Register now for free, or sign in with any of these services:
Want to set your local edition?
Select an edition for more focused local news coverage when you visit NOLA.com.
Don't worry. You can change this setting at any time to another local edition.
A trenchant analysis and pertinent questions, MrM.
Any critical analysis of this catastrophe should include the mirror image that occurs every day, when coal, oil, gas, and biofuels are burned every day.
Those emissions create CO2, which is enhancing the otherwise beneficial greenhouse effect, to the point where we are changing our climate in disastrous ways.
Aside from that, those same emissions create the "other" greenhouse gases - sulfur dioxide, nitrous oxide, and acetaldehyde - the volatile organic compounds that interact with UV radiation and result in ozone.
Ozone is now an inexorably increasing component of the atmosphere we breathe, and it is causing the epidemics of cancer, emphysema and asthma.
Perhaps even worse, ozone is poisonous to vegetation, damaging the stomaga of foliage and interfering with the ability to photosynthesize and produce chlorophyll.
In effect, trees and other plants, including essential crops, are being starved.
That will inevitably lead to famine, since we all rely on plants as the base of the food chain.
Switch to clean, renewable energy on an emergency basis or we face an existential certainty. Humans will go extinct, and it won't be a pleasant process.
www.witsendnj.blogspot.com, photographs and links to scientific research