climate change

The Day’s Satire.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment

A friend of mine shared a post on Facebook today that stated, “There’s something deeply ceremonial about the first sip of coffee. It’s like the opening act to the day’s drama.”

My comment, made during my first cup of coffee, was: I prefer to view it as satire. I’m just not sure what it’s satire of. That makes it funnier.

I do know what it’s satire of, I think. It’s satire of what one would believe would be sanity. The day went accordingly. First, a little bit of background.

The *Gasp* Background.

Globally there has been some changes in weather patterns. Some say it’s climate change, some deny that, but regardless of who says what everyone agrees that the weather is not really what we would like, which is why the English went out and conquered other countries to have tourism in: Terrible weather. This time, though, it’s on a planetary scale.

It’s so bad that some people accused of being smart by very loud cults of mediocre people have decided to invade Mars, a planet that actually has worse weather for humans than Earth. Rather than admit the mistake, the cults and all who would listen are encouraging people to leave the planet by making the weather here worse. It could be that European countries tried that, but sailing ships just didn’t pollute enough so they had to work extra hard. You know. Times were tougher to make other people as miserable as the weather in Europe made them, so they had to put in that extra effort.

Anyway, in the dual island Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, not very far from the equator, anecdotal evidence jumps out at you and smacks you with anything available. It’s all anecdotal because there seems to be some trouble with handling information by the governments that have came, went, stayed, and sat. It’s not political, it’s just… well, I’m not sure what it is, but it’s pretty clear what it isn’t: working.

Because Trinidad and Tobago is bleeding edge when it comes to State Enterprises, handling Water and Sewage is handled by the Water and Sewage Authority, known by the acronym WASA. I suspect that they tried SAWA, but it may have been confused with the local pronunciation of San Juan and so they went with WASA.

This dry start to 2024 did not surprise anyone – except, apparently, WASA. They did know, of course1, and that article in the footnote is a short read and I must warn you: It isn’t satire, it isn’t fiction. It’s just sort of what you expect from a state run enterprise in Trinidad and Tobago. Of course, to my point, it is satire of the way things should be done.

I know, I know, that’s anecdotal. Bear with me, I’ll just give you a rundown from Today.

Today.

Just before this, there was a light dusting of rain outside. The condensate was so surprised that it threw itself at the ground and mist. This is likely partly because of Sahara Dust, though I suspect other regions have offered their dust as well. With the dry, there’s been plenty of dust here in Trinidad as well.

So this apparently happened. Two 1000-gallon water tanks were stolen from a fire station, reported yesterday by the Trinidad Express Newspapers Facebook page, and since I was on my first cup of coffee I laid into the whole situation.

What’s even weirder about this is that in World War II, when the United States had the Navy base in Chaguramas, according to someone who was Master-At-Arms for the base during that time, there were plenty of water wells in Chaguramas. Before he died, he wondered what had happened to them, and was less than pleased when I laughingly suggested that the United States may have taken them with their ships when they went home.

But just on the points. Between March 2nd and March 11th, the Trinidad and Tobago Fire Services lost 2 tanks. Let’s call that a week because of schedules, and the the author of this post being kind. So in one week, presto magico, 2 tanks that can hold 1,000 gallons of water each disappeared from a Fire Station which is in charge of putting out fires with… say it with me… water. No one noticed. No one saw. They just vanished. To suspect a thief pulled up and stuck them in the trunk of a car seems a stretch. It could be that someone just picked them up and walked away with them and wasn’t noticed by the fire service officers.

Now, the Trinidad and Tobago Police Service has a way that they deal with crime. They call them ‘anti-crime exercises’ to distinguish them from the rigorous calisthenics never attributed to Trinidad and Tobago police. These exercises in other parts of the world are called roadblocks, which appear on Waze faster than the police can set up, and are done during high traffic periods so that no one can complain that they are causing traffic, instead they are just making it worse, with all those idling engines of vehicles releasing carbon into the atmosphere at a rate faster than the government can plan for making a plan.

If a criminal gets caught in an ‘anti-crime exercise’, they must want to be caught. So of course it only makes sense in a Trinidad and Tobago sense that to find those 2 water tanks the Trinidad and Tobago Police Service will have roadblocks to try to find them, costing taxpayers more in petroleum products and deodorant than the tanks are actually worth, while when everyone gets home there will be no water to take a shower with.

They likely won’t find the tanks, but the police services have to look good, and the politicians have to say things that sound smart to people who aren’t. That’s a global issue, but it has it’s own flavor in Trinidad and Tobago.

What’s even more amusing about this whole thing is that the Trinidad Express’s post didn’t even have a picture of the fire station in Chaguramas so they used a picture from TriniView.com. How do I know this? In the lower right hand corner, it said in white letters, “Triniview.com”. I didn’t even know that was a site. I grabbed a screenshot of that, though I won’t post it because I don’t know if I want to use an image-of-an-image being used questionably by a media company.

The whole thing is as it is. Sure, I wrote about it in a satirical way – but how else can one look at this? Is it satire? Can reality be satire?

I’m sure I don’t know.

Today I picked an example from Trinidad and Tobago. There are plenty around the world happening every day, where fiction writers keep throwing away half-finished books as they read the news while unscrupulous people who admit that they aren’t writers do adverts on how to sell books and make thousands of dollars a day… from AI generated content.

In a world that doesn’t make sense, that seems to fit too. This stuff happens every day.

The masses just accept it.

  1. “Dry On Ideas“, Trinidad and Tobago Newsday, Saturday, 9 March 2024. ↩︎

Monday Traffic Thought.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment

It’s that time of the week again as I watch people begin their rolled marches to work in their vehicles, the beginnings of Monday morning traffic on the nearby highway. It’s a highway in Trinidad and Tobago, but in larger countries it might be simply a road, just as what we call a river here would be called a drain in Guyana.

The traffic, though, is real, as people grind their way toward dropping their children to school, getting to work and maybe even being productive there after the standard amount of time talking about how bad the traffic was this morning.

Somewhere in government, some idiot is probably trying to find a new way to decrease traffic while filling their pockets. The usual suspects will get contracts and kick money back, and there will be more roadways to have traffic on such that more people can talk about it in the morning.

Over the weekend I encountered an unnamed local politician’s question on why the local temperatures were so high, as if he had just awoken from a slumber. The question bothered me for a few reasons.

First, it was a question central to Trinidad and Tobago, as if the rest of the world didn’t exist – and I expect in his mind other places only exist to hold money outside of the purview of the local government. He may have even visited these places and treated them like Narnia, coming home to tell everyone of the wondrous and terrible things he saw. Maybe he could write a book. The fact that temperatures have been breaking records world-wide seemed to be something he was completely oblivious to.

Second, and probably even more importantly, as someone with all these connections to have his position, the fact that he didn’t know why temperatures were so high should bother people, but it doesn’t. People were helpfully commenting on his facebook post, trying to remedy his lack of knowledge.

These are the sort of people that are ‘leading’ society in Trinidad and Tobago, it seems, and perhaps why the solutions they present suffer their own lack of understanding of the problems.

Or maybe they’re just popular idiots. There seems to be a trend globally for electing popular idiots.

Eco-transactions.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment
A fledgling palm tanager (thraupis palmarum) I rescued sometime in the early 2000s. It ended up living at least to adulthood where I couldn’t pick it out anymore.

When I wrote ‘Death by Transactions‘, it didn’t start off being about banks and technology. It started off with wondering why people who will complain about all the overhead of small transactions don’t use the same concept to tie it to ecosystems.

Every breath we take is a transaction. In turn, every time photosynthesis dumps oxygen into the atmosphere, it’s a transaction. At one point, we probably had a lot more oxygen on the planet than we do now, which probably kept the plants from going too crazy. I think I saw something on that in a recent documentary about the planet.

Nowadays, we have more carbon dioxide, so the plants are probably having a great time – those that have survived us. They don’t breath as animals do though, but in principle they help keep a balance for us to breathe oxygen. We don’t hear about the flow rates of plants producing oxygen to the atmosphere and we humans exhaling our carbon dioxide all over the place (plus we DO love combustion, don’t we?).

It’s complicated to prove, but we humans are only a part of the carbon dioxide exhalers. It seems like almost everyone but the plants is putting out carbon dioxide, even little baby birds. The interesting thing is that in cycles, the plants also produce carbon dioxide.

We haven’t had an epidemic I know of with people with low pulse oximetry yet, where people are falling below the range of 90%-100%. We seem to be getting enough oxygen still, but of course by the time that falls it will likely be too late to do anything about it. When we look at the history of oxygenation on the planet, it’s pretty interesting.

Earth didn’t always have oxygen, which is before Earth was called Earth by a bunch of primates.

We seem to be doing ok, but some other species are not doing so good.

…The ocean stabilizes the atmosphere in two important ways—it contains plankton and bacteria that produce somewhere between 50 to 80% of the world’s oxygen,1 and its water absorbs massive amounts of carbon—about one-third of the amount humans have put into the air since the Industrial Age2—reducing the impact of fossil fuel combustion. As the planet gets hotter due to increased CO2 concentrations, oceans are also warming up. As liquids warm, they can’t hold as much dissolved gas. This means a warmer ocean can’t hold as much carbon or dissolved oxygen, which marine life relies on for survival…

MIT Climate, “How will future warming and CO2 emissions affect oxygen concentrations?“, April 6th 2022.

Our planet has a history of warming and cooling. We know this, it’s no secret, and when the temperatures have shifted, extinctions happened, and new life popped up. Our planet is pretty volatile in that regard, but we don’t notice it because we live very short lives in comparison to the Earth.

We lose marine life, we start impacting non-marine life. You know. Ourselves. Some species will flourish, some won’t. We’re in uncharted territory. Here there be monsters.

If you think of every ancestor you ever had stringing back to the origins of humanity, that’s how many lifetimes we have managed to shove into our small time on this planet. 10,000 generations? 12,000? Either are guesstimates you can find on the web at the time of this writing. Humans have only been around 0.007% of the time the Earth has been swinging around the Sun.

If we work with the 10,000 generation number, that means our lifetime is only 0.000,000,7% of our time on the planet. (Can I use commas? I used commas. Count the zeroes). That means on average each one of us will have been around about 7 millionths of a percent of the age of Earth. For a while, at least.

In we got out of our own way and look at it as a planet, the planet is going through it’s own transactional cycles, and yes, we’re impacting it, which isn’t too much of a surprise because everything that has been trading oxygen and carbon dioxide has been doing so for millennia. This is the point many people make, and it’s valid except it forgets one very key thing. A somewhat important thing.

At some point, we won’t be around. And unlike any other bit of history of the planet Earth, we also can do things to help make sure that we are around.

But the Earth will be just fine.

The Patch.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 1 Comment

This was once a lush valley, the lowest parts claimed by filling in swampland, a fact that the occupants of the valley become dreadfully reminded of during flash flooding in rainy season – when rainy season was more distinct from dry season.

The greying of that boundary speaks to a larger change in the global climate on this roughly 4,768 km2 (1,841 sq. miles) island, 10.5 degrees North of the Equator, or 5.5 degrees North of the doldrums.

It’s warmed up significantly over the years, so as I cast my eyes over the valley, sipping my coffee, my eyes catch something on the distant hill, something I had noticed before but this morning caught my fancy.

If I just used my binoculars, I would just write about what I saw, but because of the wonders of camera technology on phones, I zoomed in a bit closer.

Over the decades, the Diego Martin valley in Trinidad and Tobago has been home to an increasing population, though a read of the of the environmental report for an overpass project showed a decrease in population with an increase in traffic.

More people are driving now that the Four Roads Tram station, a part of a larger transportation grid that serviced the population (lovely history through that link). I don’t know that if the tramways were ever a part of the more official Trinidad Government Railway, which in 2008 seemed like it would see a resurrection of sorts but was canceled in 2010. I don’t know why.

It’s easy for me this morning to picture this lush valley becoming peopled over time. Galvanize roofs would have shown over time, then the rise of concrete, of infrastructure would have begun carving paths through the valley.

Thought of slowly enough, visualized in my mind I can almost see the concrete structures in the valley growing like some strange creatures in the valley, seemingly feeding off the valley’s flora and fauna as they grew, light pushing back the nocturnal creatures, noise of human progress clamoring through a once lush valley. The mosquitoes were likely quite happy before air conditioning.

Ever so slowly, the concrete crept up the hill, seemingly trying to escape, to overflow, but it has not yet. It is still a work in progress, with the clearing of the side of the hills being done sometimes for small agriculture, but more and more for housing, removing the roots of that which once held the hill together. Landslides are seemingly something that happen to other people who then clamor for government assistance. Economics, governance, it’s all related somehow – and the individuals just trying to get by are more interested in the current situation than even the near future.

I don’t know the story of that bare spot, who created it, whose land it’s on. I don’t know. I simply see it and wonder why it’s done. Some might think it short sighted, which of course it is, but when you need to survive, you find ways.

I can’t judge the individual. I won’t. We all need to get by, and the Trinidad and Tobago economy leaves much to be desired despite grand press briefings. There are people in poverty. I see people begging in the area, and young aspiring entrepreneurs were washing windshields at stoplights to buy their Kentucky Fried Chicken or sandwiches from the pharmacy nearby until the government put a roundabout where once there were lights.

I don’t know all the details, and I’m sure somewhere, some committee that takes no accountability (that’s what committees are for) decided to do as they do. As they do. But I watch now, removing the concrete in my mind and wondering what it was like long before – and I am part of the problem, drinking my coffee watching this. I cannot afford the luxury of not being a part of what is going on, though I can say I have no guilt. I simply wonder what it was like before.

We humans hate locusts, and yet, over a longer span, we seem to do the same thing. Curious, I find the mean temperature in Trinidad over the years (link through image below).

I’m pretty sure changes to the valley didn’t affect the temperature, but I remembered it because of an informal conversation regarding old pictures of Trinidad and Tobago, where people wore the trappings of the English and we wondered how they could, as warm as it is. It ends up, Trinidad and Tobago, 5.5 degrees North of the Doldrums, was significantly cooler 100 years ago.

It certainly could not be the fault of the people of Trinidad and Tobago, whose climate is determined by the winds heading to and from the equator, where the Saharan dust visits annually. It would have to be global in nature.

Does it really matter that patch being cleared in the grand scheme of things? Infinitesimal, but everything until added up seems that way. Yet the world is trying to make changes, and they’re sending consultants and technology at a steep price to the region to tell people what they need to do to roll things back, straining the economy with hybrid car batteries that are more expensive than the cars themselves. Landfills gobble up the circuit boards, and rain flash floods everything, seemingly, but the reservoirs.

I wonder what someone in the area will think about this in 100 years, with 100 more years of data. I don’t know, but I felt like writing it today because…

One patch caught my eye.

The Contrasts.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment

The sunset yesterday evening was intense, like the next 2 days of weather will be here in Trinidad and Tobago. The rains beat out their own rhythm, sometimes with the glancing blows of high wind, sometimes not, and in the Northwest of Trinidad it has been… unpredictable.

Before I left for an appointment today, it was raining one way, then another, bamboo nearby was sheared by the wind. I found it exhilarating. I always have enjoyed a good storm, but today it was only a few hours where I live, with a sunset as above. In South Trinidad, though, I imagine it was much worse, with people still having been flooded from past days.

It’s disappointing, really. The same problems keep coming back while the politicians point at each others for local elections. The flooding has been happening more frequently recently, but the Water and Sewage Company of Trinidad and Tobago somehow never seems to have enough water in the reservoir. There’s too many levels of bureaucracy, not enough accountability, and no effective change – but the government of course wants to bring back a property tax based on what someone guesstimates you can rent a property for.

Nature has no time for that.

There is brave talk about electric cars, and hybrids, but the state owned Trinidad and Tobago Electricity Commission has problems with the grid off and on, at least where I am. It’s hard to imagine the grid charging so many cars every night. I’ve heard the batteries for the cars cost sometimes more than the cars themselves to replace sometimes. All in the name of ‘saving the planet’ which will well be here long after we are not.

The reality is that if these islands, among all the other islands, went and did everything right, from renewable energy to carbon footprints, it wouldn’t have much of an effect on the global climate because these nations, while polluting, aren’t the core of it. For their trouble, they import everything they are told to at high costs, but the global situation’s problems are really in the larger nations that export these things to the smaller nations. “This is good for the climate!”

The woman with a hungry child on the corner has more immediate concerns.

Since Trinidad and Tobago refuses to believe it can produce it’s own technology solutions, hampered by the failed attempts by government to innovate. Big businesses thrive, small businesses die, and everyone wants to start a small business. Big businesses largely import things and sell them to people. Small businesses try to make local things. The bias, as it is, is evident.

The batteries for the cars will end up in the local dumps, likely. Poisoning ground water, like old cell phones and computers do. Politicians will vie to be elected while not actually doing anything, and the shell game of government corporations absolves all from blame.

It is, in it’s own right, a beautiful dystopia at certain hours, populated with a majority of good people who do not go out at night as much – partly economics, partly crime. The crime of the young has become more personal, more painful to the victims, symptoms of a deep economic divide that the government regularly excavates. It’s not an economic divide, really. It’s a moat.

It can be depressing to see on a daily basis. At busy intersections, we see women with children holding up signs with lists of what they need. There are too many for most to help. This was once a rich country. What happened?

I look toward the west, toward Venezuela, another nation which was rich – and could still be rich. I deal with Venezuelans fairly frequently, and while some call them a plague, I see the hard working immigrants that build countries given the right tools. This fresh blood could be an asset. There are intelligent people here, talented people, who in a land where titles mean more than merit, find no place here. They dream.

It’s not too much to ask for a better tomorrow, particularly if you’re willing to put in the sweat equity. I see it almost every day, contrasted against BMWs and Range Rovers while police escort Ministers through the traffic they are responsible for.

These contrasts are much like the sunset. At certain times, beautiful. The rains will come again tomorrow, properties will be flooded, government will posture yet again, and we’ll see what the sunset looks like tomorrow.

It is in it’s own way Groundhog day in a nation with no groundhogs.

That Cow Flatulence Issue.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment

A Bronx CheerJust a quick bit of research from the Internet, which never fails me:

Does the quantity of methane in cow farts get balanced out by the number of vegan farts should we all become vegans? Because vegans fart, and I want to make sure we have solid science behind the claim of having less cows creating less methane-by-cows… but the methane from humans? Do vegans produce less methane than cows in unit time?

No Answers? You can still help!

Fund my research!



Do******************************@pa******.com











See, kids, Science can be fun!