Poseidon... and the Need for a Garden...

We have been thinking about the ocean a lot more lately than we usually do.  Mr. Myrtle Maintenance is from a small town near Corpus Christi, so he thinks about the ocean more than Mrs. Myrtle Maintenance, who is from out on the Llano Estacado (far west Texas, for the yankees among you).  However, the ocean has been impressed upon all of us lately, due to the criminal foolishness of our oil industry.

Oil doesn't really have a future; it hasn't for twenty-plus years, but our culture has become too fat and lazy to realize it.  Oil is dirty, lazy, and cheap, and those who make their money from it are equally dirty, lazy, and cheap.  We have known for a long time, at least two decades, how to garner enough solar and wind energy on a house-by-house basis to get rid of the electrical grid altogether, and we have been able to run cars on natural gas for decades; on top of that, for about five years now, we've had alternatives to internal combustion engines we could have been using already.

So why have we stuck with oil?  Because it was cheap to produce, and people could make a lot of money doing it.  But there has never, in the entire history of the industrial revolution, been a less effectively regulated industry.

And now we are paying the price for our collective laziness.

The real scope of the tragedy in the Gulf of Mexico has not even been hinted at yet in the mainstream media; talk of "dispersants" and the "evaporation" of oil has dulled our sensibilities on the nightly news, but anyone who remembers their basic physics knows that nothing simply disappears.  Where is the oil being dispersed to?  It's being dispersed to a vertical column beneath the surface of the Gulf of Mexico.  Which happens to be where a lot of fish live.  A LOT of fish.  Fish who form the basis for a whole other industry, a whole other lifestyle, a whole other economic basis for an entire region.  And it is going to, quite unlike the oil, simply disappear.  Dead zones in the ocean are not easily repaired once they appear; coral reefs, which form the basis for whole underwater ecospheres, take centuries to develop.  And in just a few short weeks, already at least a fifth of existing underwater coral in the Gulf has been contaminated.  Those are conservative estimates, and the oil is still pumping out.

Think about that.

Even if not one more drop were to enter the Gulf, 20% of it by the most conservative estimates is already likely to be dead for centuries.

There is simply no repairing that damage, and it is not likely to be limited to the Gulf, either.  This oil is going to end up washing up on the shores of Great Britain before all is said and done.  British Petroleum is quite literally coming home.

Adding to the cheerful news, we have only recently had, thanks to the invention of the "Argo float" pictured at left here, the ability to measure ocean temperatures effectively enough to tell whether the ocean is cooling, staying the same, or warming.

Surprise!  It's warming.  Which means the Earth is warming.  The oceans are far larger than land masses, and far deeper than the earth's habitable surface areas.  The heat-retaining capacity of the oceans is several orders of magnitude (10,000+ times greater) than that of either the land or the atmosphere.  And the water warms up more slowly, and cools down more slowly, than either the land or the air.  Which means if you want an accurate measure of how much heat the planet is retaining, you measure the water.  It comes as no surprise to Myrtle, who is a graduate of elementary physics studies, that in a partially closed system like Earth (far more energy is added to our global system than escapes from it), cranking up industrial production and greenhouse gasses is likely to cause an overall increase in temperatures.

Certain ostriches (well funded by the sleazebags in the oil industry) have attempted to deny that warming is occurring, but those foolish shenanigans should be well and thoroughly over now.  Denying global warming with the evidence from the oceans is tantamount to Ptolemaic astronomy in the Hubble telescope age.  It's not just stupid, it's evil.  Because we can't afford it any longer; we are already well past the time to take action.

So.  Is there any good news?  Yes, there is, though it seems faint at times.  The good news is, we can adapt.  Those who have space and can meet city ordinances, we say you should get chickens, and plant gardens.  In the short run, it may not seem like much, but in the long run, it will work wonders.  We also suggest buying an electric vehicle as soon as possible.  As soon as we are able to get off the electrical grid ourselves, we'll blog about how we've done it; if you're in that process yourselves, good for you!  Keep up the good work!  Maybe even drop Myrtle a line and tell us what we can do ourselves, or what we can do to help you.

We're all in this together, ultimately, so let's keep our chins up, and keep working the land.

Happy farming!