Here comes the sun, let's use it

 Sun coming up on the USS Corpus Christi Bay in 1971 in the South China
Sea. Maybe it's time we get more out of sunrises than pretty pictures. 

 

This article appeared in the April 5, 2014 Virginian-Pilot. There seems to be an abundance of facts on the subject of climate change and global warming, and countless ways to deny the facts. You won't find any facts in this piece so there isn't anything to deny.



THERE ARE numerous differences between man and dinosaurs. In general, dinosaurs were bigger and did nothing but eat and sleep all day. Humans do that but also watch TV. 

We know, with near certainty, that dinosaurs did not wear clothes and that they spoke mostly in grunts and groans.

Oh, and one more thing. Dinosaurs couldn’t reason.

So, whether it be a looming ice age advancing or a speeding asteroid closing in, all they could do was twiddle their fingers and wish they had thumbs so they could raise their fists in anger at their impending doom.

We can be reasonably certain that there was nothing they could do to stop the ice age, asteroid or any other catastrophic occurrence. Because there was nothing they had done to set them in motion.

Sometimes you just are in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Luckily, we’ve come a long way, baby, from the dinosaur days. We can do something when something needs to be done. We know from the movies that there are several ways to handle an approaching asteroid. But asteroids don’t appear to be the immediate problem.

The immediate problem seems to be the melting ice caps and rising sea levels. We might not know the cause, but obviously something is going on with the climate.

Thank God, we’re not dinosaurs. Thank God, we can figure things out. Thank God, we can do something. The problem, what seems sometimes like the biggest problem, is getting everyone on the same page. There is a lively discussion about whether man is causing this climate change — a discussion the dinosaurs never had.

Some say it is out of our hands, has nothing to do with us and that we should just wait and see.

Some say that, of course, man is responsible. He’s responsible for everything.

Others say — and this is where it gets tricky — that man and dinosaurs should shoulder the blame together: the dinosaurs for dying and decomposing and man for discovering and becoming so dependent on decomposing dinosaurs.

The good news is that no matter who is right, we don’t have to stand around twiddling our thumbs, waiting to see what happens.

We can do something. Maybe it won’t change anything. Maybe climate is too big to be either affected by man or controlled by him. Maybe the dinosaurs were right to just keep eating and sleeping.

But I don’t think so. I think we can at least try. And my guess is that the dinosaurs, had they been given a choice and the means, would have gladly done something rather than nothing.

Sure, some dinosaurs would have objected to being blamed for problems they felt were out of their control. But the smart dinosaurs would have countered with the always-winning argument, “What have we got to lose?”

This is where the global warming/climate change problem stands today. What have we got to lose?

Even if we can’t affect global warming — whether because it’s not our problem or it’s too big a problem — taking some measures will at least give us cleaner air. It will help us reduce our dependency on dead dinosaur fuel, which threatens world peace and economic stability.

What if solar power, which hits much of the globe with equal amounts of sunshine once we eliminate the smog, does turn out to be an answer?

The truth is we have nothing to lose and a lot to gain once we can quiet the dinosaurs among us.

If nothing we do changes anything, at least we will have tried. 

Human spirit is another thing that separates us from the dinosaurs. We’ll be viewed by future inhabitants differently from the way we view the dinosaur. They won’t say we stood by, idly soaking up the sun when we could have actually been using the sun to make things better.

Maybe, with a little bit of luck, a little bit of effort and a little bit of reasoning we can hold out a little bit longer.