Sunset over W. Europe (source). Enjoy it while you can. The Earth says “it’s payback time…”
These. Things. Are. Not. Suppose. To. Happen.
According to the Beebs, the Doomsday Clock was reset to three minutes till noon. But don’t panic… You’ve nowhere to hide anyway…
Many people are soooo worried because of the mild winter, ice melting, global warming, hurricanes and so on. Yet I haven’t heard of any that would (as a consequence of those warnings) start recycling their trash, who would stop the water in the toilet before all those 15 liters of drinking water are flushed away, who would turn off the lights more often and so on. 🙁
That and… say… turning our cars into hybrids… Apparently it cost no more than EUR 1500… I don’t have that kind of money but with a propper government subsidy…
Well, things may start moving after the worldwide financial loss due to climate changes has been estimated and presented in form of numbers to the global public.
In my opinion, it is stupid to change things because of money (to put it really very simply) – we should be able to live in and with our environment and take care of it.
Also, I am not able to believe that Earthlings on the whole are capable to stop anything. And I don’t think this is called pessimism.
Now, the Germans are partly optimistic because for a limited period of time they will get a Medeiterranean climate and won’t have to travel all the way to Italy or Croatia… But I’m not really sure whether one can survive days and days of 40 °C very well – I can’t. We had 38 °C in 2003 and one of the biggest warehouses had to switch to manual billing because their hardware fell out in the heat…
Believe it or not – things have already started moving… General Motors has (again) unveiled its hybrid car but only because Toyota is rapidly gaining ground with its hybrid cars in USA, causing huge losses to GM. The latter was at the forefront of hybric cars in early 90s, but all the protorypes were scrapped along with the blueprints, which turned out to be the biggest long term blunder in history of automotive industry.
Well, I stopped believing the “one person can’t make a change” mantra. Must admit that I was on the sceptics (or at best fatalists) list regarding that question, but the fact is that changing your own attitude for the better is as beneficial as feasible. Certainly won’t make things go worse…After seeing the Gore movie and (as a result) read much more on the topic, I’ve actually started heavily to recycle paper, plastic and aerosols, try to turn off lights as much as I can, turn off appliances (instead of leaving them on stand-by), etc. Might sound like typical new-age-style conversion, but in fact, I believ that trying (if not perfectly) is better than no trying at all. One by one we might at least ease the symptoms, if the process really can’t be reversed anymore. Cynicism aside, let’s give it a shot!
I agree completely… I started saving energy – for starters. And I’m sure that if all do a little, we can do a lot. Especially because we’ve nowhere to hide 🙂