No, We Didn't Do That

Tom Friedman is a great writer. When my son bought me The World is Flat, Friedman’s masterpiece book, I was in awe of his insight and rare ability to put things in a context that we lay people can understand. The book helped me – and so many other folks – understand that we really are in a global economy, so we’d better get with the program!

But now comes his New York Times column “Did We Do That?” in which he thankfully stops short of answering “yes,” that we humans are responsible for the crappy weather that Friedman believes is occurring more frequently.

“I’d never seen that before,” he noted after seeing the “wild and prehistoric” smoke billowing out of mountain caverns from the expansive fires of southern California.

The day before, after playing golf in Washington, D.C. and observing the lack of fall colors, Friedman was moved to write…… “I’d never seen that before.”

I think Tom leads a sheltered life. To be sure, these massive fires are, thankfully, a once-in-a-lifetime experience for most folks. But chasers of beautiful fall colors have often been disappointed with their findings, long before we knew about carbon emissions.

“One should never extrapolate about climate change from any single weather event or season…” writes Friedman, and then he promptly joins the fray of doomsdayers who genuinely believe that mankind is singlehandedly going to hell – or rather creating it – right here on earth.

Thankfully, his column moves to a criticism about man’s inability to create good infrastructure – like levees that could have better protected New Orleans during hurricane Katrina. Now that’s a line of thinking that makes sense.

Let me offer an answer to the question posed in Friedman’s column. "No, we didn’t do that.” Oh, we may have unwisely contributed to it in an immeasurably miniscule way, but that contribution pales in the face of what Mother Nature can and does introduce into our environment. Not that we shouldn’t clean up our act and be friendlier to our environment, but let’s please not overestimate the impact that we humans have on the cosmos.

I applaud Friedman for introducing us to Dr. Heidi Cullen’s notion that people need to get more focused on an infrastructure suffering from a “creaky power grid or leaky water pipe.” That’s something we really can impact – big time.

In the meantime, if Tom Friedman won’t suggest that we humans are a primary cause of record high and low temperatures, we South Dakotans won’t claim responsibility for the beautiful Indian summer we’re enjoying.

Lawrence County Next?

On a late winter day earlier this year, the temperature topped 83 degrees at Rapid City airport. It was just March 20th, but that temperature was high enough to land a place in the record books as the warmest March 20th on record – and the warmest day in March since records have been kept.

Now that might sound like a harbinger of “global warming.” As readers of this blog well know, I believe there is global warming, but I doubt we humans have as much impact on it as we might think. And it borders upon the ridiculous to think that we can have much impact on changing the climate.

Nonetheless, as it has done for millennia, climate change will provide us with an endless variety of irregular hot, cold, wet and dry weather. Unfortunately, if the past is any indication, severe weather will take a heavy toll.

While efforts to alter climate change may be laughable, there are many things we can and should do to be user-friendly to Mother Earth. And there are some common sense things we should be doing in anticipation of severe weather that dogs South Dakota constantly, ranging from drought and flooding to severe thunderstorms and blizzards.

StormReady is a nationwide preparedness program created to help community leaders and emergency managers strengthen local safety programs by providing guidelines embraced by the National Weather Service.

It’s encouraging to see our good friends in Butte County take steps to have their county designated a StormReady Community by the National Weather Service. Among other things, that means they have established a 24-hour warning point and emergency operations center; they have multiple methods to receive severe weather forecasts and warnings and to alert the public; the have the capability to monitor local weather conditions; and they train severe weather spotters and hold emergency exercises.

Congratulations to Butte County Emergency Management Director Misty Peck and the other Butte county folks who’ve put together the resources to earn this designation. It’s no guarantee for avoiding disaster, but it reflects good planning and meaningful efforts to mitigate the impact of severe storms.

They’ve installed sirens to warn boaters and campers of storms approaching the Belle Fourche Reservoir, developed a safety plan for the Black Hills Roundup Grounds, and have nurtured a high level of participation in the Skywarn spotter program of the National Weather Service. I’m proud that many of my fellow amateur radio operators are active Skywarn spotters.
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On Tuesday, October 2, 2007, Susan Sanders (left) and Dave Montgomery (right) from the Rapid City office of the National Weather Service delivered to the courthouse in Belle Fourche the official designation of Butte County as a StormReady County. Emergency Management Director Misty Peck (center) receives the designation.

We hope other Black Hills counties won’t be far behind.

Love the Taste -- Hate the Waste!

I’ve been a fan of tap water for years. I guffawed and grumbled when we moved to Mississippi and started buying big bottles of water and a cooler. But water pipes In Mississippi don’t have to be buried so deep to escape the frost line like they do in Nebraska and the Dakotas – so my ready supply of cold tap water was no longer available. I became a consumer of the cooler.

By the time we moved to Pennsylvania (ah, back to cold tap water) we’d started using filtered water pitchers in the refrigerator.

Along the way, a related phenomenon began. Bottled water started popping up on store shelves. And we started buying it!

Having grown up in the 40s and 50s, we had water on the playground at school, in the park, at the theatre....it was everywhere – and it was free!

More importantly, it was safe and clean. Oh, Karen would sometimes complain that the water was too hard – too many minerals in it – making it less than ideal for laundry and something of a nuisance when it would eventually clog the insides of water pipes.

Still, I have difficulty comprehending that we Americans would pay cold hard cash for a small plastic bottle of water. It is so universally abundant in the United States, and yet -- about one billion people on the planet (1 of every 6) do not have a reliable source of drinking water.

Thankfully, recent revelations about the bottled water industry have jolted my sensibilities and rejuvenated my appreciation for tap water.

Americans pay through the nose to manufacture plastic bottles, ship them to the island nation of Fiji in the South Pacific, have them filled with water, then shipped back to the United States! Next to sugar and tourism, water may well be Fiji's greatest export since Vijay Singh hit the golf circuit.

Pepsi-Cola’s recent admission that its “Aquafina” brand of bottled water comes from public water taps was – for many of us – not a surprising revelation. Public water supplies have always been closely regulated, while the bottled water industry has enjoyed barely a nod from federal regulators. At least the folks at Pepsi have fessed up to their deeds and promise to re-label the product with a forthright statement about the source of their water.

A growing number of opponents to the bottled water industry cite the enormous energy required to provide bottled water – and they point to the burgeoning problem of landfills, parks, and other public places that are laden with empty bottles. I believe they’re right. Kudos to the mayors of San Francisco and other cities who’re leading the charge.

I plan to return to the days of yore – drinking more water from a glass. I’ll probably keep a plastic bottle or two at the ready for biking and traveling – filled with fresh, clean, safe water…..from our kitchen tap!

Don't Sweat It!

Retired newspaper columnist Charley Reese hasn’t really retired, he’s just not on the payroll of the Orlando Sentinel anymore. Fortunately for us, his columns keep popping up on the internet.

I was delighted when I saw Charley’s piece Don’t sweat over cries about global warming, because it so closely reflects my views on the subject. Basically, Charley reminds us that there’s nothing we human beings can do to alter the climate.

He writes, “It takes a monstrously large ego to presume to see into the future and to pretend that one can change the course of Earth’s climate. We have no control over the amount of energy the sun radiates; we have no control over Earth’s magnetic field; and we have no control over Earth’s volcanoes. We have no control over the Earth’s atmosphere. What humans inject into it amounts to little more than a cosmic passing of gas.”

Bravo! And right on! Of course, this doesn't mean we should be oblivious to the impact we have on the environment. Less pollution is good. More re-cycling is good. Let's just not get silly about how much we really affect the environment.

Charley suggests that we’d do better to pay attention to our families, work in our gardens, read some good books, and listen to some beautiful music.

Alas, my only beef with Charley’s column of June 7, 2007, was his cynicism when he wrote, “…Earth’s climate will be the same. Most everything will be the same. The babble will go on. The decayed culture of America will continue to rot.”

While I share Charley’s concern about a decaying culture in America, that IS something we can affect. We Americans would do well to re-focus our concerns from fears of global warming to finding ways to stem the tide of a decaying culture and help restore the U.S.A. to the greatness our country enjoyed not so very long ago.

Sweepers...Man Your Brooms!

As a young sailor in the 1960s, I remember an evening at rest on the fantail of the USS Saratoga – at anchor in the Mediterranean Sea – gazing at the reflection of the moon atop a seemingly endless ocean. Heady stuff for a kid from landlocked Nebraska.

“Jeez, Chief,” I commented to a salty Chief Petty Officer next to me, “that’s a lot of water.”

“Yup, son,” he drawled in his crusty but authoritative style, “and that's just the top of it.”

That fleeting moment left me with a lingering respect for the enormity and wonder of our planet. That perspective, however, didn’t stop me or any of the thousands of sailors aboard hundreds of ships in our navy, from throwing trash off the stern of the ship. It was, after all, a nightly routine we were directed to follow – instigated by the Boatswains Mate’s nightly announcement over the 1MC speaker system. “Sweepers, sweepers, man your brooms and give the ship a clean sweepdown fore and aft. Take all trash to the fantail.” And take it…and more…. we did. I shudder when I think about the many items given the “Deep Six.” Some “garbage” had to be taken to the fantail with a hand truck!

But my conversion to treating Mother Earth more kindly didn’t occur overnight. Largely through the unflagging efforts of my wife over many years, I became a believer in recycling. And appropriately disposing of batteries, spent oil, etc.

I recall the devastation and loss of lives (some 250,000) from the tsunamis that swelled from the 2004 earthquake in the Indian Ocean. The sobering experience from the eruption of Mount St. Helen’s in 1980. Of course, these occurred in the short snippet of history called “my lifetime,” and I was keenly aware of them, due largely to a modern communications system that spewed out more facts, history, video and still photos than most of us could absorb.

Having become a believer in environmentalism, I have not become a believer in Al Gore’s gloom and doom. His film, “An Inconvenient Truth,” is conveniently focused upon Al Gore. From nostalgic childhood memories to a his touching self-described survival of difficult personal losses that many of us have or will come to experience in our lives. It was…..well, it was…..Gorey.

I believe in global warming. I believe earlier in this century, many scientists were equally concerned about a coming “ice age.” However, there does appear to be unrefutable evidence that we are in a period of global warming. Key questions for me are:

What is the cause of this global warming?
How much of the cause is “man-made”?
How long will it last?
How does human activity compare with “natural” forces of nature in climate change?
Can we make a difference?

My view is that we humans DO participate in a wide range of environmental misdeeds. I also believe that those misdeeds, including exorbitant carbon dioxide emissions, pale when compared to the forces of Mother Nature.

Of course, we know it’s not nice to fool Mother Nature, and some would say it’s even more foolish that we humans should think we can significantly alter the forces of our global environment.

Perhaps the most nagging question for me is the final one. Can we make a difference? I believe we can, however miniscule it might be. So I’ll continue to recycle and find other ways I can be friendly to the environement.

But don’t expect me to fall for Al Gore’s gloom and doom. The cataclysmic events he unveils in his self-aggrandizing movie may well occur. But they’ll not be caused by man.
In the meantime, I don’t want to be even a minor, unwitting participant, in such an event. So please help me find a recycling center that’s closer than 50 miles from home!