Heat and Humidity

When I was born in Springfield, Illinois, the heat and humidity were just part of Summer. I hated going down there after my parents got divorced, for no other reason than the ridiculously high humidity and the sweltering days. Now, the climate has shifted north and we are in the hot zone. Yesterday, it felt like I was a guppy, breathing water. It was supposedly the third highest humidity ever recorded here with dew points above eighty degrees. It made me feel sick. I had to force myself to eat something for lunch and other than a few cheese curds and a couple cucumbers, nothing else even sounded good. The combination of high heat and humidity make it difficult to cool a body down and for many, exhaustion ensues. I am much happier when the temperature is fifty or below. My theory is that you can always put on more clothes if you need them, but even if I had been naked yesterday, I would have felt overheated.

What was most striking about the weather yesterday was that it just seemed to make me angry. It did not help that I was working under the conditions dictated by someone who had no idea how to get the job done easily or with any sort of common sense, but that is just a small part of the picture. The work was over an hour away by car and although the traffic was light, it still seemed way too far to drive for the amount of money I would be making. Add to this the horrible first-day traffic snarl that occurs in and around EAA and their annual Air Venture Fly -in. We had to drive over ten miles to get my carpool riders in and another ten miles to get out and back in after lunch break. Added to this, the work should have been done in less than half the time, but because of stupid decisions made along the way by "the boss", we had to spend even more time and effort doing things twice and then three times in some cases.

Hiring professionals is usually done when you need skilled workers, but this guy seemed to think we were just glorified temp workers with no skills or experience. In my case, and in the case of at least one of my fellow workers, our individual experience was quite possibly greater than his entire life span. Now, before you let that sink all the way in, I must add that we were both nearly double his age, we both grew up in the theater and we both tend to work smarter, not harder. All the heavy shit (about two tons of cable and wire) were on wheels when he arrived. The first order of business, as he said was to unload all of the copper out of the boxes and onto the floor, taking the wheels out of the picture for the rest of the day. Indeed, he did have a detailed drawing of where every pre-labeled end was supposed to be placed on the several sticks of truss... (which filled a room as large as an airport hangar) We should have placed each coil near the middle of the run, pulled half off in the direction of where it was supposed to end up, flipped the coil and run the rest out toward the source of power, but that would have made sense.

Perhaps the weather was only a small part of how angry it got me, but after struggling all day to make things work, get them finished and looking pretty, the last step of the day was equally grim. We had practiced exemplary cable management and could have gotten the last step done in about twenty minutes, but he told us that we needed to stretch out the coils and recoil them before they were sent to the dimmer racks, from which power flowed. Another ton of cable being pulled out and back nearly 100 feet was the last thing we wanted to do late in the day, but he was the boss. This leads me to the main point of my Heat and Humidity rant. The entire climate change issue is the result of letting ignorant people lacking all common sense make important decisions for the rest of us.

Since 1984 I have had the experiences of riding my bicycle around all five Great Lakes to spread the word about how to live a more enriching life, a more rewarding, full and passionate life, while using less resources and conserving the natural wonder and beauty of our planet at the same time. Back then, some called it voluntary simplicity or self-sufficiency, I called it living better for less; today, we call it sustainability.

The self-centered oligarchs just see what they want, nothing else matters. however many of us need to be maimed, killed or thrown to the curb it is of little consequence as long as the wealthiest among us continue to get their way. I used to love working with the company that I worked for yesterday, they were a big corporate player, but their middle level managers respected the stagehands union enough to let us get work done without very much interference. When this guy told us to do the opposite of what made sense, or what was smart, we should have said "No.", or at least "If you want that done, you will have to do it yourself." Instead, we resigned ourselves to doing more than double the work for the same pay and welcomed our difficult row to hoe.  The heat and humidity had taken their toll on our reasoning skills, but there was no reason to abandon our experience and skills fo rthe sake of a guy who had no clue.

We continue to break records for heat and humidity across the nation. For those of you who still think climate change is a myth, check out a few sources of information. The human species has forever changed climate, we have tools at our disposal that can change the course of our destructive actions, but we lack the will to make better choices. We have the power to stand up, with one voice, and say, "No!" all we lack seems to be the will. climatechangepsychology at blogspot is a good place to start.

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.