Burn Down The House
August 30, 2008
– Comments (13)
Yup, that's what I almost did and it reminds me of how it changed my long term investment strategy.
Last year I got an awakening on the threat of global warming. Two things came to me in the same week. I was doing a lab with my student where I got them to design a thermos and we went over the theory of heat transfer. The same week I read some of Jame Lovelock's material for the first time.
Teaching the theories as applied to a thermos that Lovelock explains in his work as to why global warming will increase got my attention big time.
I never wrote about my long term investments strategies here, not once. I wanted to work in the north for a few years and then set up some kind of business in a latin American country to that would appeal to boomers retiring and trying to stretch their retirement dollars. I took a couple weeks of Spanish in the summer of 2007 in Costa Rica and I signed up for a Spanish course right before I got my job up north. I was going to spend a few years learning some Spanish and learning about the countries before working towards making some kind of career and income generator for myself perhaps in Costa Rica. It occurred to me to take advantage of that low cost living for myself. But, I don't think I am old enough to avoid living through some of the consequences of global warming...
Lovelock's work made me change my mind. He thinks we could see a 5 centigrade increase in global temperature in the next 20 years. That means a huge increase in the deserts on the planet. It just seemed to me that the nice warm retirement plan could be one where getting food is difficult.
So, what the heck does that have to do with my almost burning my home down? Last May I wrote about how the daylight was "killing" me up here. My biological clock to go to sleep at night just wasn't working because of how it was daylight past 11. The locals suggested covering the bedroom windows with foil. Well, there are these glass blocks and I just covered over where I had plastic up. The reflective power of the sun through those blocks was so powerful, there are scorch marks on the window sill. And it simply reaffirms Lovelock's application of science to this theories.
So, just what is Lovelock saying?
We are not getting the full dose of the sun's power and greenhouse effect because aerosol pollutants in the upper atmosphere are reflecting some of the sun's rays back.
Further, and this I saw more recently in a documentary, our planet's ice caps and glaciers are melting. The loss of their reflective power can not be underestimated. What was white and reflected energy back into space is now melted, dark and now absorbs energy. This further amplifies the greenhouse effect.
I just loved hearing in the news this summer about an upper atmospheric storm. I'd never heard that in the news before, or perhaps I just had never noticed it. But, with increasing temperature comes increasing ability to have storms, storms that can blow those atmospheric pollutants away, outside the Earth's gravity.
We have two source of reflective power that sends some of the sun's rays away from us. One has been rapidly melting away and the other can easily be blown away.
Lovelock thinks we should be planning for global warming, and that's what I am doing...
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