Vulcanic Eruption, What it Tells US?

I have been planning a blog on our threats to the Planet when the Volcano in Iceland erupted as a dramatic preview of future possibilities. No, I don’t hold us humans responsible for the Volcano. Volcanoes have been blowing ash and silica into the atmosphere since the beginning of any recorded history. As an interim to my blog on what we humans are doing to the planet I just want to deal with some consequences of critical changes in for instance cloud cover.

The simple fact that air travel in the northern hemisphere has practically come to a halt has some very important lessons for us. Aircraft engines and especially Jets are extremely sensitive to metallic or silica dust in the air. Silica is what glass is made of. Particles of silica getting into any kind of machine will quickly grind it up or cause it to seize as when silica is hit by high temperatures it turns into glass. A perfect recipe for ruining any piece of running machinery. For airplane Jet engines it is a guarantee of disaster as these engines suck in an enormous amount of air. If that air has a small amount of silica that engine will seize up and stall. Hence the grounding of planes all over the world simply to avoid tragic consequences.

(Sometime in the 70ies Emanuel Velikovsky suggested that the 40 days of darkness as written in the Bible, the Ming Dynasties and the Mexican Codices really occurred as a result of a volcanic explosion. Scientists held him in contempt because it wasn’t good science.)

Okay, so what does this have to do with our relationship to the planet? I will try to show in my coming blog, that as a result of how we humans are using up and warming the planet we will be creating conditions that might well be the same or similar to what we are now experiencing. We don’t know how long the Iceland volcano will continue exploding. The global warming phenomena could easily and probably will create conditions that would not soon go away. Just look at the pictures of desperate people sleeping on the floors of airports around the world. Could this be an introduction to a future that awaits us? Yes it could be and it could get far worse as we use up limited resources given to us by nature.

As the current debate over global warming goes it is most unfortunate that the polls show a decrease in the number of people who believe that the planet is warming. This in spite of a universal agreement amongst concerned scientists that there has been a steady increase for the last four decades in the worlds temperature. We now have whackos like a “meteorologists,” who does the local weather forecasting, suggesting that we do this great experiment and see in 30 years who was right. Yes and if it proves that you were wrong, knuckle head what will yo do then? Honestly now.

My concerns about the planets future has been sharpened as a result of all the fuss being made over the Government Debt. Politicians of all stripe and now particularly the Republicans, are constantly singing the same tune about the horrors we are leaving to future generations in the form of our governments debt. I believe that dealing with the debt would be a piece of cake compared to dealing with a warmed up overheated planet as a result of our burning fossil fuel. It could very well be far to late to make correction as oceans rise, land is inundated, cities are flooded, water is made unusable as it becomes brackish, etc etc. Believe me if that’s is what we are going to leave for our grandchildren the National Debt as suggested would be a far better trade off.

PS. Try taking a nice ship to Europe or the other way around.