by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
A great deal is being talked and written about the fact that this huge patch of mainly plastic trash is swilling around in the South Pacific there somewhere and how dangerous that stuff is to the marine environment.
But what is being done about it? The answer to that question, it would appear, is “very little”.
This is also true with so many other environmental problems such as toxic pollution of air, water and soil from many sources.
All out energies and efforts are being spent, or so it would appear, on “combating” the supposed man-made climate change.
While we are, in some places at least, finally taking a stand against the plastic one-way grocery carrier bag, enforced with bag taxes in many places even, we are doing very little on other fronts.
When it comes to shopping, we did not have those plastic bags until about the 1980s. I wonder how we managed before. Quite nicely thanks by using reusable shopping bags of various types and materials. You went shopping you brought your own bag or bags.
Now, as a result of our laziness and the convenience of the plastic one-way grocery bag, countryside and marine environment are littered with those horrible things, which sea turtles mistake for their favorite food, jellyfish, and they die as a result. Those bags also do not look great in shrubs and trees either and while it is OK to decorate trees for Christmas, plastic carriers decaying slowly in trees in the wild does not look good at all.
But that is, to some extent, still small fry, the plastic carrier issue in general, I mean, compared with some of the serious pollution caused by vehicle exhaust (no I am not talking CO2 emissions and such here), factory chimneys, etc.
Also that pollution caused by leachage from landfill, industrial farming, and much more. The list is nigh endless.
Very little, nowadays, is talked about those problems; in the 1960s and 1970s they were always in our view and on the agenda, though.
The supposed man-made “global warming”, now renamed to “climate change” agenda supplanted it all and all energy has gone and is going into fighting something that, more likely than not, we have absolutely no control over an d can do nothing about. On that score we must adapt; as to the other issues there is much that can be done, however.
We are, for instance, running our of holes in the ground where to put our garbage, that is to say, we are running out of spaces for landfill and that very fast. That is why we are n ow exporting our garbage to Third World countries to b e buried in the ground there. This is not sustainable.
Reducing the rubbish that we produce, reusing, upcycling and recycling is the answer, the only answer here and it is not rocket science and all that what is left over after that, and there is always some, go either, as in the case of organic material, to make compost, or to the incinerator where energy is produced during the burning process. That's how we must tackle that problem.
On the other hand, it would appear that some people require training and instruction as to what can and cannot go into the recycling bins.
All too often a whole batch of recyclables gets contaminated because of a couple of items that should not have been put into that bin, and that batch will then have to go to landfill.
Then we have air pollution and much of this is due to the exhaust fumes from motorcars. This situation will also not be improved if gasoline and diesel are replaced by ethanol and bio-diesel. The only answer is a reduction in use of vehicles with the internal combustion engine.
The fumes from road traffic are also now seen as the cause – or the potential cause – for road rage incidents and for them increasing in frequency and ferocity.
I am no scientist in that field but it could be possible seeing how many cars are on the roads nowadays and the often stationary or nigh stationary traffic. The pollution caused from such slow-moving traffic is much higher anyhow.
Diesel has its own special challenge, and bio-diesel will, more than likely have the same, and that are the particles set free, which have been found to be one of the main causing agents of the increase of the case of asthma in the people of the developed world. Cheers!
The much talked about Pacific Garbage Patch and its problem also should not be so difficult one to sort. There must be a way of picking the stuff up with some kind of vessel. It may mean converting a trawler or similar boat to go and “pick” that garbage floating about up. Surely this is not rocket science either.
However, all efforts are being spent on the favorite hobby at present; that of “combating man-made climate change” and the mantra goes on and on about that.
Once again I like to reiterate that yes, the climate is changing, and that all around the world, but it is, more than likely not something that man is responsible for – though may be a little bit – but which is a wobbly Mother Earth throws every so often. Our problem is that we must adapt and tackle those environmental issues that we really can deal with.
The science, as appears to be proven by contents of the material “liberated” from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, is not as accurate as made out and dependent to a great degree on computer predictions running on the GIGO system, and thus one can, more or less, get the results one want to get.
The world's climate is definitely going through changes but... the world's climate has been doing that all the time with some smaller and some larger impacts.
Today man wants to be G-d and control events that our ancestors took for “acts of G-d” or “of the g-ds” and adapted to the changes.
The Earth has been going through cycles like this all the time and at times it would appear – from old writings and how things were – that such changes were rather fast, at other times rather slow.
During the initial period of the Vikings settling on Greenland the island was covered by meadows and forests and a few hundred years later ice came, so it would appear, upon the island rather rapidly.
We then have been in a somewhat colder period until about the seventeenth century, which also happens to coincide with the start of the Industrial Revolution, when the temperatures began to slowly rise again. The they took off a little more in the twentieth century and rose to a level where the glaciers in many places melt and the polar ice.
A university from Australia announced in 2008 that they found that the global temperatures had stopped rising and, in fact, according to them, plateaued out, and have not risen by even a fraction since. That is now somewhere in the region of seven years or more.
But, I hear you say, the polar sea ice is melting, etc. Yes, and this melting of ice and glaciers will continue for it is warmer than it has been before and, because there is now more ocean – dark surface – to absorb the sun's rays the melt will continue until the temperatures will fall again.
Some sources, including NASA, are predicting that we are going to head for a new small mini ice age in the near future, based on the sun spots and such, and also the people from the Old Farmer's Almanac are predicting the same and they have rarely been wrong, so I understand.
Our real concern, however, should be to clean up our Planet Earth and stop killing water, air and soil and with it, basically, ourselves.
Let's do it and do the Planet some good, and, oh, while we are at it, watch what we do with our garbage, all of us, so we do not add to the big Pacific Garbage Patch.
© 2010
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