be greater than anything we have ever seen in the past. This will be unprecedented. Every living thing will be affected.”
In my personal blog, I have been wondering recently what good is an electric vehicle when extreme weather events knock out the power grid? I’ve put my plan to purchase an EV on the backburner for now.
These days, I’m looking at generators — for the next time we have a long power outage. But I’m beginning to think that one day the power grid will fail forever.
I wish I could be more optimistic.
What can we do as naturists who collectively have a great love for Mother Nature? Maybe you have some ideas about that.
That is what’s on my mind this first day of June 2022.
This is your forum to talk about all things naturism and related subjects.
Cheers
— Jillian
As an electrical engineer I have long seen power grid resiliency as an issue getting a lot of attention. All technology and science is a work in progress. So I wouldn't worry too much about that. However, as MystrD says: that clean energy needs to come from somewhere; and I'll add it needs to be stored in something when the sun doesn't shine or wind doesn't blow. These questions and many others will employ bright minds for decades to come.
We don't have a choice. It is adapt or die. Some climate change is going to happen and this is the beginning.
Looking at it from a purely scientific POV, climate change is self limiting. As soon as enough people die off, carbon emissions will drop. There is a natural balance of CO2 and nature will eventually return to equilibrium. It may take decades or centuries.
Some cities will be uninhabitable. Structures will crumble. Foliage will gradually reclaim areas that were logged off/built up/burnt/flooded/eroded away. Kind of like Chernobyl.
There will be more rain overall and it will be redistributed. Even so, while some places will become much wetter, others will become drier. Probably where I live. :(
Climate zones will have moved north. All those cool weather trees in Canada will slowly be replaced with warm weather trees. Violent storms and fires are bad news to us but nature will abide. New growth sprouts up that will be better adapted to the climate. Extinction events are always followed by a burst of speciation, just takes a while. I suspect that "weed" species will do very well while "niche" species will have a hard time of it.
A lot of people don't realize this but we are technically in an ice age. For most of its history the planet was much hotter and rainier - except when everything was buried in glaciers and sea ice. Or the land was entirely arid desert. During the Cretaceous period there were no glaciers anywhere and no ice at either the north or south poles.
Famine might start a nuclear war. Might not be such a bad thing. The radiation will soon subside (Chernobyl again) nature will return and nuclear winter will cool things off a bit.
Another equally beautiful but different world will emerge with a lot fewer people who hopefully will have learned that it is not nice to fool with Mother Nature.