My First Climate
Change Blog
Rocommon/Crawford Chapter of Ccl leaders decided at a recent meeting to give our crack editorial team a brief respite from their blogging work by asking another member of our group to prepare a blog. Here is the first effort from Wylie, a relatively new member.
Hello. My name is Wylie and this is my first blog. Whoee! I am a little new at this so I’ll start at the beginning. I attended my first Chapter meeting recently because of my buddy Earl. He had attended one meeting before me and he urged me to come to the next meeting with him. I asked him why. “Its because they give you free pizza just for attending,” he said with a big grin. That was good enough for me so Earl and I attended the next meeting at the Gahagan Center in Roscommon.
The meeting was interesting. Our leaders talked about a whole bunch of stuff I didn’t know, mostly about problems being brought on by pollution of our atmosphere. I didn’t say much as I was mostly waiting for the pizza that I could smell in the next room. Earl’s constant sniffing the air and his remark about how that pizza smelled really good must have provoked our leader Carey because she suddenly left the meeting room and returned with two steaming pizzas in hand. The pizza smelled good and tasted even better.
After I had my fill, I felt a little guilty about Earl and I eating an entire pizza while the remaining 8 or 9 folks shared the second pizza. When leader Carey asked for a blog volunteer, I felt guilty enough that my hand went up. Before my hand was fully in the air, Earl slapped it down. Now Earl is fast. I’ve seen him slap a skeeter off his face while fishing before the critter could even draw blood. But Carey was even faster.
Earl leaned over and whispered. “You don’t know nothin’ about no blog.” It was true, but I had already decided I liked that pizza and if all I had to do was write this blog thing, I was good with it. Carey saw the entire exchange with Earl. “Wonderful,” she said, “Wylie has volunteered to write our next blog.”
After the meeting ended, I asked Carey what she wanted me to write and she said anything that I thought was appropriate about the climate change problem. I must have looked like a dummy so she hurriedly continued on, “Maybe you could write about the first meetings that you attended and how you felt about what you heard.”
I didn’t know much about climate change until I attended my first meeting and heard all the folks expressing their alarm about what we have been doing to the atmosphere for the last 150 years or so (since the beginning of the industrial revolution). I knew a little about the carbon cycle that I had learned in 7th grade, and how all mammals use oxygen and give off carbon dioxide and plants do the reverse; taking in carbon dioxide and giving off oxygen. I looked it up and sure enough, the books said that for most of our history, things were pretty much in balance between plants taking in CO2 and mammals giving off CO2. For several thousand years we had a balance at around 250 parts per million of CO2 in the air.
Then we started polluting the air by burning coal, and then we added oil and natural gas for heat and electricity that we needed to run our factories. Things got really hot when cars and trucks were invented and we found we just couldn’t live without driving to town to buy more stuff that required even more energy to produce, giving off even more carbon dioxide and upsetting the balance between plants and animals. Our growing population didn’t help. In 1900 we had about 2 billion people on earth. In April of 2019, we had 7.65 billion people, everyone of them wanting power just as we have in America.
I learned that most power is provided by companies that burn fossil fuels and create carbon dioxide. So now we have more than 400 parts per million of CO2 in the air and all studies show that we are increasing the amount every year. The result of all that pollution is that much of the permanent ice covering the coldest areas in the world is now melting. That’s only the beginning; studies indicate other bad changes threaten the lives of our children and will change the wilderness areas in northern Michigan, unless we take action soon.
So the question is, what are you going to do about it?
Earl and I plan to eat a lot more pizza and learn what we can do to help, ‘cause we both like fishing and hunting and we don’t want to lose that. Maybe we’ll see you at a future meeting and you can help too.
The End. Wylie
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