farmviews & opinions…

…in Southern Norway…

global warming…

When the slightly more serious issues surrounding what we call global warming caught public attention a few years ago, I had but one reaction: what took you all so long?.

Strong warnings have been issued since the mid 1980' about the potentially negative effects our unlimited release of greenhouse gasses and other pollutants extracted from non-renevable resources into our environments may have on a global scale. Nothing but refined models and calculations, and confirmations of earlier observations, have surfaced in the last two decades.

It doesn't really matter that there are other, quite natural, forces at play here, and that we only know a fraction of what's going on and only understand a fraction of what we know. Global warming is just one of the more significant signs that we're mismanaging ourselves and our local and global environments.

Day in and day out we're literally pollution our own and each others' water wells and front and back yards in the name of “progress”, and don't seem to notice or care. The air-quality is so low in many places that the sunshine can't get through properly and it is hard to breathe, and those polluting the air the most are only waiting for the wind to blow their dirt somewhere else. Nuts, but a reality, and nothing of substance is done to curb the madness.

Lots of talk and promises, followed by protectionism, resulting in little to nothing positive. Widespread complacency and policies tailored for the respective player's voters and national and global economic heavy-weights, and not for a sustaniable future for us all.

A small percentage of the world's population contribute the most to global destruction, and they make sure they are being well paid for doing so. I guess we all would like to get paid well, but if all of us follow the examples of the leading few to get there, we'll probably destroy our earth and ourselves in the process – global warming or not.

unbelievable…?

I guess we simply don't want to believe that we contribute to destabilization and potentially destruction of life as we know it simply by living as we've been told and grown accustomed to. We don't want to believe that human activities can have global effects of the destructive and lasting kind, and we certainly don't want to pay for our contributions.

We're used to nature as an uncontrollable and at times somewhat unpredictable, but in the long run a quite stable force that can take whatever we throw at it. Local damage to nature, yes, but global?

Yes, nature can deal with the most nasty fruits of our activities, but we may not like how it deals with them. That's the key point here, as it isn't nature as such that'll experience problems, it is us and all living beings that rely on a somewhat stable nature. That stability is showing signs of slipping, and this time it seems like we humans are the ones tipping the balance in a, for us, negative direction.

getting the balance right…

We all know, or should know, that controlled amounts of certain greenhouse gasses and other substances generally regarded as pollutants, can improve our natural environments, locally. It is all about getting the balance right, as life thrives when well-balanced amounts of the right substances are distributed in the correct ways in the right places. Where nature is prepared to absorb and make full use of what we serve it, we get the improved and healthy growth we most likely want.

It is the unbalanced, uncontrolled and often excessive amounts of substances that are distributed in all the wrong places, that are destructive. Where nature isn't prepared to absorb and make use of what we serve it, we get mostly negative effects and unwanted spreading of potentially dangerous substances. Doesn't matter what substances we're referring to, since all substances that are “out of balance” with local nature are potentially dangerous for that environment – and for those of us who live there.

Farmers and gardeners know, or at least should know, how important the natural, local, balance is. Too little of the right substances is usually ok in that they'll do no harm and are likely to improve product quality and/or quantity somewhat. Too much of any substance is most likely to be detrimental within a short or longer timeframe. Get it wrong once, and it may take quite a bit of time for nature to correct the error – our error.

Now, imagine that your neighbors are dumping all sorts of known and unknown substances onto your land, because they don't know what effects they'll have and don't want to deal with them themselves. You may as well stop imagining, since many of your neighbors are acting like that all the time. We know their dumping as airborne and waterborne pollution, and it is entering your area and altering the local natural balance right now, and this activity has been going on for quite a while.

Even minute quantities of the wrong substances may ruin local soil, air and water conditions, and you wouldn't know the effects until they have become fairly visible, and may never figure out exactly what to do about the problem or how to prevent it. Nice “neighbors” you have, and they are spread all over the world so it can be a bit hard to find out who dumped what in your area.

That air, water and soil everywhere are constantly being seeded with various amounts of various substances from everywhere, doesn't make control, prevention and countermeasures any easier. The problem is global – although not evenly distributed and experienced, and the solutions must be global also.

quantify effects…?

I can't quantify how much of an effect human activities have on the various climatic changes we're all noticing and talking about, but I'm pretty certain we do have an effect and that it isn't a good one – for humans and life on earth as we have grown accustomed to.

Our climate is affected not only by naturally occurring phenomenas, but also by man-made ones. Some say our contribution is too small to matter on a global scale, but I'll say our contribution is too large and may already have crossed some natural tresholds in many areas, and that we know too little about the potential consequences both on local and a global scale to continue playing with nature this way.

During the last century we have extracted large amounts of stored organic matter, matter that it has taken nature millions of years to deposit and convert deep down – what we know as fossil fuel. We use this fossil fuel as convenient sources of energy to drive our industrialized world, and thereby redistribute its various components back to the earth's surface-layers, oceans and atmosphere.

The extraction and use of fossil fuel have peaked during the last few decades, and this sudden release of stored natural components seems to have tipped nature's balance in a direction that causes conserns. Rightfully so since we can't expect nature to be unaffected by such a sudden shift, and no-one can say for certain how badly this will affect us – only that it will.

Yet, what most of us complain about right now is higher cost and lower availability of energy derived from fossil fuel. We want more of the stuff that destroys our environment, we want it cheaper and we want it now. This reaction is not surprising, but it doesn't make sense.

Not to worry, we will find more reasons to complain as time goes by. There is after all only so much of the stuff deposited down there, and most of what we can get to will be brought to the surface in a few centuries – make that a few decades for oil, and energy derived from fossil fuel won't become cheaper over time.

why the delay…?

We'll be weaned off fossil fuel sooner or later, whether we want to or not. Repairing the damage a few centuries of fairly unlimited extraction and use of fossil fuel would have done to our habitats, will become harder and harder the longer this weaning-off period lasts though.

Sooner rather than later we'll have to stop using fossil fuel altogether, and focus on scraping the waste-products from what we have already used out of our environment and store them back where they belong – under ground, or find other ways to counteract the negative effects. Nature will of course succeed if we leave the entire cleaning-process to it, but the process will probably be too slow and take too long to be of much good to us.

Harvesting, using and recycling nature's regular, anual, energy-production properly, and not add anything that can't be 100% recycled with no negative effects, is the only way we humans can assure that we don't offset the environmental balance we rely on. Once we're (back) at that stage, we can only hope that nature doesn't throw in too many nasty surprices, as there isn't much we can do to control it.

Natural and man-made incidents wreak havoc somewhere around the globe all the time, and if one isn't living in the worst hit areas it's as if not much has happened a short time after such an incident. We humans are blessed with the ability to forget pretty quickly, an ability that normally makes our lives easier. Of course this “forgetfulness” can be deadly in this context, so it is convenient to forget about that too.

Having to deal with environmental changes that we're not prepared for, may be an unpleasant and even deadly experience, but I guess we've been “asking” for it for so long that we'll have no real reason to complain even when it is at its worst. It is a pity those that probably will be hardest hit are not the ones that have been at the forefront of “asking” for global warming though.

business as usual – for now…

That living beings destroy their own habitats so they can no longer live well there, is quite common. Consentrate and keep animals or humans, and the fruits of their activities, within an area, and they will sooner or later have overused and ruined that area. What's different now is that humans have become better at dispersing the fruits of their activities outside their own areas – keep their own areas somewhat livable for longer by exporting destructive factors to surrounding areas and forget them.

Of course, sooner or later there will be no unaffected areas left as a result of such an “export destructive factors” strategy, and global destruction becomes a fact. I think we're pretty well there now, and have entered a phase that largely consists of blame-games about origins and causes, and politically and economically attractive but mostly ineffective (and often harmful) approaches towards short and long term solutions.

This tends to obscure the problems rather than solve them, but many live in hope that obscuring and largely ignoring the rising problems will make all their problems go away as by magic. It's a childrens game, but the most “hopeful” are of course right in the sense that they are probably dead before all human habitats are seriously affected. Maybe that's not exactly the solution they hoped for though, and their legacy won't exactly shine.

our future doesn't look good…

Consuming more than we need and wasting a whole lot more while we're at it, are not doing any good for our habitats and the species we share them and the globe as a whole with. The dodo is just one of the many species we humans have killed off for good, and the number of species that become extinct mainly because of human activities is increasing year by year.

Destroying at a distance seems to be most common these days, since we're releasing more and more pollution into our atmosphere, rivers and oceans. This does of course mean plenty of it will end up in all the wrong places, and become global problems with no return-addresses.

Our destructive methods and excuses for applying them, are becoming increasingly sophisticated. I wouldn't be surpriced to find that there are handed out revards, like one or more Nobel prizes, for particularly clever destruction-methods and excuses.

We're busy exporting most of our problems to the next generations, and in my view that most certainly is no better than exporting them out of sight in ones own time. I think we should be careful about exporting our solutions to the next generations also, as our “solutions” tend to have even worse effects over time than our problems.

Minimizing the human footprint is probably the best, although for now a bit utopian, solution. Utopian in the sense that we've grown accustomed to being wasteful and will have a hard time adjusting. The most wasteful of us are even exporting our custom to the rest of the world as best we can, which makes it even more difficult to argue that it's a bad custom – now and in the future.

I think we'll have problems setting the record straight for generations to come, which means the cost of righting wrongs will keep on growing and growing. It is not about money anymore…

slightly optimistic…

Since more and more of us are noticing the negative effects of the changes we have introduced to the environments we have based living “as we know it” on up until now, I'm ever so slightly optimistic for the future. Nothing fundamentally wrong with changes as long as we can survive the effects, but maybe enough of us will do something about the effects too – before it becomes a question about survival.

We can do a lot to minimize the negative and strengthen the positive effects of changes. Some already are, but so far the negative forces are dominating the scene – counteracting any and all good work. This has to change, or else the changes may be too hard to deal with for too many of us.

Status quo isn't sustainable no matter how we look at it, so almost any change may be seen as a good one as long as it moves us away from the present way of thinking and living – even if it has to mean partial or total destruction of life “as we know it”.

Either we do find and implement sustainable ways to manage ourselves, our livelihoods and the environments we rely on, or we're pretty well doomed to feel the negative effects of our own stupidity one way or another. It is just a matter of time, and we're not using time to our advantage.

I don't really fear even the worst scenarios caused by global warming and environmental destruction. A small ice age following the initial warming can only do good in the parts of the world where I live. Nature will survive one way or another, even if we don't. I just hate to know that we humans are part of the problem but not of the solution.

Maybe this time…

sincerely  georg; sign

Hageland 10.aug.2008
last rev: 27.aug.2008

farmviews & opinions…

We want more of the stuff that destroys our environment, we want it cheaper and we want it now.

I wouldn't be surpriced to find that there are handed out revards, like one or more Nobel prizes, for particularly clever destruction-methods and excuses.
— Georg

If it can't be recycled and/or revitalized, then it's probably not worth buying into.
— Georg


farming…
…2000 - 2008