Climate Change 202

The logical step, once Heat Islands are seen and understood, is to get a picture of large scale impacts of the hundreds of thousands of towns, transportation corridors, energy transmission corridors, etc. each belching up an energized bolus, carrying toxic compounds and particulate matter aloft. Again, perhaps a volcano would be more intense, and concentrated, but we are creating heat islands virtually everywhere. Like a child learning shades of red, we need to understand what we do to our atmosphere. Using the volcano as "out-of-the-box red" from the kindergarten set of Crayons. Perhaps what we are seeing on the global climate change scale is brick red, or terracotta. Still, undeniably "red" once we have matured and understand the range of color that makes up red. The amalgamation of these updrafts, which create nearly invisible columns of upwelling air, here in Northeast Wisconsin, have created a dense and stationary mass of heated air, so large, as to shunt winter weather as far south as Texas!
We see ever more heat, more drought, and wildly fluctuating diurnal (daily) temperature change, combined with heavier, and more prolonged wind, high rain events, etc. Two new types of rain events have now been seen in Wisconsin. One stalls normally, fast moving thunderstorms, (Which get their energy from superheated air blasting into the Stratosphere.) When vast amounts of energy are being released on still summer nights, the phenomenon can dump several times the monthly average, of rain, overnight. The second phenomenon is "training", where a series of nodes of heavy rain, travel perpendicularly along a storm's front, inundating a small area as it's parent air mass runs into these "bubbles", or "columns" of heated air which act as major atmospheric mountain ranges along urban/suburban corridors. I have seen as much as can be seen from the earth, and have integrated information gathered by flying as well. Most of the problem with these phenomena is that they are too small to be considered "weather" in and of themselves, they change weather. Yet, they are usually far too large scale for individuals to detect, perceive, or grasp without an understanding of the heat island concept.
In essence, we each have an atmospheric change map of our entire existence. It has mostly been lost to the scale of time, but we can imagine it quite easily once given tools to "see" this kind of process. At rest, we "contaminate" the air with carbon dioxide, this however is useful to plants, mosquitoes and a plethora of microbes. Because our body heat creates a tiny updraft, the CO2 tries to fall and the effect is of creating two counter spiraling vortecies. This can be imagined as a sort of doughnut shape. Along the inner surface of the bottom of the doughnut, air would be moving aloft, spinning the doughnut, and the CO2 would be curling out and down the outside of the doughnut. To help visualize this phenomenon, hold your right hand out and spin it clockwise, hold your left hand out and spin it counterclockwise. Now, move your hands from front to the sides. This gives you some sense of your "energetic addition" to the world when you are at rest. As you travel through life, you also bring with you a series of these doughnuts, spinning off like a nautilus through time-space. (please don't write this off as Metaphysics) If we exercise, our bodies, we actually make more CO2, and stir up the air more. Although we still make the generalized "doughnut effect", it is overwhelmed by fluid dynamics and eddy currents behind our moving mass.
Similarly, but without the counteracting CO2 is the car or truck at rest after use. It has the spiraling upward energy, but all it has to give back are the gasses and fumes borne up by the heat of the engine. When the car is running far more heat and fumes are created, borne upward by the energy of the heat. It sounds tiny, but we have hundreds of millions of cars operating every day!
Many of us remember the childhood banking lesson. Two sisters got a choice of having their annual allowance allocated in one of two ways. One chose to get ten dollars every month. She liked money and was very happy. Her sister chose a penny plus another penny every day, compounded for the entire year. The sister who picked the first payment plan thought ten dollars was a lot of money compared to a penny, and it is. However, a small change compounded over a long time has substantially more impact. "Penny Girl" has nearly seven hundred dollars by the end of three hundred and sixty five days, whereas the girl getting ten dollars per month only nets one-hundred and twenty.
Similarly, we need to look at long-term incremental changes that yield the biggest bang over the long term. Not everyone can go from a car using fuel at a rate of 25 MPG to one using it at a rate of 50MPG as I was able to do. This cut my transportation emissions by half. I could cut them by half again by always having one passenger, and by half again driving the car with three friends along. Carpooling could drastically the energy use we all have to use for transport. With four people riding in my car, we effectively get 200 MPG!
By using a solar furnace, frequently called a "scorched air" solar heater, I reduced my space heating bill by 1/3. This is only a few hundred dollars per year, but I am expecting the system to pay itself off in year three. From then on, that money saved stays in my bank, rather than flowing to a utility company. Perhaps, all one can afford to do is slow down a few miles per hour to save fuel, or check the air in their tires more frequently. Even keeping them two pounds psi harder can improve mileage without affecting handling. These small changes add up over time and complement one another in unique ways.
Find out if it is possible to ride share to work or the grocery, you may be surprised at how rich your life becomes while simultaneously saving resources! Imaging also, what life would be like if you just spent more time sitting and thinking, letting your CO2 cycle through the natural world the way God/ess intended.