OK, it's cold enough, thanks...

[altivo]

We're at -6°F and dropping. The "freezeless" hydrant in one barn is frozen. Oddly, that has never happened before, even when we had temperatures of -20 a few years back. The animals are not complaining much, actually, as long as they get fed and preferably extra rations.

I'm complaining though. I'm getting old enough for this to make my joints stiff. We have the woodstove going 24 hours a day, which we haven't done at all in recent years. The house is comfortable enough, but going outside to do animal chores is painful.

Supposed to be worse tomorrow, then gradually improving. No long posts from here for a day or two. It's too cold to sit at the computer (far end of the house from the woodstove.)

Comments

[octatonic.livejournal.com]

"Even more frightening are the right wing religious nuts who believe that all this is part of god's plan and we are supposed to ruin the earth because it says in the Bible that we will and the second coming can't happen until we do. They figure we should hurry up and do it faster..."

Now that /does/ scare me. I might have voted
for Bush but it doesn't mean I'm stupid (
rumours to the contray XD).

I think this whole, "Jesus is going to
Rapture us out! Then the New Earth!" thing
is dangerous in a couple of ways. Its
fantasy escapism first of all, and it
leads to "let it all burn" thinking.

Neither of those is good. Well, okay,
/I/ like escapism myself, but I tend
to know when to draw the line and buy
the flourescent bulbs and recycle. I
also think that if there was a subsidy
(maybe...a tax credit?) on converting
your house to say solar energy some of
that really nifty new tech like the
black strips of solar collecters that
look nice on a roof would get bought
lots more, and if /that/ happened we'd
not have to send our blood to the
middle east.

That'd make a great bumper sticker:

"Every Extra Mile You Drive Kills One
More Soldier"

[altivo.livejournal.com]

But bumper stickers like that are "unpatriotic" and a "liberal plot". ;p

Tax credits for energy efficiency all died during the Reagan years because the Republicans decided it "wasn't a problem any more." I suspect that any attempt to reinstate them today would be vetoed by Dubya. He's only interested in tax cuts for the wealthiest 10% of the population.

Here in Illinois, electric rates have been controlled for years, and only allowed to increase when there was real evidence of a need for increase. Those controls ran out at the end of last year, and an attempt to extend them was blocked... by a Democrat, a black man from a poverty background, who happens to chair the crucial Senate committee. The same man who also blocks all efforts to subsidize development of alternative energy resources... Consequently, the electric monopoly here is raising rates by 25% effective immediately, and another increase expected in a few months. Who will be hurt most? Poor people. Will it reduce consumption? I doubt it, because there are no alternative choices. Will it increase profits at the utility company? Absolutely, and probably by a whopping 100% this year.

[octatonic.livejournal.com]

I do NOT "believe" in global warming
(climate change, whatever). I don't
think its due to us. The Allerood and
other climatic events had nothing to
do with humans.

But.

If the /fear/ of it can generate the
development of new technology that gives
us energy independence, and if its done
so we don't have to crash the economy...

Stay the course.

Eventually we are going to have to change,
like in the 19th century when we had
to give up whale oil for lamps. Its
not a bad thing, being able to control
our energy destiny.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I do believe we have done things in the past two centuries that have accelerated certain climatic changes. Any of them considered by themselves would have been insignificant, but taken as a whole, the threat exists. Whether the result will be as abrupt as some claim, I have no idea. But the consequences of the sum of the observable and measurable trends, going back as far as such measurements were possible (now approaching 200 years or so for direct instrument measurements, and thousands of years based on indirect measurements of fossil and soil strata, etc.) seems clear enough to me.

In what is sometimes termed the "Gaia effect" we may be about to see another ice age. This may not be intuitive, but the pattern in the fossil record supports the theory. In essence, the melting polar ice caps raise the sea level. This rise does not have to be huge, even 50-100 feet will do it. There is a "threshhold" of sorts across where the Alaskan land bridge used to be. It's an underwater ridge that limits the flow of cold Arctic waters into the North Pacific, or the flow of warmer Pacific waters into the Arctic. When the sea level rises enough, cold water spills into the Pacific, changing the flow of ocean currents and altering weather patterns. The "El Niño" effect is the sort of thing I'm talking about, only lots more things like that all over the place. Some areas get warmer, others start cooling off. Instead of the whole earth just cooking like a closed greenhouse, once the effect goes far enough, glaciers and ice caps start growing tremendously... Ice Age. It's a natural cycle that has repeated many times, taking tens of thousands of years. We have just hurried it along, and by how much remains to be seen.

Oddly enough, it plays right into the hands of the biblical fundamentalists who claim that the world will end in "fire and ice." Only it wouldn't be the end of the world, only the end of things as we have known them, and a major rearrangement of ecologies and priorities. It won't happen overnight or even in a decade, but over several centuries at my guess (as opposed to a couple of millennia or more on the unaccelerated time frame.)

[octatonic.livejournal.com]

Calls a truce.

::hugs::