A Timely Reminder About The One Threat To Us All

It's still a collosal problem. And we are stuck between rocks and hardplaces, and getting more trapped by the year. And while everybody wants to scream, yell, and pound their fists about every other issue they claim to care about, people have slowly begun to voice their feelings much less about how petroleum is both pivotal to our existence, and a source of our problems.

How Oil/Petroleum is Bad For Our Environment

Burning fossil fuels is bad for the environment. That includes coal, oil, and natural gas. Once we all agree on that issue, we have to discover how much of an issue it really is before we begin to understand how we, the people, are contributing to the problems of the planet with our carbon footprints. It's easy to get the basics, such as, burning fossil fuels pollutes our air and our water.

The burning of fossil fuels is contributing to global climate change. When burned, large amounts of Greenhouse Gases are released into the atmosphee. Primarily, that's going to be Carbon Dioxide. Carbon Dioxide, or CO2, helps to trap heat which intern leads to a slowly growing warming trend in our oceans, surface, atmosphere. This helps to explain the insane weather patterns, apocalyptic flooding, and biblical storms that strike our world.

It's called the Greenhouse Effect. It has some serious and long-term consenquences, and ones that human kind should be concerned with.

• Hotter Temperatures: The more frequent and often deadly heatwaves we've felt are an example.
• Polar Melt Off: The decrease in polar ice due to the elevated atmospheric temperatures and the rising sea temperatures has already caused a stir. It's contributing to sea-level rise, and it impacts water resources. However, one of the most ominous effects, is decreasing the salt to water content, or desalinization, in areas like the North Atlantic. This affects Earth's magnetic field.
• Changes in rain and precipitation trends: Areas are suffering serious droughts and others have had to learn to deal with apocalyptic flooding.
• Ocean Acidification: The more CO2 absorbed by our oceans, the more acidic it becames. This threatens marine life, and the food supply, as well as economies.
• Extreme Weather Events: Extreme weather events come with more frequency around the world,, and they are also more intense. This includes everything from Hurricanes to Wildfires and Droughts.

The image above actually depicts something similar to scenes along the US East Coast in the early days of 2010. The one constant about the early days of that year, the questions about mass animal die offs. But as these things were ongoing, from Alabama waking to thousands of birds lying dead, to mass aquatic die offs along the coast lines, to other incidents around the world, it became apparent what the problem was most likely tied to.

During the weeks after the mass die-offs in early 2010, other anomalies came to light. Florida was the only state in the country, including Hawaii, not to be hit with snow. Peculiar is right.

There were also issues at a Florida airport. It was suffering from problems with the navigational arrays. Why that would tie into the story about mass die-offs of animal life was a mystery, until reading that the problem was likely attributablel to a fluctuation in the magnetic field.

Crazily enough, there was one more piece of information that came up, one that was initially very easy to shrug off as coincidence. The term, critical desalinization appeared in a report on the incident. Have you ever heard the term?

Hearing, or rather reading, a term used by Dennis Quaid as he explains the bizarre weather patterns in the movie, The Day After Tomorrow, told us two things. Art and life do imitate eachother. And the problem of global warming could have very serious ramifications for humanity.

Maybe, as Gas prices shoot through the roof, mostly because of the war in Iran, people need to stop and remember that the climate is still in a delicate place. No, nobody is advocating for not driving to places you need to be. Nobody is advocating for not living your lives.

Most certainly, nobody is advocating for cars too small for most Americans to get into. Who wants to cram into a prius, or some goofy ride, after having lived with the era of muscle cars, pick ups, and large utility vehicles?

The truth is simpler. There are still different ways to curb the speed with use fossil fuels, bringing the demand down, and protecting the environment at the same time. Why? Because, it's still a real problem that maybe, just maybe, we need a little reminder about.