How big are you?

Today a friend sent this link regarding a new State of Montana initiative to help alleviate global warming issues:

http://leg.mt.gov/css/climate_survey.asp

Although I have supported some of her past campaigns such as the one against compulsory fluoridation, and I tend to agree with her opinion on the absolute immorality of international corporations, we do differ on many things. She was urging me to take this survey and fill in “strongly disapprove” on every item because it would make all of our electricity bills go up and anyway all this “global warming” stuff is just pseudo-science.

NOT!

I took and, and you should too as it goes away on 2/29. But I filled in “Strongly Approve” on every item. That’s called diametric opposition, I guess. Is a dialog even possible?

When we consider things like air pollution, changing ocean currents, melting icecaps, we tend to discount the seriousness—after all the oceans and the atmosphere are huge and we are so small..

If you were walking through the Universe and happened to reach up and pluck off the Earth, hold it in your hand, would you even notice the thin smear on the outside, the slightly wet and slimy film that is us and all we think about? The diameter of the Earth is about 7900 miles. From the bottom of the Marianas Trench to the top of Mt Everest is only 12.5 miles, another 7 or so miles to the very top of the atmosphere. If you held the Earth like a large grapefruit and wrapped the thinnest tinfoil you could find around it with the resulting wrinkles and folds, that wrap would still be 1000 times thicker than our coating of life. If you had long legs and were wondering whether you could hop over the Atlantic Ocean or if you would get your feet wet if you stepped through, consider that the average depth of the puddle is only 2 miles while it is 4000 miles across. The water wouldn’t even come over your shoe soles. Stand on a moderate sized hill and look out over the country--you can easily see 10 miles unless the Chinese coal industry is having a heavy burn day. It doesn’t look far at all—with a good pair of binoculars you can see houses and cars, watch people driving down the road. You could walk there in 2 ½ hours. Where would you be if you could walk 2 ½ hours straight up? Snug at the bottom of our entrapped well of atmosphere, we never wonder would happen to us if we were suddenly transported 10 miles straight up. Looking across the Atlantic, the deep cold water currents that will be disrupted by melting Arctic icecap are tiny ephemeral wisps of convection, so fragile, so easy to change. The Gulf Stream which creates all the climate we have ever known in North America and Europe is just a warm glimmer on the surface of the puddle.

Here is a scale image of the earth and the moon—so close together it only takes 1.8 seconds for light to travel from one to the other, yet so tiny, so lost in space.

Then consider an object to which light takes a year to travel—the closest star, Alpha Centauri so tiny it is barely visible on a clear night. Then consider a photograph taken from the Hubble Space Telescope (orbiting only a tiny distance above us, 366 miles) of the Cone Nebulae, a place whose light has taken 2400 years to reach the Hubble. It looks like an illustration from a science fiction novel:
And the Cone Nebulae are very close in comparative terms--we can capture light and other wavelengths from things a million times farther away.

We are tiny blips in a very big place but we can’t seem to get that through our heads—we keep behaving as if we and anything we do matters at all.

Keep it all in perspective and keep recycling . . .