Earth Day 2023

The 53rd Earth Day has arrived, (tomorrow), and everyone is touting their undying love for the world. Every product producing company and corporation is showing how green they have become and how their wares are completely safe for us and the environment. The government has passed new laws to make it easier for our planet to breathe without suffocating on CO2 and methane, and every 2024 political candidate is setting themselves up to show how they are the wonderful, caring Earth-friendly persons that they all imagine themselves to be. It makes me quite ill. Earth Day has joined the ranks of the rest of the crushingly over-commercialized holidays that Easter, Halloween and Christmas have long since become. Everyone can sound like an environmentalist without having to actually do anything now, and the rest of us will believe them. (It has produced a new word for our language, greenwashing).

Climate Change on our planet is being caused by Global Warming. As our planet heats up from the mind-blogging amounts of CO2 being produced by our technological civilization, and dumped into our atmosphere, the weather will get more extreme with hotter and colder, wetter and dryer swings, causing more and more disruptions of our daily lives. This last winter alone has produced massive, record-setting amounts of snow in California, Nevada and Utah and it could not have come at a better time. The Western U.S. has been suffering from a prolonged period of drought. All that snow will melt and flow into rivers, lakes and reservoirs. California especially has desperately needed the water for their nearly depleted reservoirs throughout the state. However, too much of a good thing will cause flooding in many parts of California which produce a considerable amount of the vegetable crops for the rest of the U.S. It will all be under water this spring and summer, most likely causing shortages and large price increases of many products. The Great Salt Lake and especially Lake Powell in southern Utah have also been reprieved from drying out for another year or so.

But, remember those climate swings that I mentioned, It may have been very cold and wet this last winter. but now, a strong and hot El-Nino has been predicted to begin this summer or fall. Record heat, never seen before, has been forecast for the end of 2023 and especially in 2024, which could become the hottest year on record. So, will that make things wetter or dryer? For each 1.8°F (1°C) of atmospheric warming, saturated air contains 7% more average water vapor. During an El Nino, warmer water in the Pacific Ocean is pushed east towards South and Central America and the California coast. It could create wetter then usual conditions in the southwestern U.S. and drier conditions in the North. It will be interesting to see if it actually stays wetter for California and here in Utah, but it will certainly get a lot warmer. Earth Day next year could be quite interesting, to say the least.

(The very long and cold winter that we just experienced here in Utah could change into a very hot summer and fall. We are planning on making some changes in our landscaping to make it more drought tolerant and to cut down on water use by converting some of our lawn to other plants.)