I posted last week about Maria’s friend Yuka. She stayed with us for a week, and then found another Japanese student to rent a place with, near Rittenhouse Square in Philly (it’s a fun part of town). We strapped a spare mattress to the roof of the car and help her move in. The next day, she got a call from her employer in Japan. Yuka’s a schoolteacher, and she was on a one year leave of absence. It turns her replacement simply vanished, and the school asked her to come back. So she’s returning to Japan on Wednesday. Before going, she’s making a quick trip to New York city. So just a few days after moving her in, I went back to her new place, strapped the mattress to the roof of the car again, and helped her move out.
In an attempt to increase global warming by getting my blood boiling, a friend of my sent me a link to The Commons. The presentation is slick and seemingly environmentally friendly, yet the content consist of little more than attacks on environmentalists. I’ll try to keep this as brief as I can:
- I freely admit that many on both sides of the climate change debate are prone to hyperbole, highly selective use of information, and drawing unjustified conclusions. Many environmentalists will talk about a heat wave here or a melting glacier there, and then say the sky is falling. This is irresponsible. But the Commons blog is guilty of using these same tactics (an island here that isn’t sinking, a glacier there that isn’t melting). You’ve got to look at the overall patterns. I saw little in the Commons blog that substantially addressed the analyses behind the UN’s reports on sea level rise, global temperature increases, the sea level rise reports on (George Bush’s) EPA site, the National Research Council’s report on global warming, or the report on the rapid loss of Arctic sea ice. I could go on, but I’ll stop there. (I should note that in one entry the Commons authors denied that there have been recent increases in global temperature, and in another they acknowledged it, albeit dismissively, so I don’t know what they really think).
- I freely admit that there are a variety of forces that act on the Earth’s climate - from active volcanos to minor fluctuations in the energy output of the sun - that can potentially dwarf any human impacts on the environment.
- I’ve found that those who are not concerned about the impact of human activity on the environment rely on two arguments that go something like this:
- “The Earth has a long history of significant climate fluctuation, so what does it really matter if another fluctuation is coming, or whether we’re contributing to it?”
- “Environmental science is not, at this time, capable of making specific or reliable predictions about exactly how human activity may be affecting the environment, so why should we invest in possibly very expensive changes to our economy, to counter a poorly defined threat?”
- My problems with these arguments: There are over 6 billion people across the globe, and we are highly dependent on the biosphere the way it is. If climate change were to occur incrementally over hundreds or thousands of years, then we could adapt incrementally, and - assuming it didn’t add up to catastrophic change - that would be more or less ok. But if we’re talking about major changes that are going to happen in a narrower time window of say, one or two hundred years, then we’re potentially talking about numerous densely populated coastal and low-lying areas going underwater, major agricultural dislocations, and other problems. The costs - in economic terms and in human misery - would be incalculable. If it turns out these things happen due to forces beyond our control (like changes in solar energy output), then I guess that’s too bad for us. But if it turns out to be something we bring upon ourselves because we’re too busy chasing the next quarter’s profit margin, then we suck. Given a hard-to-quantify but potentially very serious threat, I say prepare for the worst. Traditionally, this is how strategic military planning is approached. Unlike some of my fellow liberals, I’m consistent in this regard: I’ve always been an advocate of a “strong and sensible” defense posture (and I spent time on it - I used to work for Business Executives for National Security). If you can’t say with total confidence that your behavior is not going to wreck the environment (i.e. the world we all live in), then you should change your behavior. To me, that’s the true “conservative” position.
- My recommendations: if we focus on two key areas - 1. making investments to improve alternative energy technologies, and 2. doing whatever we can to curb global overpopulation - then we’ll not only reduce the negative consequences of human behavior on the environment, we’ll also go a long way towards solving a wide range of political problems (i.e. effective programs in these areas would provide a foundation for a more clear-headed US foreign policy in the Middle East, and for quality of life improvements in places like China, India, and Africa that currently have their resources heavily strained by overpopulation problems).
A postscript: the one thing I saw in the Commons that really got under my skin was their charge that environmentalists are elitists that aren’t interested in the plight of the poor. There are, for example, plenty of environmentalists who are concerned about the negative health effects experienced by the mostly poor folks who live near factories that belch out a variety of toxins. And many are trying to do something about it.
A few months ago I did a big cleanup and updating of toppa.com, but there were two areas that I didn’t get to: the “Huh?” pages, and the Big Country pages. I’ve finally finished cleaning up the Big Country pages, and I added two polls: a best song poll, and a best album poll. I announced them the other day on the Big Country email list, and I’ve gotten about 30 responses so far.
I managed the Big Country email list for a few years, but I gave it up in 2000 when my ISP’s majordomo server crashed and they decided not to fix it. Back then there weren’t all these free web tools for discussion forums, and my enthusiasm had waned by that point anyway, so someone else took it over. The list lives on now as the Yahoo Big Country group.
For those who may not know, Big Country was very active until Stuart Adamson commited suicide in 2001. They recorded a total of 8 albums. The last couple were not as strong as their early albums, but 1993’s “Buffalo Skinners” was as good as their work from the early 80s.
Now for those “Huh?” pages….
When Maria came back from Japan last week, she brough her friend Yuka with her. When Maria went to live in Japan several years ago, Yuka helped her get oriented and settled in Osaka. Now we’re returning the favor: Yuka is here for the summer to take English lessons at St. Joseph’s University, which is a few miles from our house.
Her original plan was to stay with us for just one weekend, and then move into a dorm. But when the time came to move into the dorm, she took one look it, and walked right back out. The rooms were absolutely filthy, even though they had allegedly just been cleaned. So she’s staying with us until she finds a short term rental (but since she can’t really speak English, Maria’s making the phone calls).
There’s no good way to get to St. Joe’s from our house via public transporation, and Yuka has an international driver’s license, so I’m letting her borrow my clunky old Nissan stick shift. But she had no real-world experience driving on the “wrong” side of the road, and she’d never dealt with a stick shift on the right-hand side, so we went for a driving lesson yesterday. She did really well - she even knew exactly what to do at a yellow light (floor it). The only thing she had trouble with was right turns: she kept wanting to go into the other lane. But she cured herself of that by the time we finished.
Learning English will take longer though. In trying to help her learn to speak it correctly, I’ve become conscious of just how peculiar our language is. For example, she was trying to say “I will pick you up at the airport,” but was having trouble with how to use “pick up.” It’s ok to say “I will pick up Maria” or “I will pick Maria up.” I think the latter might be technically incorrect (a split infinitive), but in conversation, when using a person’s name, you can put it on either side of “up.” But if you’re saying “you,” “him”, etc, then it has to go before “up” - saying “I will pick up you” doesn’t sound right. In helping her through her sentences, we ran into weird rules like that all the time.
She’s been treating us to some good Japanese cooking: so far she’s made sushi, Japanese curry, and Okonomiyaki. Yum!
Maria returned from her Japan trip last Friday, and I just got around to downloading the pictures she took on our digital camera. It was a business trip, so she didn’t spend a whole lot of time taking pictures (she was conducting interviews for a research project), but we’ve got a few to show you. Don’t worry, we’ll take more than enough pictures when we take our vacation trip to Japan in a couple of weeks!
I should explain the picture of the sign that’s written in garbled English: this sort of thing is a common sight in Japan, and it’s called “Japlish” (aka “Engrish”). In general, Japanese are very shy about trying to speak English, as they don’t want to embarass themselves by not speaking it correctly, but they seem to have no problem writing horrible English with wild abandon. Check out engrish.com for some hilarous examples.
| 184|1 |
183|1 |
182|1 |
| 181|1 |
180|1 |
186|1 |
| 185|1 |
|
|
