Weekly Photo Challenge: Changing Seasons

Changing Season of a pilgrim traveler

Lourdes Oct 2012 pilgrimage

Lourdes Oct 2012 day after we left

Get Used to Climate Change (excerpt from Scientific American)Humanity will have to learn to adapt to a changing climate, as our species has done before By Daniel BotkinThe more technologically and legally advanced a civilization, the greater the need and desire for environmental stability, for a balance of nature. Hence, our modern dilemma vis-à-vis climate change. Rather than claim the world is constant except for our sinful interference with it, we need to acknowledge and work out ways to live with environmental change. This can include doing our best to stop or slow that change, as we do in the short-term with agricultural irrigation, stabilizing the “precipitation,” so to speak. But the harder we work to force environmental constancy onto our surroundings, the more fragile that constancy becomes and the greater the effort and energy it takes. The use of groundwater for crop irrigation illustrates that fragility. Large aquifers that took many thousands of years to develop are being depleted for crop irrigation over comparatively short times—decades or centuries.

 “Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.” —Physicist Richard Feynman in the final report on the Challenger disaster