It's fluffy pink carnage...

This scratching post had a fuzzy, springy ball on top of it, presumably so cats could bat it around playfully and entertain themselves. Well, Piva decided the fuzzy ball should be eradicated from the household, and took the measures necessary to make that happen. This little cat can be totally insane sometimes… (she also just jumped up on my keyboard and typed “y6rf”… I’m sure there’s a message in there somewhere…)

So this morning I check the news and see that Al Gore was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for his environmental work and for raising awareness of global warming. Um, what??? Who makes these decisions? You gave a Nobel Prize to Al Gore? Seriously? I mean, I thought it was bad enough when his pseudoscience-fueled, inaccurate bit of documentary claptrap, “An Inconvenient ‘Truth’” (a word he apparently uses quite loosely…) won an Academy Award. Don’t even try to tell me there wasn’t a better documentary out there that deserved the award. Why is it that even the entertainment industry is ruled by politics? And now apparently, so are Nobel Prizes.

First of all, what in the world does global warming have to do with peace? Al Gore has done NOTHING to further the cause of peace on this planet – if anything, all of his pontificating has been DIVISIVE and the cause of much more arguing and conflict. And second, I’m really starting to get annoyed by all the global warming talk. And don’t get me wrong, I am 100 percent FOR finding cleaner energy, and more efficient energy, and conserving water, and recycling, etc, etc. I mean, it just makes sense to want the air and the water to be clean, and to be as efficient as possible when using energy, and to reuse things that can be reused. However, I just don’t understand using the “stop global warming” tagline in an attempt to persuade people to be more environmentally conscious…

But then, I usually try to look at it logically – we know, without a doubt, that our planet has already been through cycles of warming and cooling. We KNOW this. It’s a scientific fact. We also know that when these changes were taking place, the earth was either devoid or mostly devoid of human life. Therefore, we can safely conclude that the roads weren’t clogged with SUVs, no one was using hairspray, plastic jugs weren’t piled up in landfills, and no one left the lights on when they exited a room. We can also safely conclude that whatever caused the planet to warm up and cool down was a NATURAL phenomenon. One that could not be stopped or changed. Whatever was to happen, was to happen.

So here’s the problem I have now – now the planet is covered with human beings, many of whom seem to think said planet revolves around them. They also seem to forget that the planet has been evolving and changing for eons, long before any of us humans existed – we had absolutely nothing to do with the weather patterns, or the sea levels, or the size of the glaciers. And yet what happened to those weather patterns? And the sea levels? And the glaciers? They CHANGED. They evolved. In fact, they’ve probably been continually changing and evolving for as long as this world has been circling the sun. But NOW, there are humans who seem to believe that THIS particular climate configuration is the ONLY one that should ever exist, from now until the end of time. That unless we do something, other generations of humans may have to contend with a DIFFERENT climate. That unless we do something, we might actually have to CHANGE our maps to reflect differences in land masses and bodies of water. That unless we do something, the world is going to change and evolve again… Well, duh. Honestly, what did you THINK would happen? The world’s climate would hit a certain point, and then, for the first time since the dawn of creation, it would settle into a holding pattern?

And I’m not saying that we humans don’t have any impact on the climate, or that we aren’t possibly accelerating change – I'm sure our very existence has an impact on the world. I just think that it’s rather naïve to assume that we are the ONLY reason for climate change, and that we can bring it to a screeching halt if we all just hold hands and drive hybrid cars. Yes, there are definitely reasons to find cleaner energy and to preserve our resources – but if you think it’ll stop the climate from changing or prevent the need for updated maps in the future, you’ll be very disappointed some day.

I just think someone should come up with a more logical argument for why we need to take care of the environment – you know, start with something like, “drinking clean water is good for you” and go from there…