Climate Change
These articles on the California wildfires have caught my attention recently ( http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/24/us/24calif.html ). Those fires in California look more serious than ever. I think the New York Times just updated the evacuations number to 500,000. The photos say to me, be very glad I’m not evacuating my home in San Diego. I believe that Global Warming… ehem Global Climate Change, as Karl Rove has instructed us to call it, is very real. Why are folks so aggressively fighting the science and research? I recent saw the film An Inconvenient Truth. It’s on point with a powerful message that I believe should a least be heard. Evidently the filmmaker was in a room with Karl Rove not to long ago and it got ugly e.g. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/23/washington/23rove.html Until some serious consideration is put into global warming, we’ll be enduring all kinds of folks ignoring the issue until their homes that are about to go up in flames.
Update 9/15/2020: Climate Change has been a topic of a lot of discussion recently and after reading the news this morning, I wondered if I’d ever made a note about it. I found this article from 2007 with the tagline of “These articles on the California wildfires have caught my attention recently” and a text file entitled climate change in my personal project folder on my office computer. In the spirit of my previous post on Non-Linear Publishing3, I’ve just been adding updates to posts I had previously written instead of piling on more linear information.
Right now we’ve got a record number of hurricanes, one poised to hit the gulf coast for the second time this year, and extensive fires on the west coast. I read this morning that the northern hemisphere had the hottest summer on record4. Meanwhile our reality television president is hawking ideas of coming record colds and a denying the science. I saw recently that my former hometown, Charleston is suing fossil fuel companies in an effort to recoup some of the expenses of having to deal with rising sea levels5. Needless to say, I’m in agreement with them after having read some of the research tucked away by the fossil fuel industry. I’ve got a basic grip on the science and quite honestly, I’m a bit leery of the implications of what effects climate change will have on folks. It’s serious stuff for a lot of people that has vast affects on everything. As it is now, it’s mostly first world problems for me keeping the garden watered and scheduling my tennis matches around low humidity. I have, however, been ruminating on some long term solutions that revolve around the fact that I accept climate change as a scientific reality.
As much as I’d like to do a deep delve into the challenges presented by climate change, I’ll end up making this post all about me if you can imagine that. I bought a one way flight to Maui some years ago and stayed for a while. The thing I enjoyed most about it was the perfect weather. 70 to 80 highs, 60 lows and enough rain to have a lush landscape. It’d rain for an hour in the middle of a sunny day. I just recently wrote that “my goal is to have a life where my only real concern is the weather”. We’ve debated moving to Hawaii, but there are some logistical and financial concerns for us. We’ve debated getting two houses… one at the beach and one in the mountains near skiing. I’d live in them off season and do short term rentals to cover the costs. We had picked out Boone NC6 and Hilton Head Island SC7 as the two locations because they both have beautiful weather for half the year. Issue there is that if the rentals dry up, we couldn’t afford to maintain two homes even if we did have the whole thing under a business umbrella. Plus that idea is not very ecologically sensitive and I’m not sure how we’d feel about having to pack up like gypsies twice a year. We’re lucky that we live in the piedmont8 of South Carolina which is basically a humid subtropical climate. The summers are pretty oppressive though and we usually try to escape to some cooler temperatures. We both have family relatively close, so we’ll be here for the quite some time. We are planning on migrating a little bit north at some point and we’re making the financial, career, and architectural plans9 to do so.
For everyone else out there dealing with very real climate issues of flooding, fires, severe weather, and hurricanes… vote the skeptics out and take your own actions. Install solar, use renewables, weatherize your home, go electric with your transportation10, support climate conscious companies, recycle, reuse, up-cycle, downsize, go urban, and just consume less overall. Everyone’s future depends on it. Just as I’ve found myself revisiting this post from over ten years ago, I hope we won’t have to look back in ten or twenty years and think “why didn’t we do something”?
- New York Times – California Fires Out of Control as More Than 500,000 Flee – https://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/24/us/24calif.html
- An Inconvenient Truth – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Inconvenient_Truth
- Non-linear Publishing – https://davidawindham.com/non-linear-publishing/
- Northern Hemisphere summer was hottest on record, scientists say – https://www.nbcnews.com/science/environment/northern-hemisphere-summer-was-hottest-record-scientists-say-n1240049
- City of Charleston lawsuit against fossil fuel companies – https://www.postandcourier.com/city-of-charleston-lawsuit-against-fossil-fuel-companies/pdf_f87d668c-f2a8-11ea-83b4-1b2c82407b39.html
- Boone, North Carolina – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boone,_North_Carolina
- Hilton Head Island, South Carolina – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilton_Head_Island,_South_Carolina
- Piedmont Region U.S. – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piedmont_(United_States)
- Architecture – https://davidawindham.com/architecture/
- It’s Electric – https://davidawindham.com/its-electric/
- Meat Less – https://davidawindham.com/meat-less/