19 August 2007

Blossom


I got a note on the box yesterday after wandering in from a volunteer Board Meeting. My participation had required getting up far too early on a lovely Saturday, and driving across the District to the Maryland border to a volunteer Board meeting. The area used to be a slum, but is blossoming with new construction behind an impressive new Federal fence.

When I got back, I read the weekend summary of jokes and articles that a buddy puts together for a mailing list of right-thinking citizens. Contained in it was an article made a dramatic disclosure that the hot summers of the last few years were not the record-breakers we had thought. It cast doubt on the veracity of climatic change, which, if true, was a big deal even if the Polar Bears are having a hard time.

I put it aside for a more lucid contemplation than I was capable of in the early afternoon. The dry cleaner was still open and the sun glittered off the cool blue waters of the pool at Big Pink.

I took my shirts and drove through the neighborhood next door where Karl Rove lives, or at least has until the end of the month when he will be able to start making the big bucks while he is spending more time with his family, which apparently has been the goal of his last thirty years of association with the President.

The houses between Big Pink cost less than five grand when they were constructed seventy years ago, and were the triumph of what arguably was the only successful Federal social program that has ever existed, the Federal Housing Administration.

I don't know what Mr. Roosevelt's whiz-kids would have made of the mess we are in over sub-prime loans to people who could never have managed the payments on the little brick boxes. They insisted on proof of solvency, and maybe they should not have repealed the rule.

I assume Mr. Rove will move on from his little brown box to something more in line with his stature. I had to blink when I saw some of the nick-names with which he was known in the White House. There are the ones with which I was familiar, “Bush's Brain” and all that. Apparently the President called him the “Boy Strategist,” and another term of endearment, earthy and Texan.

It is a reference to the fact that lovely flowers can spring from cow-flops, and the hyphenated term ended with the world “Blossom.”

Flower of manure or not, Rove successfully did something very few can say they did; he won a pair of Governorships and two Presidencies for his amiable chief. Along the way, he may have tipped our nation over a precipice.

I say "may" advisedly. I don't know that any particular individual can have that sort of impact, but the collective effort of the scary-smart ideologues and loyal if unimaginative fellow-travelers may just have done the trick.

The meeting had stolen the morning, but I am accustomed to acts of theft against my person and property these days and the Board at least is not of the malevolent variety.

By the pool, basking in the unexpected coolness I read about the failed Presidency, as though they were not all failed in some way. Then I turned to the article from the day before about the climate.

The story claimed that NASA was embarrassed about a glitch in their calculations for the warmest years on record. 2006 is not now the hottest year of the last century, but only second to the Dust Bowl year of 1934. Other of our recent reference years dropped a bit in the ranking for the top ten, and makes one take pause.

Not that it is not getting warmer. The evidence of what is happening in the high arctic is too stark to ignore. But there are likewise accounts from the first third of the 20th century of the icepack shrinking. Since we have had ice ages without benefit of human intervention, I became curious about how to account for why things were so hot eighty years ago.

The earth did take a major pause in the years of conflict. I was up in Labrador, Canada, one summer, when the clubbing of the baby seals was such an issue. It was appalling and brutal conduct, of course, but the innocence of the time is a bit fetching in these murderous times.

Talking to the up north, they said the seals almost went extinct in the late 1930s due to industrial over-harvest by the hunters. The war years meant a halt to the annual hunt, and a threatened species flourished for a while.

Not that we were not perfectly capable of threatening the species once more as soon as the guns went silent.

I was curious enough about it to follow the story back to the source- a difficult matter, since Rush Limbaugh picked up the story as a means of discrediting the conventional wisdom of the Global Warming phenomenon. He is an entertainer, of course, and not someone to take seriously. There is an active industry in climate-change denial, some of it sponsored by those who are in the carbon production business.

Pouring over the data, it became clear that something was happening in the 1930s, but I was unable to discover an explanation for it. I recall some 70-year cycles in storms, which would seem to relate directly to the conditions caused by increased surface temperature.

The deniers say that there was no human factor in the equation then, though my understanding of the times was that farmers had churned the prairie grass under the plow from Canada to the Southwest in the four decades before. Chicken or egg?

Looking at the revised data, the trend remains upward in surface temperature. Over time, even with the corrected data, there will be new records set.

I will not argue against the general notion that the warming is affected by the increased amount of greenhouse gas, even if things may be more complex than we are capable of understanding. Discrete events can produce direct results. The choking consequences of Co2 is real enough. Whatever may be happening in the natural world is certainly capable of being significantly enhanced by human activity.

No less a figure than Ben Franklin commented succinctly on the cooling effect of the Icelandic volcanic eruption at Mount Laki in 1783, surmising that the gas released had something to do with the climate. The later eruption the blossomed over Krakatau in August 1883 gave the world unseasonably cool weather, brilliant sunsets, and prolonged twilights due to the dispersal of f aerosol particulates in the upper atmosphere.

There was quite a bit of controversy at the time about the phenomenon. By way of contrast, Krakatau generated twenty times the volume of material released by Mount Saint Helens, and is estimated to be the second largest eruption in history, topped only by the event at neighboring Mount Tambora in 1815.

I remain convinced that something must be done about greenhouse gas, and pronto. The fact that there may be something else cyclical behind things makes it only more frightening. I would hope we can avoid it through something less than the abrupt termination of a variety of pleasurable American pursuits, but that may be wistful thinking.

Science may be the answer to ameliorate the pain of the transition to a world that can operate to its own rhythms, not amplified wildly by the acts of man.

Science being the product of the species, unfortunately, there are fashions in that trade as there are everywhere else.

The evidence of our senses says that something is going on, and we have pinned our explanation on carbon. I think that is probably correct, at least as an amplifying factor to something else, which is not yet properly understood.

Fashion is fleeting, though there are certain classic elements that come and go. It seems not so long ago that we were wringing our hands over the prospect of the Global Winter that would follow the nuclear exchange between the then-superpowers.

I would hate to think that the small-scale exchange of those awful things might be the way to continue to drive our cars, but fashions do come and go.

As with Mr. Rove, there may be a way that a flower can blossom from manure. I am not sure there is anyone smart enough to pull off the cultivation of such a blossom in the time we have available.

Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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