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 Thoughts destined to be washed away by the tides of life. |
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I've been studying my cover photo for a while now, and it seems to me that it is more than just a photo of what is there that can be seen, more than just three white rocks stacked on a beach. It contains an important question about the future, about what happens long after the photographer has gone. What will happen to our pile of stones when the tide comes in? Will it topple or has the architect built this structure at a safe distance? I don't know what will happen to these words that I stack here on the sand. They may prove safely distant, or they may be swallowed up by a rush of self-doubt. They may be here for a season. They may lose their balance and be scattered by the shoreline, or be hidden away under shifting sands. Perhaps someday, the tides of life will reclaim them. Or maybe that's just a bunch of poetic, romantic nonsense. After all, this is just a blog. |
| It seems the UK government is investing £50 million in a scheme to dim the Sun. The stated goal is to combat global warming. Various methods have been proposed, but the main idea is to somehow reflect sunlight back and away from Earth to cool the planet. What could go wrong, you may ask? Well, all possible catastrophic scenarios aside (including the possibility of some affected country taking exception to some other country changing its weather or indeed, the weather of the whole Earth, without anyone’s permission), what about the future of solar energy? One in every twenty buildings in the UK has solar panels on it. That’s a pretty big investment already, especially for a country not known for having too many sunny days. Do they really want less sunshine? I don’t understand how we convert to solar energy to save the planet and also dim the Sun to save the planet. I guess I don’t understand the hubris of people who think they can “save” the planet. I recycle mainly because the town council says I must in order to get my trash taken away each week. They sell quite a lot of that recycling to China. And even with all of us recycling everything possible, only about 21% of what is collected actually gets recycled for reuse. Only 5% of plastic gets recycled. But we tell people to wash out their cans and plastic bottles (which wastes water) and then we fill the air with the exhaust of huge trucks that we send out to collect them, only to find that most of them end up in that floating island of garbage in the ocean. I'm not saying we shouldn't conserve. I'm not saying we shouldn't recycle. All I am saying is that this climate thing is a little more complicated than we might believe. Maybe we should think this through before doing something extreme without knowing all the consequences? |
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