The Other Global Warming Contributors

No one in the media will shut up about global warming, and while I think it's always important to be conscious of your impact on the environment, there are 2 things about all the hype that really irk me.

1. This day in age, damage to the environment is a basic consequence of life. Our main exhaust is The Dreaded Green House Gas Carbon Dioxide (ooooooooooh!), and we haven't left enough of the planet's natural checks and balances (i.e., trees) standing to make up for our mouth-breathing masses.

2. Pundits go on and on ad nauseum about the big contributors to global warming, what I like to call the Three Cs: cars, coal plants, and God help us, cow farts.

But the things that have really gotten us to this place--the place where Nevada's Lake Mead continues to drop dramatically every year such that They think by 2012 its level will be below the output pipe that feeds Las Vegas and other cities; the place where the polar bears are drowning in the arctic circle because the hunting grounds are ever-flooded; the place where the acidity of our oceans is increasing such that all marine life is dying off, except for our friend the jellyfish, who seems to like this new pH just fine--is the cumulative damage.

I suppose we could posit that before the industrial revolution, the Earth's vast green spaces were probably able to offset what damage we did. Then came large scale manufacturing. And large scale successful breeding (thanks to the decrease in infant mortality). So I've always wondered what the impact was of:

1. Smoking. When they started making Camels by the millions, and we added up all the cumulative smoke over the last couple centuries, how big would THAT ozone hole be?

2. War. Think about how much of an impact the immense volume of smelting, bombing, sinking ships, crashing airplanes and chemicals (i.e., Nitrogen mustard, Agent Orange, Zyklon B) have on the planet during war. And the 20th century alone saw the U.S., a manufacturing giant, at the forefront of 4 huge wars and 1 cold war. And remember those pillars of black smoke over the Kuwaiti oil fields? What damage did all that stuff do?

3. BBQs. How many tons of charcoal are burned, or propane ignited in people's back yards every summer? Think about how many of your friends have a BBQ. Cumulatively, that's a whole lotta burnin' goin' on. How about all those smoke houses that turn out your favorite sausages, beef jerky and pepperonis?

4. Disposable diapers. Think about THAT before you reproduce (I'm talkin' to YOU "John & Kate + 8", "Octomom" and "18 Kids & Counting"). Oy.