Kort Explores conundrums of the human condition

Hardly a day goes by without something being blamed on global warming. Just in the U.S. we have El Nino on the West coast, the increasing severity and frequency of hurricanes on the East Coast, tornadoes in the heartland, and record rainfall across the country all being attributed to global warming. Around the world nearly every major climate event from storm to drought is now being blamed on global warming.

There seems to be a general consensus that our global climate is changing, but is our world getting warmer or colder? The critics of Western Industrial Civilization claim that our activities are causing the planet to get warmer. They claim that we're facing widespread flooding of coastal regions due to rising sea levels as the polar ice caps melt, and global famine as productive farm land becomes sun blasted desert. They try to cover all possibilities by saying that global warming will cause more severe weather at both ends of the spectrum - both warmer summers and colder winters.

Many of us have been entertained by the manufactured horror of movies like the Blob where slimy creatures consume everything they touch. But the fun fades quickly when the monsters leave the silver screen and appear in the real world. Fortunately, while the looming disaster insidiously growing within the walls of our homes is aggressively attacking the structures in which we live, it doesn't eat humans - at least not directly.

"We are certain of the following: A large number of manmade chemicals have been released into the environment... [which] have the potential to disrupt the endocrine systems of animals, including humans."
Wingspread Conference,
Report on Chemically Induced Alterations
in Sexual and Functional development:
The Wildlife/Human Connection.

It has long been a basic concept in thermodynamics that entropy effects all systems, and causes natural systems to degrade into greater confusion and disorder as time passes. Entropy defines the direction of time and prevents time from spontaneously reversing. The ultimate effect of entropy over the next tens of billions of years will be to create a temperature equilibrium in which maximum disorder has been achieved and no useful energy sources remain. This is referred to as the heat death of the Universe.