How to Keep Calm About the Greenhouse Effect

Perhaps you have managed to avoid all the news stories, TV documentaries, scientific explanations and political waffle about greenhouse gases and climate change.
Or perhaps you have seen and heard so much about it that you just want to scream "Yes I get it! We are all going to die! Now shut up, OK??"
Or are you a dedicated seeker of knowledge who tries to keep up to date with all the claims and counter claims?

If you are one of the second or third groups, I have something soothing/interesting (respectively) to show you. (Anyone in the first group will not have read this far.)

As I have mentioned before, a friend of mine writes a scientific blog about climate change, and because he actually knows what he's talking about, I usually don't. But a recent post made sense even to me, because it used the sort of analogy I can follow: "Do Greenhouse Gases Act As Blankets?" .
Even if you don't read the article, do watch the movie of the "experiment", because it is very peaceful, and something we can each verify for ourselves at home, or use to impress any easily awed friends.

Not all truck drivers have tattoos ...

One of the volunteer organisations with which I happily spend my time (in preference to unhappily spending it doing actual work) is the local bush fire brigade.
I used to belong to a rural brigade near Toodyay, but I haven't been active since I left the area several years ago. I missed the sense of achievement and community involvement, so a few months ago I joined the Kalamunda brigade. We have training sessions every Sunday morning throughout the winter, in preparation for the summer fire season, and it has been a very worthwhile and enjoyable experience refreshing my skills and learning new ones.
Back in the distant past when I was at agricultural college, I got my truck licence in order to help with the grain carting on farms, and this later came in handy in the Julimar BFB, because it meant I could be what was officially (but rather rudely) called a "Heavy Driver". This was nothing to do with body weight, thank goodness, but referred to the "heavy tanker" as opposed to the "light tanker", which required just a car license.

The Kalamunda BFB has a much larger fleet of appliances (3 "heavies" and 3 "lights"), but also a much larger membership, so I did not expect to be needed as a driver, which suited me fine, as I have done no truck driving at all for a few years, and had only a little experience at Julimar in the previous five years. In other words, I had a license but minimal current skills, which was an extremely good reason not to get behind the wheel!

So it was with a mixture of excitement (20%) and terror (80%) that I found myself on an emergency vehicle driver training and assessment course last weekend. The Saturday theory session was so sobering that some of us decided we would rather walk to fires, pushing handcarts as in days of old. The lethal potential of several tons of fully-loaded, out-of control water tanker; the legal responsibility of the driver for all other crew members in the vehicle; the inexorable laws of physics opposing the efforts of the driver to effect an emergency stop; and the balance needed between safety and speed when responding to an emergency - these were aspects many of us had never properly considered in the excitement of "turning out" to a fire.
Consequently by the time it was my turn for the practical session on Sunday, the above percentages had shifted to nausea (10%) and terror (90%). There were two of us doing the "heavy tanker" course that morning, and I was mortified to discover, on the 40 minute drive to a disused airfield) that I was to be comprehensively shown up by an extremely competent and experienced fellow volunteer. The instructor sitting beside him remarked on several occasions that he felt a bit superfluous, and that there was nothing he needed to say. Oh dear, I thought. (Or silent words to that effect.)

The next few hours passed in an adrenaline-fuelled, dry-mouthed, and excessively apologetic haze, with a couple of "highlights" burned into my memory.

1. The emergency braking practice, particularly the short but heart-stopping skid - not an enjoyable manoeuvre in a big truck with 2000L of water sloshing wildly around a few feet behind your head. (Although we did avoid the experience of one team the day before, when the lid flew off the water tank during one emergency stop, and a tsunami broke over the cab.)

2. the instructor (ignoring my pleas) gave me the task of driving home through the Sunday afternoon traffic, complete with inattentive sightseers, weekend motorcyclists weaving enthusiastically and inexpertly across the lanes, arguing families on their way home from lunch at the inlaws, and death-defying kids on skateboards and bicycles.

I'm enormously relieved to report that I managed to deliver the truck and all its occupants back to the station undamaged, although I sincerely hope it is a very long while until I am required to drive one of those trucks under "lights and sirens" to an actual fire.

"And just where do you think you've been, young lady?"

Hands up all those women of 25 and over who can still recall the guilty shiver those words can cause.
Yes, me too, even though I had depressingly few occasions where the guilt was justified. But those are the words echoing in my head on returning to this blog and finding it is over 6 months since I last posted.

So where have I been? Right here actually, in a tab just next to this one. But the reassuringly tedious regularity of life is not conducive to the sort of blog posts that might conceivably be of interest to anyone, so I have sent my inner voice to the Quiet Corner.
Why am I posting now, I don't hear you ask? Well, my principle online activity as a volunteer editor at the Open Directory Project is currently on hold due to "upgrades" of some technical stuff, so I'm suddenly purposeless. Also, a couple of my friends have turned out to be quite entertaining bloggers, and I feel very outclassed!

I've never been a true blog fan (as proven by this stop-start effort), but I can see how addictive it can be to read other people's personal journals and clear out the contents of one's own cluttered mind.

I have two newly discovered facts to share with you today, each as inconsequential as the other. One I learned from a blog, and one from "real life". See if you can tell which is which.

1. Avocados take 18 months to develop on the tree, and even then they will not ripen until they are either harvested or fall to the ground.

2. Regions immediately above the Tropic of Cancer are called sub-tropical, just like those below the Tropic of Capricorn. The same applies to sub-equatorial regions.

If you guessed that one of my friends has a climate blog, well done, and here's an unripe avocado as your reward. (Hint: it will ripen in 9-10 days, or 7-8 days if stored in a brown paper bag in a cupboard.)