Cold Summer in the Twin Cities
Have been quite busy in the past few weeks. Started to write a blog entry on healthcare but decided to split it in pieces and delay them.
This entry is regarding an issue that is more important by several orders of magnitude than healthcare in America. The issue is global warming.
Last summer my wife and I were coming out of Sam’s Club in Eagan, MN. The day was relative cold for summer. We overheard a remark regarding weather from a random Naive American walking in the parking lot as we were heading to our vehicle. “So much for global warming. It is just a plot to make us [Americans] buy smaller cars”.
Last week while watching the local news the weather segment came on. It appears that the jet stream has been somewhat low this year bringing unseasonably low summer temperatures to the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul. The reporter was in the city of Minnetonka, a rather up scale neighborhood in the area. The reporter interviewed several random people on the street. While this was occurring I chuckled and made the remark to my wife “I am waiting for a comment denying global warming”. The last person being interviewed, who was quite well dressed possibly implying that she belongs to a rather affluent and hopefully more educated social class made the comment “So much for global warming”.
Not sure where people gets their information (probably most do on the Internet) and how much of the news are actually absorbed by Naive Americans. Global warming is a phenomenon that in the not so far future have the power to destroy not only the human race but most (not to say all) plants and animals on earth.
Indirect symptoms of global warming are the higher temperatures all over earth both in water (lakes, seas and oceans) and land. Permanent masses of ice are gradually and steadily melting. The ratio of salt and other compounds to actual pure water (H2O) are changing. One might say, so what.
Scientists have known and proved for a while that some gases in the atmosphere tend to increase the temperature on earth. Carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and other fluorocarbons are able to a greenhouse effect. Basically the heat radiated by earth bounces back increasing the temperature in the atmosphere, land and water masses.
There is another gas that is not too often mentioned but is able to produce similar greenhouse effects, that is methane. The issue with methane is that it is poisonous to animals and insects and huge amounts are trapped at the bottom of lakes, seas and oceans. An increase in water temperature will cause the trapped methane gas to be released to the atmosphere. The released gas will contribute to raise the temperature on earth as well on the masses of water. This in turn will release additional trapped methane. In other words, once some critical initial amount of methane is released the process will spiral. There would be no way to stop it.
Naive Americans appear to think that such problem is something that might never occur. It just belongs in science fiction. The facts are that global temperature is rising. In Africa, at a smaller scale, methane from the bottom of a sea has escaped a few times in the past century killing millions of fish. We might not see the problem in our lifetime; our kids may or may not but our grand children???
If Naive Americans are not interested in global warming then our beloved career politicians should. If things do not change in the next century, methane will kill not only Naive Americans but also the entire human race.
