It is confusing at times listening to the argument of global warming and now the media is on it full time, we are subjected to pictures of desolation the world over and smoke stacks minus the snow and ice we have come to expect in various places.
Who hasn’t seen the lonely polar bear floating around on a shrinking ice cube in the arctic.
I started wondering what is so different about our lives in the last century and it is becoming obvious.
There are homes people lived in and still do in the north and they look like this;
Now there are many structures the world round which look like this;
Transportation used to look like this;
To this;
The difference between the past century or so and before that time is that much we have developed to accommodate our creature comforts requires tremendous amounts of heat and energy, from forging the tools to build the buildings, to the metal and other materials required to construct them, transporting the raw materials to refineries and deliver finished goods to the site and the means to heat or cool our new homes.
We are a productive species. We have planted electrical poles every where in this world, from mountaintops to valleys and across the prairies. Concrete and asphalt roads reinforced with iron were unknown 150 years ago as was the automobile. In those days a locomotive pulling cars over a steel road was the only modern method of transportation used by the masses, and these metal roads did not go everywhere.
To provide the heat required to accommodate much of or modern lifestyles, we burn fuel, tremendous amounts of it, constantly. Not like a forest fire which burns out after a few days.
It has to have some effect you would think. When I look at the cities which are growing in this world, their skylines, aircraft and freeways and the immensity of it all, even though the world dwarfs all of this by comparison, I wonder, is it possible?
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