Ohio & Erie Canal towpath coming into Cleveland - foto by Smith

Lady found a paved bike & hike path that follows the old Ohio & Erie Canal towpath. The canal was dug in 1827 to transport goods between Cleveland and Akron and beyond, before the railroads took over in the 1860s.

Great place to ride. The start of the paved path is one block south, while the MetroPark canal / nature portion is only a mile or two further. Today we saw 32 rabbits, two bright red cardinals, three red-winged blackbirds, three dozen geese, seven ducks, and a badger-like animal with a long wide thick low body that was too fast for me to identify.

Ohio & Erie Canal towpath coming into Cleveland - foto by Smith

Earth’s new canary in the mines: amphibians - foto by Smith

Be very very afraid.

There are three strikes against reducing global warming gases: China, India and the USA. If these three countries don’t reduce carbon emissions by a major factor, global warming continues at an unprecedented pace. And of course both China and India have stated they have NO intention of reducing toxic emissions - in fact both have stepped up their use of dirty coal.

And to be honest, the USA isn’t doing anything about gas reduction either. Neither are England, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Mexico, etc on anon.

Before 2000, greenhouse gases were increasing at slightly less than 1% a year. Since 2000 when we decided we had to reduce them to save humanity, the released gases have increased almost 4 times to 3.5% a year. Way to go Earth guys.

So the earth scientists are going to plan B - geo-engineering the planet. Scientists who can’t even make a safe plastic bottle for babies are talking of manually altering the earth’s climate. These are the same people who produce anti-dizzy pills whose side effects include dizziness, anti-depression pills whose side effects include massive depression leading to suicide, and nuclear power plants at Three Mile Island that melt down. One of my favorite science triumphs is heroin - the scientists decided that opium and morphine were too addictive as pain killers so created heroin as a safe substitute - of course when they were done they discovered their non-addictive product was actually five times more addictive than opium.

Here are just a few of the things these same people are talking of trying:

“Injecting the air with particles to reflect sunlight

“Volcanic eruptions release huge amounts of sulphate particles into the upper atmosphere, where they reflect sunlight. After Mount Pinatubo erupted in 1991, sulphates reflected enough sunlight to cool the Earth by 0.5C for a year or two. The Nobel Laureate Paul Crutzen suggested in 2006 that it may be possible to inject artificial sulphate particles into the upper atmosphere — the stratosphere. However, the idea does not address ocean acidification caused by rising CO2 levels. There may be side-effects such as acid rain and adverse effects on agriculture.

“Creating low clouds over the oceans

“Another variation on the theme of increasing the Earth’s albedo, or reflectivity to sunlight, is to pump water vapour into the air to stimulate cloud formation over the sea. John Latham of the United States National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado is working with Stephen Salter of Edinburgh University and Mike Smith at Leeds to atomise seawater to produce tiny droplets to form low-level maritime clouds that cover part of the oceanic surface. The only raw material is seawater and the process can be quickly turned off. The cloud cover would only affect the oceans, but still lower global temperatures.

“Fertilising the sea with iron filings

“This idea arises from the fact that the limiting factor in the multiplication of phytoplankton — tiny marine plants — is the lack of iron salts in the sea. When scientists add iron to “dead” areas of the sea, the result is a phytoplankton bloom which absorbs CO2. The hope is that carbon taken up by the microscopic plants will sink to deep layers of the ocean, and be taken out of circulation. Experiments support the idea, but blooms may be eaten by animals so carbon returns to the atmosphere as CO2.

“Mixing the deep water of the ocean

“The Earth scientist James Lovelock, working with Chris Rapley of the Science Museum in London, devised a plan to put giant tubes into the seas to take surface water rich in dissolved CO2 to lower depths where it will not surface. The idea is to take CO2 out of the short-term carbon cycle, cutting the gas in the atmosphere. Critics say it may bring carbon locked away in the deep ocean to the surface.

“Giant mirrors in space

“Some scientists suggest it would be possible to deflect sunlight with a giant mirror or a fleet of small mirrors between the Earth and the Sun. The scheme would be costly and prompt debate over who controls it. Many scientists see it as contrary to the idea of working with the Earth’s systems.”

This is from alternet.org/environment/116743/are_%27hail_mary%27_technological_solutions_our_only_hope_to_prevent_disastrous_climate_change/?page=2

Earth’s number 1 polluter- foto by Smith

stuff - foto by smith

From 1990 through 2000, global warming greenhouse gases increased less than 1% each year. Since 2000 when the world began actively trying to reduce greenhouse emissions, they’ve increased 3.5% a year. We decide to get cleaner, get dirtier instead - around 400% worse.

Way to go Earth.

When I think of the future, I keep my surface cool but there’s dark things running beneath howling fool moon fear like death and life and the never ending in-between. I catch glimpses of these strange critters and think best not to follow too closely because these equations have no balance, no ending, no answer, are quicksands for hope.

I have a world view but no world pew or world tool so all I can do is work on me, help Lady, and try to do no more harm than I’ve already done.

As Mister Rogers sang, “Brighten the corner where you are.” Makes your life better, makes the lives of those around you a wee bit lighter. That’s about all we can hope for. The rest is spreading gloom and encroaching doom and real life reel live sci-fi disaster movies without any Steve McQueens or Paul Newmans to save the day or show the way.

Quien sigue? / Who’s next? - foto by smith

Gaia - foto by smith

If I’ve gotten it right, the way this Planet Game works is a rich planet is seeded with life which quickly multiples, complexifies, evolvifies as it marches up the food chain and inevitably at an ever-faster rate consumes / poisons / destroys the planet.

The secret is the planet is rich enough to keep us alive just long enough for us to get to the breaking point where we either run out of planet and die, or else further evolve into a friendlier less toxic species that learns to live with the planet and each other.

Right now I’m betting on option A - run out of planet and die.

Though there’s always hope. Maybe humans will reach some critical mass mind soon and break through to ESP so we can’t cheat each other, or aliens will come down and teach us to live as one, or some God will appear and set us straight, or global warming will get so bad that we have to get good, or some other dumb Deus Ex Machina as yet unknown will come along and save us or teach us to save ourselves and we’ll all live happily ever after . . . but I don’t think so. I think we have to save ourselves, and I do not believe we’re doing it.

Welcome to Earth Busters R Us.

grave situation - foto by smith

citysong - foto by smith

Wanna hear “feeeeeeed meeeeee” multiplied by eight billion hungry angry voices like an outtake from some George Romero zombie flick? Well, it looks like we might be heading that way.

In 1940, one calorie of fossil-fuel energy produced 2.3 calories of food energy to eat.

In 2008, it takes 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce one calorie of modern supermarket food.

“The way we feed ourselves contributes more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than anything else we do — as much as 37 percent, according to one study.”

“Chemical fertilizers (made from natural gas), pesticides (made from petroleum), farm machinery, modern food processing and packaging and transportation” have made it so “when we eat from the industrial-food system, we are eating oil and spewing greenhouse gases.”

[ quotes from Farmer In Chief by Michael Pollan, The New York Times Oct 9, 2008 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/magazine/12policy-t.html ]

This is a cogent, coherent article which offers hope, because after clearly laying out why we cannot continue growing cheap food due to lack of cheap oil, it explains how we can fix the problem and make our health and lives better in the process.

More Michael Pollan:

“Spending on health care has risen from 5 percent of national income in 1960 to 16 percent today.

“Four of the top 10 killers in America today are chronic diseases linked to diet: heart disease, stroke, Type 2 diabetes and cancer.

“In the past several months more than 30 nations have experienced food riots, and so far one government has fallen.

“The current food system — characterized by monocultures of corn and soy in the field and cheap calories of fat, sugar and feedlot meat on the table — is not simply the product of the free market. Rather, it is the product of a specific set of government policies that sponsored a shift from solar (and human) energy on the farm to fossil-fuel energy.

“The U.S.D.A. estimates that Americans throw out 14 percent of the food they buy; much more is wasted by retailers, wholesalers and institutions.

“Meat and milk production represent the food industry’s greatest burden on the environment; a recent U.N. study estimated that the world’s livestock alone account for 18 percent of all greenhouse gases, more than all forms of transportation combined. (According to one study, a pound of feedlot beef also takes 5,000 gallons of water to produce . . . a bushel of grain takes a half gallon of oil to produce.)

“40 percent of the world’s grain output today is fed to animals; 11 percent of the world’s corn and soybean crop is fed to cars and trucks.

“The Centers for Disease Control estimates that one in three American children born in 2000 will develop Type 2 diabetes. The public needs to know and see precisely what that sentence means: blindness; amputation; early death. All of which can be avoided by a change in diet and lifestyle.

“When a single factory is grinding 20 million hamburger patties in a week or washing 25 million servings of salad, a single terrorist armed with a canister of toxins can, at a stroke, poison millions. Such a system is equally susceptible to accidental contamination: the bigger and more global the trade in food, the more vulnerable the system is to catastrophe.”

Welcome to the future flux. May you live in interesting times.

PS - It takes 2.5 liters of water to make and bottle one liter of Coke, and 250 liters of water to grow the sugar cane used in the mix. Two hundred fifty-two and a half liters of water used to get one liter of Coca-Cola. That’s priceless.

feedme - foto by smith