I suppose it was inevitable, given my spectacularly bad luck at marketing. that I would have to move into new ways of self-promoting and marketing my books. So, I decided I had to move on into the realm of YouTube video blogging. I can handle this, right? It is just talking to people on video. I don’t expect to be as skilled as some of the other content creators you find there, but if I can get some people to be foolish enough to click on my videos, I might… well… you know, sell a book.
My goodness! That was certainly more difficult than I thought it would be. Of course, I only did one take. After all, as a teacher. you don’t normally get do-overs. I know some of you do videos, and you know how to do them a lot smoother than that, and time them better too. But I am trying to teach a really old dog new tricks here. (My age expressed in dog years is 434.) I will get better with practice. And since the first video is always expected to be the worst video, I anticipate having nowhere to go but up.
Well, maybe the second one is worse. I can’t help it. I am old and not exactly media savvy. I know too that video editing software is available to make things better. But I don’t really have the time and money to spare on that right now. Seriously, even five dollars is too much to spend on this blog post. But perhaps it will add to my two huge paychecks from Amazon this month, one of $0.85 and the other at $0.35, to help me afford better in the future. Creativity can help you through a lot of things. But technology you can’t afford ain’t one of them. And I hope you weren’t too badly traumatized by my hairy old face. We’ll try again next week, next Thursday most likely, and hopefully do a bit better.
2
Hope Comes From Science
Of late I have been rather obsessed with the coming darkness. Death. Ragnarok. Mass extinction of all life on Earth. My own situation as a pessimist quickly approaching the end of my own personal life has probably colored my obsession to a very large degree. And I should point out, my own prognosis is not going to change for the better. I do not have the financial power to prevent the problems I already have using modern effective healthcare. I am personally doomed. But even though the whole world seems easily as doomed by climate change, that doesn’t mean everyone shares my sad fate. There are potential solutions to the problem that only require the people who do have the financial power to fix it to decide that life on Earth has more value than their personal wealth and privilege. (Uh-oh… there’s a dependence on goodness where it seems like none actually exists.)
I often turn to science and books by very smart people to give me ideas that comfort me and give me hope. I recently did some binging on YouTube’s Answers With Joe. He does an excellent job of providing answers to things that worry me underpinned with scientific facts.
I have been worried about the environment from the times in high school science class when we learned about Paul Ehrlich and his book The Population Bomb.
Then we were learning about how the overpopulation of the Earth and its attendant need to produce food for all those people threatened massive famine, resource scarcity, and eventual extinction for humans. It was pointed out that, at the time in the 1970s, we were using chemical fertilizers and pesticides on the fields in Iowa to increase yields that would not only pollute the water and air in Iowa, but would eventually make its way through the watershed system into the oceans where it would overstimulate the algae and create an ocean environment throughout the world devoid of oxygen, fish, and all other lifeforms. I could see the threat and the validity of the science that Ehrlich had done.
I learned, over time, that population stresses do not necessarily cause extinction events in a matter of decades. The 1980s came and went and we were not extinct, despite eight years of Ronny Ray-gun, the jelly-bean president, and massive success in increasing food production. As Joe does an excellent job of explaining in the video above which you didn’t watch, population problems proved at least partially self-correcting. Families generally slowed their growth rate as health and wealth improved and made them more productive, more intelligent, and better able to support the heavy layer of living people that now covered the Earth.
Recently I became obsessively and pessimistically concerned with the dire predictions of environmental scientist Guy McPherson. I do recognize that his work reflects the extremist point of view among climate scientists, but ;there are a number of facts that he presents that are irrefutable in the same way as the arguments of… Paul Ehrlich.
In the second video above that you also didn’t watch, Joe explains how the problem of greenhouse gasses can be undone by renewable energy, carbon capture and air-scrubbers, and the search for viable products made from CO2, helping to reverse greenhouse gasses. He also explains how chemical cooling of the atmosphere and actual planetary weather control are possible. Technology already exists to solve the climate problem. The only drawback is that somebody has to pay for it. And the people in control of that kind of financial power are all entitled low-down greedy bastards that would rather build massive survival bunkers in the Ozarks than pay for the rest of us to survive. So, there is hope, which comes not with a grain of salt, but with a giant’s saltshaker filled with rock salt. Still, it isn’t time for all of you to give up. Just me. I am the one most completely doomed.
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Filed under battling depression, commentary, farming, feeling sorry for myself, humor, insight, Liberal ideas, pessimism, sharing from YouTube, strange and wonderful ideas about life
Tagged as Answers with Joe, climate change, human extinction