BELFAST, Maine — For one week, Belfast has been home to a half-dozen college students who are spending the summer cycling around the state to spread the word about a cause that matters to them — climate change.
The students are from the internship program New England Climate Summer, and on Friday morning they were busy doing a community service project for the Unitarian Universalist Church of Belfast, where they have been staying while in the city.
Kristin Jackson, 21, of Falmouth, is an environmental studies major at Brown University in Providence, R.I.
“I’ve always been interested in activism, but I’ve never really taken a stand yet,” she said.
However, the nine weeks Jackson is spending biking from community to community with the program’s Maine team has been a great introduction to environmental activism.The six students from all over the country will spend a week each in Belfast, Rockland, Cumberland, York, Biddeford, Portland and Lewiston. While in Belfast, they helped with a “permablitz” at a home on the Woods Road, to assist the resident in turning the yard into a sustainable permaculture garden.
“We’ve learned so much,” Jackson said, adding that the group has been doing a lot of gardening work here. “It’s real life experience.”
Jane Dopheide of the Unitarian Universalist Church said that hosting the students is a good fit for the church.
“It really supports our interest in youth and also our interest in environmental issues,” she said. “The larger Unitarian Universalist organization asks churches to commit to things like recycling, not using paper products and promoting environmentally healthy practices and programs.”
Take your new age religion, your mumbo jumbo and leave, thank you.
Global warming is real, whether you’re willing to accept the truth or not.
There’s no “new age religion” here. There’s no “mumbo jumbo.” There’s only science and reason, and they tell us that, as certainly as smoking causes cancer, the carbon dioxide that humans are pumping to our atmosphere is heating up the Earth and wreaking havoc with our climate.
Go ahead and play your fiddle, Nero, but don’t try to tell the rest of us that there’s no fire to put out.
* Actually, there’s no historical evidence to suggest that Nero actually played any stringed instrument while Rome burned – many of the outrageous stories about Nero and Caligula and others are little more than exaggeration and slander (although unfortunately the horrors of the gladiators and crucifixion were real enough).
The anecdote might not be true, but it still makes for an excellent analogy.
showing your age, Steve?
In the sense that youth are often more willing than older people to accept truths that society at large would rather just ignore and are more eager to work to change the world for the better, than yes, I suppose I am showing my age, if that’s how you want to put it.
It’s unfortunate that these ‘activists’ aren’t as active learning what a sham ‘climate change’ is. Kids: If it’s promoted by Al Gore or any other progressive liberal democrat, it’s not good for the country & it’s a lie. The collapse of the Chicago Climate Exchange is all the proof one needs.
Still harping on Al Gore? Given up on harping on valid scientific evidence? You may not like some of the proposed political solutions, but you’re still ignoring the 800 pound gorilla lurking in the shadows: AGW.
Al Gore and Angus King should just ride off into the sunset together.
Much of Europe met the CO2 reduction goals set by your scientists; and the temps weren’t reduced, totally discrediting your theories about AGW.
Here is another reason why we don’t listen to you kooks any more:
Dying’ coral reef shows signs of spectacular regrowth
http://www.thetechherald.com/articles/Dying-coral-reef…regrowth/5570/Apr 24, 2009 – Australian scientists studying the effects climate change is having on the Great Barrier Reef in Queensland have cause for celebration today …
Then we have the vast quantities of fossil fuel being discovered, i.e. natural gas; and so deep in the earth that geologists are researching non-fossil reasons for their existence.
Wow.
Ozone depletion happened, humans stopped releasing CFC’s and ozone depletion is reduced, is going away.
Acid rain happened, lakes, soils and streams acidified, George Mitchell and three other senators, dems and repubs (and G H W Bush) got the amended Clean Air Act passed and it rippled around the world with legislation and the acidity of rain decreased dramatically and the environment is better.
Climate change is occurring rapidly, much more so than models predict but so many can only listen to the likes of Rush and Sean and Fox and suddenly scientists are viewed as politicians and data doesn’t seem real anymore. Even China is working to reduce C emissions, while the US buries its head in the sand and believes everything Rupert Murdoch and Fox News tells us.
It is so appropriate that young people be involved in their future.
Yeah, China is working real hard on carbon emissions. Read this:
“If China’s carbon usage keeps pace with its economic growth, the country’s carbon dioxide emissions will reach 8 gigatons a year by 2030, which is equal to the entire world’s CO2 production today. That’s just the most stunning in a series of datapoints about the Chinese economy reported in a policy brief in the latest issue of the journal Science.
Coal power has been driving the stunning, seven plus percent a year growth in China’s economy. It’s long been said said that China was adding one new coal power plant per week to its grid. But the real news is worse: China is completing two new coal plants per week.”
In one of life’s ironies, the same strip mines in Inner Mongolia also produce Germanium for Wind turbines and solar panels–see this week’s ECONOMIST.
Follow the money, folks, follow the money. George Soros, Al Gore & Company; education research is always following available Taxpayer funds and Obama opened the floodgates for this waste. Wind & solar reap massive subsidies compared to meager, insignificant results.
Finally, the USA shouldn’t continue its destructive economic slide by crippling industry and driving energy costs through the roof while China, India, and other countries turn a blind eye to this perceived problem.
I am delighted that we have student activists demonstrating the positive impact of the warming climate on Maine agriculture.
We now have bumper crops and are an exporter of many foods. My own garden has been re-organized into sections so that I can plant successive crops that can take advantage of the longer growing season.
In addition, crops which were once curiosities are now thriving….huge eggplant, enormous paste tomatoes, unusual peppers, and melons…..my new peach tree has one peach!
Fortunately, the more CO2 the bigger the crops are. CO2 flooding of Maine’s expanding greenhouses enables year round vegetable growing, and the State’s forests are thriving.
My gardens hunger for your CO2.
****Isnt’ is surprising how all the doom & gloom scenarios have proven false or traced to political scenarios involving ‘evil corporations’. I well remember someone scrutinizing the photos of the Greenland ice cap and noticing how dirty they were and drew the conclusion that their melting was not due to warming but to absorption of sunlight by the dirty snow—China took note and is buying US stack cleaning technology.
These people are all brain dead, non-science fadists.
They are the climate change flock and face- book narcissists!
Angus King should be “drawn and quartered” by one of his scamming wind turbines.
The sudden release of “hot air” from his self-absorbing lung volume would put an end to global warming (if it exists at all).