Good News

The local paper brought the good news that global warming is a fixable situation and we have enough time to do the fixing.

I believe this is true.

What is missing from this assessment is that governments, industries and individuals will actually face up to the amount of fixing necessary to keep the chaos of population shifts, storm intensity rise with attendant habitat destruction, crop failures, coastal erosion and myriad effects on animal and plant life. We are told that China and India will continue to pollute the skies inasmuch as they are developing nations.

The U.S. is the world champ at the moment, throwing up some 24.5 tons of greenhouse gas per person. China is a close second. The problem is that China and India have over two billion people while the U.S. has only 300 million--and they are catching up to us , fast.

We can do some things on an individual basis, like equipping our homes with compact fluorescent lamp bulbs (CFLs), trading in our 15-MPG SUV's for 50-MPG Prius's, installing energy-efficient air conditioners and heat pumps, riding bikes or walking instead of driving, etc.

But all that will have only a minuscule effect on the warming of the Earth. What is the real source of all the greenhouse gas that is causing the deepening problem?

We must look into our own behavior to understand how difficult it will be to curb our appetite for all the goodies with which our industrial empire continues to shower on us. If we want to continue to drive in lonely splendor from our suburban pads to our spanking new industrial plants, if we want to continue to flit in airliners from here to there around the world, if we can't do without our electronic gadgets, if we must expand our cities at the expense of forest and farm land, all to enhance the bottom line for more and more entrepreneurs and industrialists, then we will continue to see the inexorable rise in temerature.

The change will hurt. We have to pay a price for avoiding catastrophe or else the price that will fall on our children and grandchildren will be unbearably severe. What price? Tune in later. I'm in Canada at the moment and learning a great deal about how our neighbors to the north are changing their life style.

Die Off

A few years ago I was commiserating with a neighbor over the beastly temperatures we were experiencing. (They were even worse than those of this year!) I made the mistake of mentioning Global Warming. I say mistake because my neighbor, face flushed with anger, said through his tight lips, "God would not let that happen to his world!"

It became obvious to me that my neighbor had as his religious belief a profound trust in a deity that operated this planet and all things on or in it. I never argue or try to minimize the beliefs of others and I attempt to be truly respectful of them. In this case I mumbled that I understood his point and left it at that.

Over the years I have been regaled by Young-Earth believers, Jews for Jesus, and agnostics as well as well-meaning but insufferable bores with their own take on God and the universe. As far as Global Warming is concerned I've come to see conservative republicans along with the oil, coal, automobile, and logging industries as total non-believers (or minimizers) of the global warming threat.

Let's see how the Hebrew Bible (otherwise known as the "Old Testament") handles the role assigned to us humans. Now this can be a problem because reading the bible and extracting meaning by us modern civilized beings could cause us to miss some major points. The rabbis, from ancient times to the present, have developed a system of exegesis or interpretation that they call midrash that has helped generations of Jews understand their own Bible. Since we started by talking about global warming, here's a midrashic explanation of the story of creation:

In the hour when the Holy One created the first human being, God took Adam before all the trees of the Garden of Eden and said: "See My works, how fine and excellent they are! All that I have created I have created for you. Think upon this, and do not corrupt and desolate My world; for, if you corrupt it, there is no one to set it right after you."

Rabbis Albert Vorspan & David Saperstein, Tough Choices, Jewish Perspectives on Social Justice, UAHC Press, NY 1992


Well, darn! You mean that Brazil shouldn't be leveling the Amazon Forest or that the U.S. shouldn't be sawing down the Tongass National Forest in Alaska? You mean that the Japanese shouldn't be decimating the shark population to make shark fin soup, or that we shouldn't
be dumping waste from our oil wells in the Caribbean and killing the coral reefs?

Did you know that we are in the midst of the greatest die off of animal and plant spoecies in the Earth's history?

What's it all about?

And why should you bother to read it?

Mazel is a yiddish word that is loosely translated as luck. It is usually paired with "tov" (good) which phrase is usually meant as a wish to another person as "May you have good luck."

Ah, but way back when, in ancient Israel, mazel, in old Hebrew, meant roughly, "May the stars be aligned for you." Oh, no! Not the people of the Book! Astrology? Ah, yes, those ancestors of mine, attuned to the customs of the day, were very much influenced by what they thought were "outside forces."

In this Blog I wish to convey that there are "inside forces" that influence us, and therefore we have "Mazel tough" instead of "Mazel tov."

Yeah, today we have tough luck!

Here's an example. Some 25 years ago I found myself teaching a course in Industrial Safety Management. The previous professor had died suddenly from an overdose of twinkies. I had to place myself as his replacement because I was the department chair at the time. There was no time to find a substitute, so I found the text to be too elementary and began supplementing the text with lectures from other sources. I began to read widely and diligently (hey! I was a professor after all) and began learning some interesting things. One of these things was about an air sampling station on Mauna Loa volcanu in Hawaii.

This station collects air samples over the course of each day, measuring the concentration of carbon dioxide. Being high above vegetation and away from human activities, this is a source of data that is considered the most reliable in the world. The graphical record over many, many years shows a steady increase in CO2 levels in the atmosphere.

I brought this up in class one day, remarking that this could have an impact on the climate of the world. I compared the way that CO2 acted like the pane of glass in a greenhouse to keep heat from dissipating. I mentioned that they should be aware of this phenomenon inasmuch as they would be employed (if not already employed) by industries that could be generating this CO2.

I invite you to Google "Mauna Loa carbon dioxide monitor." See for yourself. The shnooks who say that the science underlying global warming is wrong can't seem to understand the data or refuse to acknowledge it.

And that is our mazel tough!