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Entry: Climate of Here Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/climate_of_here#18801 Post contents: Reductionism is the global pastime. Too bad it does not extend to reducing impact. While there may indeed be a long term trend toward warmer temperatures, it has happened before, it would be better if the term used would have been "climate dynamism". Volatile weather is on the increase. Rainfall events are seeing shorter duration, greater intensity and higher velocity flow. Streams in New England are becoming deeply imbedded in places, lowering surrounding groundwater elevations. In other parts of the country, droughts are entrenching and we have tornados in February. While global warming and cooling have happened before, what is distinctly different this time is the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. What is always missed in our popular media and it's little Goebbels called Conventional Wisdom is that there are many sides to every issue and that glib partisanship is a sure recipe for suicidal dysfunction. We have committed a huge amount of financial and intellectual capital to an unsustainable paradigm of living. Some elements of modernism are hugely beneficial while others are rampantly destructive. Our American brand of debt-financed sprawl on the back of cheap oil has created a land-use pattern that will not stand the test of time. Though climate and land use are indelibly tied, we need to separate the debate about our consumptive land use from the scientific debate about climate change. Combining them seems already to be confusing the issue to a standstill. Though there is great economic opportunity in change, it threatens the Business-Bureaucracy Institutions developed to support our heavily industrialized and centralized way of life. In this atmosphere, the disinformation spread to protect the prevailing institutions will be ultimately harmful because we need to adapt and adapt now.....not to mention the need to cut the Bureaucracy down to a fraction of where it is today. Otherwise, we can simply keep being Lemmings to the bitter end.Better yet, we'll be NASCAR Lemmings, gunning it through the wreckage to the finish line. Sent at: 2008 09 07