Cow flatulence contribute between 4 - 9% of methane, a troublemaker in the world of climate change. You know who else contributes? Policeman sitting with the engine running outside the gym. The whole time. I don't get it. CO2 is also a pretty naughty Nellie when it comes to climate change. And that's mostly human caused.
All this talk about climate change really makes you think of the budget brawl - a metaphorical midget wrestling match complete with chairs, easily distracted refs and a bunch of people watching, some of them not even knowing if it's real or not.
Let's start with climate change. Mother Nature is moody. Climate goes through cycles. An ice age here. A drought there. Thrown in a few volcanos, meteors and El Ninos and weather is hard to predict. The one thing you can observe is a trend. You can watch the trends and make generalizations. So let's say there was no industrialization, mostly just cow farts and the resulting tornados. And lets say you were, somehow, with your complete lack of technological advancement (resulting from a lack of industrialization), you managed to observe and calculate (with your hand-whittled abacus) that temperatures were trending higher and that the ice on top of mountains in Pakistan was going to melt, raise the oceans and mess up the oceanic currents that assist in tempering climate. You would think two things: When that ice melts, it will make it a lot easier for the Pakistani government to go in and finally take out the Yeti. Second, you would think: holy crap, how can we stop this? And your answer would be, well, it's completely out of my control. I guess I just have to accept that significant portions of the population will be lost or displaced. Then a meteor that you didn't calculate for on your hand-whittled abacus (because you were SO busy with climate change) would crash into your house instantly killing you, your dog, Bruce Willis, and incinerating your precious wood-beaded calculator. Dang.
Okay, a slightly less depressing scenario, you learn that the heat trend will melt some of the ice in Pakistan, cause some waters to rise, will be really inconvenient for some trade routes, but for the most part, it looks like everything is going to get really close to total devastation, but you are going to be able to weather it (see what I did there). A meteor does come crashing into your neighborhood but it is so eroded by its travels through your atmosphere, that it ends up a small rock that bounces off the dog house in your yard, and Bruce Willis, your little Jack Russell terrier, picks it up in his mouth and buries it in the yard.
Now let's pretend that you were in Scenario #2 above, but you are in an industrialized world in which the industrialization contributes to a slight degradation of the atmosphere. If that's hard for you to imagine, picture you are in a world just like ours but try to believe, just for a minute, that CO2, produced by industrialization, really does contribute to degradation of the atmosphere. Got it?
Okay, so here you are with Bruce Willis and an automatic dog ball thrower by your side. You are on your tablet computer (oh let's just say its an iPad since no one knows what the eff a tablet computer is but they know what an iPad is), and you use it to observe and calculate trends in weather and see that over the past 200 years, you are trending back towards some pretty heavy duty climate change only this time its slightly more accelerated than the past. This may not seem feasible to calculate, but remember, you're using an iPad, it's "magical". You realize that if you can just curb a little bit of the CO2, you have a shot at preventing scenario #1 above and are willing to settle for scenario #2. You explain it to Bruce Willis saying "Bark!", which roughly translates "It's like having a glass of water with room for about 2 more ounces before it spills over. Mother nature is going to add one more ounce, no matter what, so we are going to have a very full glass. But our freakin' CO2 is another 2 ounces of water. Maybe if we can just use 1 ounce of water, we'll at least be good till the next cycle, whenever that is." Bruce Willis responds with "Bark", which bowowly translates to "I could really go for a meteor right now."
Easy enough to understand, right? Republicans get this concept. Like with the budget.
Before I say to much more, let me be out with something. I am a socialist. That's why I voted for Obama. Of course that was before I knew the only thing he wanted was to steal all of our white women and use them to populate his secret service and call them the Amazonian Guard. Oh wait, that's Gaddafi. Wouldn't it be funny if, instead of the Amazonian Guard, they were called the "Muammar Effers"? I know, right?
Okay fine, I'm not a socialist. But I'm not a raging capitalist either. Just kinda goin with the flow. Ideologies are for chumps.
SO back to the budget. Republicans totally get the 2 ounce more concept. No tax increases. They are sitting there with their "tablet" computers, looking at economic trends of the past 150 years and saying, bigger taxes is like CO2. The economy goes in boom and bust cycles. That's capitalism. But if someone doesn't stand up and protect the revenue generation of lower taxes, it will take us to Scenario #1, a scenario from which the wealthy would not recover. Unfortunately, this wasn't a calculation made on actual data trends but rather there ability to get three stars on varying levels of angry birds in which pig outsourcing was used to build cheap, easily destroyed wooden structures. But hey, three stars is three stars.
The concept is the same though. And that's why Republicans are so soundly united on the Fix Climate Change and No Tax Increase ideologies.
Wait a minute. No. No. I'm pretty sure that's right.
