This is a follow-up to a post about global warming that I wrote awhile back…
I just saw a segment on the CBS News Sunday Morning show that caught my eye. It referenced a scientist at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR), who conducted a study and discovered that about 13,000 years ago, the Earth’s temperature rose a startling 18° in a span of only 50 years – a change 100 times faster than we have experienced in the past 100 years. The TV report sort of glossed over that last statement by stating that the reason for the dramatic change was “unknown.”
My position is that periods of warming and cooling are a natural part of the Earth’s “life cycle” and that the Industrial Revolution and human intervention have an infinitesimal effect on those cycles. Just because the cycles are thousands of years long sometimes doesn’t mean that if we’re in the midst of a change in the current cycle, that we caused it. The seasons change, and we accept that as being normal. Well, the seasons of the Ice Ages change, too – we’re just not around to see the entire Ice Age cycle because it’s too long.
There have been several Ice Ages, as a matter of fact – and what do you suppose defined those Ice Ages? That’s right – a period of global warming! How else would you know when the Ice Age ended, except that it got warmer and the glaciers melted? If there were no interglacial warming periods, it would just be one long, uninterrupted Ice Age, now wouldn’t it?
I just love this web page. It gives an easy-to-understand history of the Earth’s warming and cooling cycles, including something I had never heard of before, called the “Holocene Maximum” which, as its name implies, is the hottest period in human history. The problem for people who believe industrial development is the cause of global warming is that the Holocene Maximum occurred 4,000-7,500 years ago – long before humans were operating those nasty, polluting factories! (BTW, this refutes all this hype about several recent years being the “hottest on record” — the “record” only refers to the last hundred years or so that changes have been recorded by modern instruments as they occur.)
Please scroll about 2/3 of the way down this page, to the group of quotes listed there. The quotes are prefaced by this statement:
The case for a “greenhouse problem” is made by environmentalists, news anchormen, and special interests who make inaccurate and misleading statements about global warming and climate change. Even though people may be skeptical of such rhetoric initially, after awhile people start believing it must be true because we hear it so often.
So true! An opinion becomes “fact” by incessant repetition. Here are a few of the more telling quotes:
“We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we may have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.”
Stephen Schneider in an interview for Discover magazine, Oct 1989
(leading advocate of the global warming theory)
“In the United States…we have to first convince the American People and the Congress that the climate problem is real.”Former President Bill Clinton in a 1997 address to the United Nations
“Nobody is interested in solutions if they don’t think there’s a problem. Given that starting point, I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous (global warming) is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are…”Former Vice President Al Gore in an interview with Grist Magazine
May 9, 2006, concerning his book, An Inconvenient Truth
(Gore is now chairman and co-founder of Generation Investment Management,
a London-based business that sells carbon credits)
“Researchers pound the global-warming drum because they know there is politics and, therefore, money behind it. . . I’ve been critical of global warming and am persona non grata.“Dr. William Gray in an interview for the Denver Rocky Mountain News, November 28, 1999
(Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colorado and leading expert of hurricane prediction )
That last quote sums up one of my strongest suspicions – that certain people have discovered that there’s a ton of money to be made in the business of global warming. The selling of carbon credits (Al Gore), alternative energy sources (wind, ethanol, solar), hybrid and electric cars (Prius, Volt), and various other “green technologies” will undoubtedly make some people multi-millionaires, while imposing taxes and levying fees at the expense of others.
The bottom line is always money, and the biggest proponents of global warming have the greatest potential to profit from it. It’s a brand-new global market, created literally out of thin air, and it just makes me sick.
In January, President Obama warned that we were facing “a crisis unlike any we have seen in our lifetime” and that recession “could linger for years and the unemployment rate reach double digits” if nothing is done. He predicted trillion-plus budget deficits “for years to come.”
We were all scared. We panicked and battened down the hatches to weather the upcoming storm of financial doom. We retreated to our “economic storm shelters” and contemplated a more Spartan existence devoid of the excesses we had become accustomed to. We clipped coupons, we rode our bikes instead of driving, we planned meat-free meals, we curtailed entertainment and dining out. We were frightened children, waiting in the dark for the bogeyman to jump out from under the bed and eat us alive.
The government appropriated hundreds of billions of dollars for bailouts, supposedly to stimulate the economy. The President promised economic relief for the vast majority of Americans. I saw the banks and the auto industry get billions, even while they came begging for money in their private jets. I saw several large entities get double-helpings of bailout money. People who received sub-prime mortgages are now getting a break and may be able to renegotiate their mortgages downward because their house is now worth less than they paid, so they can perhaps avoid foreclosure.
I didn’t buy a house that costs more than 31% of my gross income. I didn’t get an adjustable-rate mortgage that is now eating me alive. I’m not defaulting on payments to my creditors. I’ve virtually eliminated most of the “special” things that make life more fun – like travel, dining at nice restaurants, getting my nails done or enjoying a facial. Yet I still struggle every payday to make my check last until the next one, and hope to God I don’t lose my job because I can’t seem to put anything away in savings because the bills take my entire check. Don’t I get any benefit at all from this huge amount of money the government is handing out?
Oh, yes – I forgot. Remember the $13 a week figure that was often repeated as the benefit the average working person would see in their paychecks each week, due to lowered federal withholding taxes? I did see some benefit from that action – I now have a whopping $8.71 per week more to spend. I didn’t even get the full $13 – do I actually make that much less than the “average worker”? I didn’t think so, but it looks like that’s the case. Well, at least now I can buy that venti latté from Starbucks that I’ve been dreaming about!
So big corporations get huge money, and people who acted irresponsibly get a pass – but a responsible working person gets crumbs? It hardly seems fair.
But wait – there’s hope! Just this past week, the President gave himself the new title of “confidence builder in chief” and said that the economic crisis is “not as bad as we think.” What??? I thought it was worse than anything we have seen in our lifetime, and could last for years! Now, a short two months later, it’s not as bad as we think? And just who was it that told us it was so awful in the first place? That’s right – it was the President.
Why the sudden turnaround in his attitude, I wonder? Is it because people were TOO scared, and their fear shut down the economy so much that it came to a virtual standstill? Did the government’s dire warnings go too far, and now they want to soften their stance so we’ll peek out of our hidey-holes and have more confidence that the future won’t be quite so bleak, after all? I don’t know about anyone else, but that flip-flop in the President’s statements makes me trust the government even less than I did before. It also makes me feel like “we the people” have been manipulated like marionettes on a string. I’m getting whiplash from the back-and-forth governmental proclamations!
As for my financial situation – fortunately, I was already so broke that I didn’t have a dime in the stock market, so I wasn’t hurt at all by the plummeting Dow Jones average. My mortgage is at a fixed rate. I have a relatively new car in good working order. I still have a job. My health is fairly stable. So it looks to me that, since so many people were terribly devastated by the recent economic downturn, I have so far been virtually unscathed “so long as nothing bends nor breaks” (as my mother used to say) – with the result that, in relative terms, my economic status has actually improved somewhat because other people are now more on my level after their losses.
So maybe I’ve benefited from the economic crisis, after all – and my $8.71 per week extra can buy me a piece of coffee cake to go with that latté.
It’s funny how you can read someone’s blog and feel like you know them, even though you may not have exchanged more than a handful of words with them in their comments or in an e-mail. Lisa at Clusterfook was one of those people. Hers was the second blog I ever read, back when she called herself the “Rock Bitch” in 2005, when she had recovered from cancer the first time.
There were to be two more cancer battles. I gave the timeline of her struggles in a previous post. Her battle is over now — she died last night at about 10:30 p.m. CST, after choosing a couple of months ago to forego continuing chemotherapy that wasn’t working and choosing instead to spend her remaining time at home with her husband and two young daughters. I think she definitely made the right decision, even though some would regard it as giving up. She did not give up, not in the least! I think she made her choice so she could concentrate on showing and telling her daughters how very much she loved them. She wanted to take care of as many details for the future as she could, wrapping up the myriad of loose ends that are part and parcel of being an adult in our society.
She even gave thought to what would become of her blog after she died, and appointed a fellow blogger and close friend, Karl, to inform her readers of her passing. They called it “Power of Blog” (as in power of attorney), so he could speak for her when she could no longer do so. Karl visited Lisa two weeks ago to go over the details of passwords, databases, hosting, and all the other things that go into the technical end of running a blog. She had already paid for her hosting in advance for at least the next two years, so the archives would be available online for others (including her children) to read her own words and remember what a vibrant and intense spirit she had shared with all of us.
By doing those things, she showed how much she cared about her online friends, in addition to her family. She knew we cared about her (although she wondered about that at times), and knew we’d want to know the end of the story. She kept us up-to-date when she could, and provided us a way to tell her in overwhelming numbers how much we loved her, while she was still able to receive that love from the online strangers who became her friends. She allowed us to say good-bye, before she was gone. And now we can still pay tribute to her life and send condolences to her family on her blog, as well as on our own blogs in posts such as this.
The Power of Blog idea is something I need to set up for myself, and I’ve already talked to someone about taking on that responsibility. Being a single woman with no children, and being “of a certain age”, I wonder how my online friends would know if something happened to me. To them, I would just disappear with no explanation, leaving them to fret and wonder with no hope of ever finding out. Their only connection to me in most cases is by e-mail, and there would be no one there to receive their communications. I wonder the same thing about some of my online friends, too — how would I know that something had happened to my dear Kenyan penpal, for example, who is halfway around the globe? This Power of Blog is definitely something I need to look into, and leave instructions with my designated friends so they’ll know what to do.
Lisa approached her impending death with the same tough practicality that she brought to the other, more mundane issues of everyday life. She very rarely felt sorry for herself, and sought out every possible avenue that would allow her to remain with her family just a little longer. She stood toe-to-toe with cancer and stared it in the eye, and when it no longer made sense to fight the battle, she laid down her weapons and wrapped herself in the love of her family.
I’m very thankful to have known Lisa, even from a distance. I know that if I’m ever stricken with a life-threatening illness, I have a fantastic role model to look to, who showed me the way to fight it with grit, class and grace to the very end. I hope I’m able to carry it off half as well as she did.
Tags: relationships
Sometimes I wonder if my existence has made a difference to anyone else. Although I know intellectually that my life has made some impact on the lives of my friends, at least on a small scale, I wonder just how memorable I am. I wonder if my being here matters to anyone.
Since I don’t have children, the obvious source of my “living on” through them doesn’t exist. Instead, I have to be memorable in order to be remembered. I have to make a difference in the life of someone, somehow, if my presence on this earth is to be anything more than a tiny blip in the continuum.
I haven’t done anything spectacular in my life so far – I’ve tried (at least as an adult) to be a decent and kind person, although I certainly haven’t gone out of my way to make any huge contribution to society or work for some grand cause. Mostly, I just keep to myself in my little house, in my little neighborhood. I try not to make enemies, and hope that trouble stays far away from my door.
I realize that in the grand scheme of things, and among the billions of people on the planet, I’m just a tiny speck of energy that flickers during the brief span of my lifetime, and then is gone from here. I have no aspirations of being “great” or “famous” in this lifetime – but I’m selfish enough to want to be remembered by someone.
It used to make me sad to think that I might be forgotten, and I’ve been known to actually ask people to remember me. I’ve come to the place now where I don’t feel that way anymore. A handful of my friends have told me in recent years that I have indeed made a positive impact on their lives, and that’s a great comfort. And they made those remarks without me asking them, which makes their comments infinitely more meaningful.
So maybe I have made a difference after all, just by virtue of my existence. Even though I haven’t sacrificed for some great cause, I did contribute my skills to a non-profit organization I believe in. Even though I was thousands of miles away, I gave encouragement and advice to a young man who is like my son. Even though I couldn’t give money to a friend who desperately needed it, I did make sure he had an occasional home-cooked meal and a place to do his laundry. Even though I didn’t lessen the workload of another friend, I did listen and let her know I loved her when she was going through rough times.
I recently watched an episode of Private Practice, in which one of the characters was comforting a dying friend. The man wondered if it had really mattered that he was here, or if his passing would mean that he wouldn’t be remembered. His friend repeatedly assured him as he died, saying with conviction, “You were here. You were here. You were here…”
So maybe the small things I’ve contributed do count for something. If I can lighten someone’s burden or lift their spirits or so some small thing to assist someone who’s doing a bigger thing, then maybe that’s enough for now.
Maybe I was here, after all…
Tags: navel-gazing, relationships
Most of the time, I feel very small and insignificant – a feeling left over from when I was a small child and so shy that I would tiptoe across the linoleum floor in kindergarten, so my Mary Janes wouldn’t make any noise as I walked. I wanted to be invisible, even back then.
When I was five or six, I remember hiding behind my mother’s skirts in a store, and my mom literally pushing me out in front to face the clerk and saying, “Tell the lady what you want!” I don’t know why, but for as long as I can remember, I was afraid to talk to strangers or make my presence known in any way.
In school, even though I was plenty smart and knew the answers, I would never, ever raise my hand when the teacher asked for class participation. Some teachers eventually got wise to my tactics of fading into the background, however, and they would call on me to give the answer instead of waiting for me to volunteer. I was absolutely mortified to have them call attention to me, and would have greatly preferred to fade into the woodwork.
My father picked up on my extreme shyness, too, and in junior high he forced me to take Speech class as one of my electives. I resisted, to no avail – so instead, I refused to learn my lines for the scenes we performed in front of the class, and ad libbed my way (badly) through the parts I was assigned. I did the absolute minimum in that class – my performance was so bad that the teacher (who I actually liked) even kept me after class a time or two to encourage me to do better. He tried hard, but was ultimately unsuccessful in inspiring improvement of my acting skills. For my efforts (or lack thereof) in that class, I received the only “D” I ever got in my academic career. I guess I showed my father, huh? Not only was I shy – I was also very stubborn.
I insisted on living in the dorm when I went to college, even though the school was only 15 miles from my house (that’s a whole other story), and I took that opportunity to consciously reinvent myself. I told myself, “Nobody knows you here. They don’t know you’re shy. You’re going to go up to everyone you meet and say, ‘Hi, my name is Mikkie – what’s yours?’” And you know what? My strategy actually worked! For the first time in my entire life, I had a social life. There were quite a few girls and guys that I regularly conversed with, went to parties with, or just hung out with. I even dated some fraternity guys and went to a Greek formal dance! If you had told me those things back in high school, I would never have believed it.
Unfortunately, I was so entranced with my newfound “social butterfly” abilities that my studies suffered. It was just too difficult to attend an 8 a.m. Humanities class after staying out until after midnight the night before, listening to the Beatles’ White Album and drinking Annie Greensprings! Even though I had a full-ride, four-year scholarship to a private college, I had no real direction as far as a major, and I dropped out of college after two years, after being on academic probation a couple of semesters. (Twenty-plus years later, I went back and completed my bachelors degree at the same school. I guess I’m just a late bloomer in the maturity department!)
As I’ve gotten older, the extreme shyness has abated for the most part. Most of my current friends and acquaintances have a difficult time believing I was ever shy, although those closest to me realize that it still lurks in my personality, especially in large groups. Maybe I just cope with it better now – but I still avoid certain activities or situations (like crowded events or shopping malls) when I’m by myself, because they make me uncomfortable. If I go with someone else, it’s OK because they serve as my “security blanket.”
If I can’t avoid attending an event where I’m alone and don’t know many people there, I’ll likely find a place in an out-of-the-way area and just do some people-watching. I’ve never been the mix-and-mingle type and am hopeless at small talk, but I do enjoy engaging someone (one person, not a group) in conversation on an interesting topic in a quiet corner of the room.
The internet has been a revelation, and has utterly transformed my life in the past ten years that I’ve been online. First, I made a couple of great friends through some old-style bulletin board rooms. Then I spent several years pursuing relationships through online dating, with mixed results – some became friends, some broke my heart, and a time or two I was lucky not to be harmed in the process. I’m now involved with a nice man who I did NOT meet online, and have retired from that aspect of online behavior.
The latest incarnation of my internet life is blogging – surprising, huh? I started out reading people’s blogs, then I began “ghost-editing” a friend’s blog, and now it’s progressed to having my own blog(s). Blogging is a sickness, I think – but it’s an agreeable illness for the time being!
Tags: navel-gazing
I have been married and divorced three times in my life. That’s a fact, and I can’t change it. I’ve been divorced now for 11 years, and have pretty much settled into the idea that I’ll likely be on my own for the foreseeable future. Oh, I’ve had relationships — although most were extremely short. However, I’m in one now that’s been ongoing for almost five years — which is much longer than my first marriage, and almost as long as my second. But I still say that I’m on my own, because this relationship is basically a friendship rather than a relationship that has marriage or cohabitation as its ultimate goal.
In times past, there was some amount of shame or scandal in to be divorced so many times, and I didn’t tell people about that aspect of my life unless they were very close to me. There was one exception – in the interest of full disclosure, I would often tell someone about my checkered marital history if I saw the possibility of getting involved with them. I wanted to be honest with any potential partner, and I figured that if they still stayed after hearing what some would consider as “deal-breaking” information, then they had accepted my past and my present.
It didn’t always turn out that way, however. Sometimes people didn’t react negatively at the time of my disclosure, but kept that information on file in their “mental Rolodex” and used it against me later. I can think of one specific occasion when my honesty backfired on me in a big way.
I had been corresponding with a man in Canada who was very interesting to me. I had told him right away about my failed marriages, and the reasons for them. He made no particular comment at the time, and I thought I had dodged that bullet. But no – after six months of daily phone calls and e-mails in which everything seemed fine, and two weeks before he planned to travel here and meet me in person, he dropped a bombshell.
In the midst of a perfectly normal conversation, he suddenly announced that he would not be visiting, and could no longer be involved with me, because I was not “marriage material.” His reason was that he didn’t want to become “casualty number four.”
I couldn’t have been more shocked if he had abruptly slapped me across the face. I burst into tears and reminded him that I had told him of my history long before, and he didn’t seem to have a problem with it. I was heartbroken – absolutely devastated. I cared for this man, and had been nothing but kind and supportive in all our conversations. I simply didn’t understand where this rejection came from.
One more thing – in the next breath, after shattering my world so cruelly, he asked if we could still be friends. What is it with guys? They break your heart, then they immediately ask to still be friends??? What’s up with that? They want to reject you, but they don’t want to really lose you. Makes no sense to me!
I told him NO – we couldn’t be friends, at least not for a long time. After ending that conversation, I didn’t speak to or hear from him for a year and a half. But I didn’t forget about him, and in a weak moment I sent him a brief e-mail to see if he remembered me, and asked him how he was doing.
He immediately replied that he had thought of me so many times, and had nearly picked up the phone to call me on many occasions. That was nice to hear, but the fact was that he didn’t. So I was cautious – once burned, twice shy. But I kept the lines of communication open.
We talked for about three months, then he had some sort of financial crisis he was involved in, and became very depressed. after several weeks of me sending e-mails with no reply, he thanked me for sending him a birthday card — and then he stopped communicating completely. I had visions of him hiding in a dark room, being miserably sad and confused. I was worried about him, but had no way to communicate if he didn’t want to. So I had to let him go again – he was a grown man, and I couldn’t force him to do something he didn’t want to participate in.
There was another lapse in communication for two years, and then (silly me) I e-mailed him again. What was I thinking, asking for more potential pain from this guy? Sometimes “book smarts” doesn’t equal intelligence.
He wrote back, calling me “fabulous” and “incredible” — and suddenly we were back in touch again, as if there had been no lapse in the conversation at all. This on-again, off-again communication pattern was making me feel a little seasick!
But things seemed to be different this time — he seemed more emotionally stable, and a little less melancholy. And the odd thing is that he denies being in the crisis situation from the previous incarnation of our communications, when he was so terribly overwrought. I know I’m not making up information about that, because I still have the e-mail he wrote about it at the time. But whatever helps him sleep at night, I suppose. (He also didn’t remember the “casualty number four” conversation, which pissed me off. But he apologized for hurting me, anyway, which helped some.)
So far, this time it has evolved into sort of a friendship/business relationship, with a few romantic overtones. It’s lasted a lot longer this time, too – since mid-2005.
I formulated a theory about his hurtful behavior years before. My thought was that he had been in a nasty divorce, and he wasn’t ready to be in another serious relationship because he hadn’t yet healed from that mess. So he used my marital history as an excuse to make a hasty exit, because he knew that if he met me in person, he would really fall in love with me. In short — he got scared and ran away. I presented my theory to him a few months ago, and he agreed I was probably right.
My relationship with this man alternately warms my heart and infuriates me. He’s the only person who evokes such extremes of emotions from me, and I’m not sure whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing. It’s definitely not a boring relationship, and if it’s this intense long-distance, it could be even more so in person. I am sometimes attracted by that intensity, and sometimes fearful of it.
I’ve been maintaining the website for his charitable organization ever since we restarted our conversation in 2005, and I recently redesigned the entire site. We collaborate on projects for his organization (which is safe). We debate politics (which I hate). We talk on a personal level (which I love). He calls me “little girl” (which makes me giggle).
We flirt occasionally, and he makes vague remarks about me moving up there. He offered to buy me a plane ticket as payment for my work on the website, since I do it for free as my contribution to his cause. I was supposed to go there last August, but due to his work/travel schedule and some serious health issues he had, it has so far been postponed.
I no longer have much hope of a romantic relationship with him, although he’s sort of my “pretend boyfriend” in my mind. We have both admitted to caring deeply for each other, and even that we love each other. Short of a real, face-to-face relationship, I guess knowing I’m cared about from a distance is OK. I’d have to give up a huge amount of my current life in order to blend it with his, anyway, and I have some reservations about doing that, after working so hard to make a life for myself, by myself.
Maybe we’ll get together in our next lives…
Tags: emotions, penpals, relationships
