by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
The environmental crisis upon humankind today is not just climate change and global burning, if it is man-made. This is just one problem.
We are faced, however, with a far larger environmental crisis than just that; a crisis of enormous magnitude, a magnitude that we have never encountered before. At least humankind has not.
Climate change is, falsely, where erroneously or purposely, the jury is out on that at the moment, for way too much of the environmental crisis of present and some of the happenings, like rainforest logging is falsely claimed to cause and increase greenhouse gas emissions. Now let's get back onto the carpet here.
Why are we just playing on climate change? There are many other aspects that are equally it nor more important even.
Is climate change being used for something else?
The ordinary admonishments of recycling, waste reduction and environmental protection in order to clean up Mother Earth did not work well enough and people in the quest for ever more things and wealth ignored them, ever since the late 1960s when they began.
So, I guess, a new tack needed to be found and used; enter climate change, and the claims that it is being caused by human activities.
In the 1970s, the early years of that decade, we were told that a new Ice Age was upon us and that it was caused by pollution that we were putting into the air, in that case carbon monoxide pollution, and the fact that the Sahara increasing and such was put forward as the sign for this new Ice Age.
They then wanted people to stop using the internal combustion engine motorcar and when scaring did not work, well, enter the “oil crisis”. People control as per Henry Kissinger.
That only worked for a short period but people accepted the car-less Sundays quite nicely, thank you. Still things went back to normal and then rather abnormal for a time.
Then came the Ozone layer, or better the hole in same, over the Antarctic and man was blamed again; in this instance CFCs and such like, and they were banned. Now it has been found that it would appear that the hole in the Ozone layer in fact prevents the Planet from overheating. But, drat, the hole is now getting smaller. We had to mess around again. Our scientists knew it all.
Yes, the climate of Mother Earth is changing but is it CO2 or is it, as it really would appear to be, one of those more or less regular wobbly that Mother throws. My bets and that of many others, scientists included, is on the latter, with man not being guiltless either.
However, we have a serious problem with, say brown cloud in the Himalayas which is causing glacial melt, and pollution also could be responsible, general pollution, as it was always assumed in the 1960s and 1070s for much of the environmental problems that we have.
Indeed it is pollution that is a greater culprit in t he destruction of the Planet and loss of habitat, etc., than other things. Poisoned water, soil and air, are causing not just us, humankind, problems with breathing and other health issues; it also causes loss of wildlife and habitat.
Dying forests are more a result, more often than not, of poisoned soil or air than of climate change. But climate change and the supposed fight to reverse it – good luck – has pushed other environmental issues, often much more pressing, to the back burner.
So, while, if we can reverse climate change we may end up with slightly cooler Planet it may no longer inhabitable, at least not to humankind, because water, soil and air simply is too polluted to sustain human life. Not much use, I would say.
Therefore we concentrate on climate change alone to the detriment of other environmental issues at our peril and we must remember that not everything is a result of so-called climate change and any rising temperatures. And they are not rising all over the globe anyway.
© 2010
