The world is ready to be “entertained” by aging rich rock stars to tell us we need to live more simply.

Well, after all, you need A CAUSE, and Africans are starting to get annoyed that the media pays more attention to rock stars trying to save them than to really helping Africans by investing in business. The dirty little secret is that Africa’s economy is starting to improve thanks to globalization, and even the terrible wars and famines are local phenomenum.

So now the latest craze is save the planet.

The problem is that there are several probems: The problem of how humanity will cope with the normal climate change cycles, the problem of pollution, the problem of excess wealth causing wasteful habits, and the problem of finding cheap energy that will lift poor people from their poverty.
Giobal warming is a religion:and it’s message: REPENT YE SINNERS.

It is politics, resembling the “population explosion” hysteria of twenty years ago, telling us that only a one world order with strict rules that control people’s behavior is the only way to save humanity.
But the dirty little secret about climate is that climate change is cyclical. What are we going to do about it should mean how will we cope with it, not how we should go back to living like our ancestors . And a lot of us suspect that even if we followed the master plan to save the earth, the climate would change anyway, and the only difference is that we would be a lot poorer and less able to afford things like airconditioning, pumping water, and investing in new crops that would enable us to cope with the natural climate cycles on earth.
And indeed Ice Core examinations reveal the cycle of climate has been going on for quite awhile.

In today’s online journal Science, the team showed that the coldest period occurred around 20,000 years ago, during the last glacial maximum, when the ice sheets were at their peak.

It was about 10 degrees Celsius (18 degrees Fahrenheit) colder than today. (Related: “Antarctica’s Atmosphere Warming Dramatically, Study Finds” [March 30, 2006].)

Meanwhile, the warmest period was during the last interglacial period, which is an interval of warmer global average temperature that separates ice ages. At that time, around 130,000 years ago, it was a balmy 4.5 degrees Celsius (8.1 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than today.

So maybe people should stop the BIG IDEA and go back to a lot of small ideas. The idea of balance. Neither a pitanical approach that disparages everything from cigarettes to SUV’s to McDonalds, nor a lifestyle of the rich and famous.
Some say the “live earth” is more about the last gasp of the baby boomers than really about the earth.

Sounds about right to me. They “did their own thing” and threw out all the rules about responsibility and hard work and sacrifice, and now they want the rest of us who worked hard, were responsible for our families and lived simply to feel guilty for our small pleasures.

Sorry, Al, you can have my airconditioner when you pry it from my cold dead hand.

We old ladies may not jet set around the world saving the planet like saintly people like you, but let us at least live in a room that is under 95 degrees fahrenheit.

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Nancy Reyes is a retired physician living in the rural Philippines. Her website is Finest Kind Clinic and Fishmarket