Earth Day

You want happy talk about how fabulous the human race is on Earth Day? Wrong fucking blog, go on now there are literally millions of blogs out there.

What, you still here? OK then, steel yourself, big breath now.



Usually the PBS NOW show is 26 minutes, but last week it was a special 56 minute presentation on glaciers, that can be watched online.

On Thin Ice
Seventy-five percent of the world's fresh water is stored in glaciers, but scientists predict climate change will cause some of the world's largest glaciers to completely melt by 2030. What effect will this have on our daily lives? With global warming falling low on a national list of American concerns, it's time to take a deeper look at what could be a global calamity in the making.

(I love to listen to Vandan Shiva, she's a brilliant woman who uses her vast, well-rounded knowledge as an activist.)

PBS Frontline -- Poisoned Waters (click here to watch 52 minute show online)



James Caress: Gases fast destroying oceans' pH
By JAMES CARESS
Guest commentary
Updated: 04/20/2009 08:36:02 AM PDT


As Earth Day Arrives, Population Still the Uneasy Issue

Carrying Capacity, Exponential Growth, and Resource Wars
By John Cairns Volume 14, Number 1 (Fall 2003) Issue theme: "Mass immigration: the public health dimension"
...Nature levies brutal penalties for exceeding carrying capacity, such as famine, disease, and war...

Population growth and resource depletion
Essential Concepts
There are 5 main concepts that our students struggle with when learning about population growth and the relationship of population to geological resource use:

1. overpopulation is a leading environmental problem,
2. exponential population growth and development leads to faster depletion of resources,
3. population grows exponentially,
4. why population prediction is difficult,
5. population is not evenly distributed throughout the world.

When my mother was born there were 2.3 billion people on the planet. When I was born there were 3.2 billon people on the planet. My child is now of childbearing age and there are almost 7 billion people on the planet. That's called exponential growth. I'm not a big fan of religions because they all seem to be mired in the past when their holy texts were written and population growth. was not linked to deadly environmental degradation.

Oh Jeez, I don't know where to start with this article, it just cracks me up:

President Obama to head to Iowa for Earth Day
By PHILIP ELLIOTT – 58 minutes ago
...Obama aides note: Last year, the U.S. wind industry gained 13,000 direct jobs, and about half of wind turbines' components are made domestically...

...5.1 million jobs have been lost since December 2007 -- pushing the (nationwide) unemployment rate to 8.5 percent in March."...

(I'm not even going into the fact that the IMF and the World Bank are useless as teats on a boar to most of the world population)