Saturday Soapbox

So we went to the beach yesterday, and like a complete and utter fool, I let myself get sunburnt. Oh, there was no shortage of sunscreen, everyone else was all lathered up, but I actually forgot. Think of any derogatory comment you want about what an idiot I was to forget sunscreen, and I will heartily agree with you.

Gina is hot. Where Gina lives, in inland Orange County, is hot. Gina hears a lot from other people how dang hot it is everywhere else, and so Gina's rather simple mind wandered to global warming.

Now let me begin by saying that I absolutely believe that all the crap we release into the air is has some kind of effect on something, I am not scientist enough to spout off about CO2 levels and coral bleaching. But I am not fool enough to think that we can go about releasing tons of chemicals and goodness-knows what in the air for decades, if not hundreds of years, and think that it all just "goes away." Anybody that has taken basic science knows that our atmosphere is what both protects us from the ravages of the sun, as well as the double edged sword of trapping gases and such beneath it in its shielding efforts.

From what I am understanding, part of the problem with global warming is not so much that the days are so warm. It is the fact that the earth does not cool off enough at night, thus not allowing requisite replenishing. Take the other day, when it was in the mid-90's here during the day. Ok, bad enough, but then you at least expect it to cool off at night. Nope, it only reached a low of 72. At 72, the dewpoint is not reached. Thus, no water for the little lizards and bugs and plants. That, in a nutshell, is not good.

It does make me very angry that our president pooh-poohs the notion of global warming. I mean, let's say that you don't think that people and their byproducts are the cause of global warming. Is it really such a horrible thing to require business to reduce their output of harmful substances? Even if it doesn't contribute to the weather thing, hey, we breathe this stuff, it seeps into our drinking water, it goes all sorts of places it doesn't belong. Chemicals are everywhere in our bodies and environment. And I, for one, am inclined to think that a substance used to refine stainless steel has no business in our groundwater. But yet, in some places, there it is. Did anyone read the article about how they discovered that fetuses are literally swimming in a sea of chemicals in the womb? Who out there thinks that this is a good thing? The chances that these chemicals turn out to be good for us is not a lottery I am willing to play.