Shut up, nerd!

Oh yes, summer's here. It's pretty easy to tell, all I have to do is take a little cigarette break outdoors and when I'm sweating like a pig halfway, then it's probably summer already. The heat is just unbearable, and cracking a car's window just a little bit in the midday sun is sure to induce a massive heatstroke. Guess it's time to give in and sleep with the air conditioning on tonight, releasing a few CFC's in the process and converting goodie-two-shoes CO3 into evil CO2. (That's ozone and carbon dioxide, a little refresher in chemistry)

Yeah, yeah, we've heard it all before, about how each and every summer seems to be getting hotter and hotter. Well, I can never recall a summer that was "cooler", so forgive my skepticism. Hey, I do my share saving the environment, it's just that we seem to be pre-conditioned to scream "the sky is falling!" at the top of our lungs whenever we break a sweat.

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I'm no scientist, but creating an example out of melting glaciers seem to be a tad deceiving. Ice melts, a well known fact. Also a fact is that these glaciers have been melting for a couple of eons now. If we talk about the rate by which these glaciers are melting, I picture an ice cube in my glass of scotch, the smaller the ice cubes get, the faster it melts. So why create all this hullabaloo about it?

So I sat down with my scotch on the rocks and thought about it a bit. Do scientists mean that the ideal environmental situation is to have these glaciers melt during summers and gain more mass during winter? Could be, but so far I haven't heard anything about it from all those documentaries. How I wish I could have listened more during my thermodynamics class, I seem to recall a topic about entropy, how it couldn't be reversed so when you increase the thermal energy of a system, there's no way within that frame of reference to decrease it unless you apply "work" on it, transferring it elsewhere but nevertheless creating additional thermal energy in the process anyway. Hmm... I'm not even sure that makes sense. Anyway, the point I wanted to make was that you could never fully recover the mass lost from the glacier during the summer in winter, hence year after year the net effect would still be that the glaciers are melting, just as the ice cubes in my scotch have melted away as well.

Okay my mind just shot itself to bits... enough nerdy talk. I'll simply accept what Al Gore is talking about and plant a tree. Well, I don't have a yard, so maybe I'll grow tomatoes in a tin can instead.

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Time out: a quick shoutout to my friend Ria. Hi Ria! You know that blog you talked about over at billandria.blogspot.com? The one that is gathering 100 comments to submit to Sarah Palin? I clicked on it and I think I'm comment-er number 99. Haven't checked up on it again but I hope someone else dropped a line to make it an even hundred. Keep it up!

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I was over at the Department of Environment and Natural Resources yesterday and found myself reading up on some panels illustrating work being done preserving a river system in Mindanao. Apparently, Lake Lanao is responsible for feeding the island with over 1000 megawatts of electricity through several hydroelectric plants downstream. However, critical water levels at the lake as well as the destruction of watersheds along the river's path has compromised this system. Just too bad, to think that if this eco-friendly power supply falls short, coal-fired power plants are ready and eager to fill in the gap.

Wait, am I being a hypocrite? Aren't coal power plants our top clients? Well, yeah... but before you take that pitchfork out of the barn, our business is to help these coal plants be more environment-friendly. But okay, I'll shut up now before I start finding my foot in my mouth.