Lifestyle Changes for the Everyone

January 28, 2012

Sunrise this morning was a cool blue eastern sky here on California’s northern coast — so far a much-warmer winter, and a much-drier season than normal.
Old-time local folks say a throwback to the 1960s.
And as a guy working a liquor store, people do discuss the weather.
Comments border on the incredulous for the misery of the rain and cold we experienced only a few days ago as we’ve had nothing but beautiful skies lately — our own taste of a changing environment.
Although sharp sunlight this morning, the weather here is expected to return to ‘normal‘ tomorrow with rain and colder temperatures. The real climate for this neck of the woods could be considered “heavy drizzle” — coastal areas tend to be that way, instead of heavy, down-right rain, it’s just spattering wet 24/7.
Resided for several years in Pismo Beach (on the California coast about midway between LAX and SFO), and the overall weather for both are near-about the same, except up here it’s much-colder and wetter.
This winter has been different for most of the US — warm.

On this amazing time to be alive motif, one can also include the weather, which in reality covers a lot of shit, and one in particular, ‘energy,’  a build-in, self-generating climate-change-creating piece of literal machinery.
We couldn’t have one without the other — the influence of ‘energy‘ has been the fatal factor on the weather.
The most-likely-insurmountable problem facing mankind right now is what I call the ‘Double-Bitch-Bang‘ — climate change and “peak oil,” or its overall equivalent, “resource depletion” — and the rub of the matter is there’s no real big scream to do something.
Ironic humanity: Civilization requires more and more energy, and with that comes more and more climate change, and thusly, bad weather.

In reality, the weather is indeed a throwback, but not from any known time frame.
The brainiacs pose it better — from NASA:

The difference between weather and climate is a measure of time.
Weather is what conditions of the atmosphere are over a short period of time, and climate is how the atmosphere “behaves” over relatively long periods of time.
When we talk about climate change, we talk about changes in long-term averages of daily weather.

And that’s the entire point of climate change — it’s not about some far off place, but right outside everybody’s front door.

Odd how some folks have known for some time about global warming.
From USATODAY last week on a new government map and the abrupt-subtly of a warming planet:

“It is a good thing the government has updated the map,” says Woodrow Nelson, director of marketing communications for the Arbor Day Foundation.
“Our members have been noticing these climate changes for years and have been successfully growing new kinds of trees in places they wouldn’t grow before.”

And the people who deny climate change are just dumb, or belong to the Republican party, or in most denier cases, are both — from LiveScience: Low-intelligence adults tend to gravitate toward socially conservative ideologies, the study found. Those ideologies, in turn, stress hierarchy and resistance to change, attitudes that can contribute to prejudice, Hodson wrote in an email to LiveScience.
So not only does humanity have this enormous problem with actual survival, but there’s this entire cross-section of society that’s hindering any solutions — we be f*cked.
And in an age of a long-list of bad shit happening all at once, humanity is in for a rough ride.

And all this bubbling shit is intertwined — from the abstract of ‘Oil supply limits and the continuing financial crisis‘ (pdf):

Since 2005, (1) world oil supply has not increased, and (2) the world has undergone its most severe economic crisis since the Depression…
The expected impact of reduced oil supply combined with this reduced leverage is similar to the actual impact of the 2008–2009 recession in OECD countries…
If this should happen, based on these findings we can expect a continuing financial crisis similar to the 2008–2009 recession including significant debt defaults. The financial crisis may eventually worsen, to resemble a collapse situation as described by Joseph Tainter in The Collapse of Complex Societies (1990) or an adverse decline situation similar to adverse scenarios foreseen by Donella Meadows in Limits to Growth (1972).

And how are people going to respond when the time comes.
What to do? — RT took to the streets of New York to find out:

Global warming is not only wearing out our planet’s environment, but also the minds of global leaders trying to find solutions.
Legislators are introducing more and more bills to help curb the effects of climate change.
RT’s Lori Harfenist found out on the streets of the Big Apple that ordinary Americans are ready to give up something to fight global warming — but certainly not everything.
Things like quitting hairdryers and walking distances less than two miles instead of driving actually meet no resistance, but as for drying clothes on the line instead of using a spin-dryer and taking a shower for less than a minute — these things met with much less understanding.
One woman even told Lori that people “are cold and selfish”.
She said “they do not care about the planet unless it affects them personally”.
“Unfortunately that is the world we are living in”, the woman said.
Changing personal habits of energy consumption can clearly seem depressing — but might become obligatory, if global warming really does continue to affect our planet.

We all have our thoughts on those in the playground.

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