Ah, the time has come for me to once again favour you humble serfs with the joys of my witty banter and poignant ruminating. This week's soliloquy will cover...

THE ENVIRONMENT

"The environment of a system is that part of the universe that is in communication with the system, but is not part of the system." [Walter Fritz, Intelligent Systems and Their Societies]

The environment is a pretty awesome thing. It provides an outside, so that an inside may exist. (For information about that, consult a philosopher). Moreover, without the environment we'd be pretty stuck. Now, many political pressure groups, such as Greenpeace and Russia, talk about protecting the environment. But why? Why would we do that?

See that? That a tree. Essentially, what it does is this:

During the day: What trees do is take nasty CO2, a nasty gas that we produce when we breathe, fart, drive, get on aeroplanes or burn effigies of our enemies, and turn it into O2. CO2 is bad because it collects around the atmosphere (The bit of air pulled close to the earth by gravity), and makes the earth trap more heat. Kind of like a blanket, except that if the earth gets too hot then the cold bits of it start to melt and then flooding happens and the weather gets all crazy and films like "The day after tomorrow" start to come true. O2 is good, because we breathe it and we use it when burning stuff and we would be pretty bummed out if we couldn't burn things any more.   Trees take the carbon from CO2 and put it in their barks.

At night: Trees breathe out some CO2, but mostly the carbon stays inside them and so they take more out than they put back in.

 

So that's pretty hunky dory, right? There are loads of trees! Except no. Because what happens to all that extra carbon? Well, if things are left to their own devices, the tree will die eventually and the carbon it left behind will simply end up in the ground. It then gets compacted with the carbon from loads of other trees, and creates coal. Something similar happened a while back with fishes, and we got oil. Also, there's gas and I think that came from animals that walk on land. That's fine, but the problem now is that we keep burning that coal, which means that all of the carbon, carefully put away for us by millions of years of trees, is being let back out in the atmosphere. That means that the whole business of the world getting too hot happens anyway, and we all die painfully.

That's pretty crap, right?