I just finished watching a two-hour documentary on the Discovery Channel
about global warming. I guess most of us don't give much thought to how big our "carbon footprint" is on the
planet.
I didn't realize what "carbon footprint" meant until today. I thought
it meant that we're carbon-based creatures. Now I think it means the emissions of carbon dioxide that we add to
the atmosphere by the way we live.
The documentary painted a rather bleak picture of what is happening on our
planet. Huge icebergs are melting at an alarming rate, and I have to agree that this is cause for concern. And
a side-effect of this is the rise in sea levels, which are already creating some problems. There are many large
coastal cities, and it wouldn't take much of a rise in sea level to wash away large parts of our beaches, and
to destroy a lot of real estate.
The latest estimate is that this will all be happening in this century.
They say that we can't stop it from happening, because global warming
is part of the natural earth cycles, but we can slow it down, and perhaps minimize the resulting destruction, by
changing our living habits just a little.
"Going green" seems a lot more important now.
The big criteria is to cut down on the carbon dioxide we emit. I didn't
know that ethanol (and hybrid vehicles which use ethanol) cut CO2 emissions. And I also didn't know that any time we
use an electrical appliance, we're adding CO2 to the atmosphere.
And, oh boy, do we use electrical appliances!
They said that if each one of us will just cut our carbon dioxide emissions,
by a small amount, we could make a big impact on slowing global warming.
Well, hey, it's worth a try, right?
