Mother Nature Breaks Wind As Wall Street Begs
Oct
13
Written by:
10/13/2008 11:25 AM
Last week arctic researchers found “chimneys of methane” erupting from the surface of the Barents Sea. The gas is released by melting sub-sea permafrost. Calculations have shown that there is more carbon where that is coming from than in known coal reserves. Meanwhile, Henry “Poke” Paulson is telling Congress that the financial sector is the basis of the US economy. We hope Congress will maintain a deaf ear to that, but hope is in short supply what with McCain wanting to augment the 700 billion that may be going into Wall Street’s poke by throwing Social Security in after it. Given all this one would think that the election would turn on an issue: if not the war then perhaps the resale value of a Prius, or how to live on crackers and high fructose cola. Could someone explain to this stupefied column how it is that at this worst crisis in US history both nominees for president promise to make things worse?
Speaking of the election, it’s a paradox that the race for California’s 8th district House seat is more important than our presidential candidate’s race for five percent. I hate to see those words. But it has been said, and I agree, that our role in the 2008 presidential election should have been to discredit the process, not put up a sacrifice. To those who maintain that making it into the debates would be a victory of such worth it would justify the punishment Cynthia and the Greens are taking, please reflect that the worthy victory would be to expose the presidential election for what it is, a con
A con? A con with a twist because the script includes disenfranchising low income voters and hacking the machines! Can you picture anything more bizarre than conning the public into voting for the lesser evil, then fixing the count?
But once again we’ll get the winning vote for spoiler. We will owe Cynthia a debt we cannot pay for her courage, her eloquence, and her devotion to the cause of humanity. GPoWS will get a chance Oct 3-12 to tell her we think she has used the bully pulpit well.
Methane is 40 times more effective than carbon dioxide in trapping solar heat. But the present concentrations are Methane 1.7 ppm and carbon dioxide 385 ppm, so that the present warming is due to carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide concentration had been constant at 280 ppm for at least the past 1000 years, beginning its rise around 1900. Affected industries have tried to deflect attention from manmade carbon dioxide by pointing to the far greater potency of methane and citing its natural sources, like cows. Well, fellows, it looks like you were on to something now that Mother Nature is out-farting the cows.