Wednesday, February 19, 2014

Get Used To Cold Weather 101

 If you are not used to cold weather, you had better work at it. Climate Change guarantees that you will get weird spells of colder than normal weather for the rest of your life. 

Rain, hail, sleet, snow, frost - we had better get ready to deal with just about everything except oobleck. (Green stuff that falls from the sky in Dr. Seuss books.)

This blog is about disaster preparedness. There is a lot about cold weather  on this blog,since I live in Alaska. I think people who are not used to cold weather might find some of this cold weather information useful when you get hit with unaccustomed cold weather.

This blog is made with tags to help  find different subjects in it. Google will search this blog and find the subject tags for you. Cold weather is one of the tags you can use. Just type in Yvonnes silver linings cold weather into the Google search box and the cold weather posts will come up for you.

One of the worst things about disaster is what happens after them. More people die after the disaster than during the disaster. This can be true of cold weather disasters like power outages.

People often kill themselves tryingt o keep warm. DON'T  BURN BARBECUES OR OTHER DEVICES INSIDE YOUR HOME TO KEEP WARM. This can kill you by causing you to be poisoned by carbon monixide or other gases given off by the fire. This is a major cause of deaths after cold weather disasters.

Don't get killed by lighting your fire too close to windows or doors either. This is almost as bad as lighting a fire inside your home.  The gases given off by the fire will get inside your home this way too.

I already posted a lot about safer ways to keep warm. If you can handle it, you will probably be able to stay in a shelter that is opened to keep people warm during the disaster and afterwards. The Red Cross, governments and other agencies usually open shelters, so you can check with them to find out where the nearest one is.

If you can't find or get to a shelter to keep warm, or don't want to go to one, you can shelter in place at home, but it won't be that easy and not that comfortable either. It may be a really bad idea to try this if you have not already prepared for emergencies ahead of time.

Store shelves are usually emptied before, during or after a disaster. You are unlikely to find food or other necessities in stores.

Once you make it safely through the cold weather disaster it would be nice if you prepare for future disasters, including cold weather ones. We will get more and more weather disasters for the rest of our lives because of climate change. We can also expect to get worse weather disasters than we have ever had before. 

There are lots of posts on this blog with links to information about why this is happening and how we know about it, if you are interested in finding out more about it. If you use the search term, "climate change" on Google, you will get a list of posts on this blog about climate change.

When you get safely through your cold weather disaster, please think about preparedness and get ready for the next weather disaster that will come to your area. It is possible you will not survive it unless you do prepare for it. At the least, you will be more comfortable if you prepare.





Sunday, February 2, 2014

Be Important To The World

Right now two things are being decided that will affect the whole earth, every person in the world, every person who will be born, and the future of us all.

You can be important to the world and our future. What you need to do to be that important is not even very hard. 

You need to tell the President of the United States, Barack Obama, not to use the XL Pipeline and tell the Washington representatives and senators from all of the USA not to vote for the TPP, or Trans Pacific Partnership. I think you should do this even if you are not a US citizen, or voter.  Public opinion matters a lot to him. If you are not a US voter and want to speak to a representative or senator, just pick the one you think it will do the most good for you to contact.
An example of ideas for this are: a state where you have a friend who lives there, or a state where you know someone from your area who does business there.

Here is a link to contact President Obama: 
http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact

Here is a link to contact US representatives and senators:
http://www.house.gov/

http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm

I will explain the basic reasons for this first, then I will go into more detail.

The reason why President Obama should not start up the XL Pipeline is that the Canadian oil that will go into that pipeline is especially dirty. It must be refined twice to even be usable. Each time that dirty oil is refined, it spews bad stuff into our air that makes climate change worse. It make even more climate change pollution when that dirty oil is used in cars, and power plants, etc.

There is a huge amount of that dirty XL Pipeline oil. There is so much that the head of the United States' weather service, quit his well payed and important job over it. He testified before the US Congress before he quit. He told the US congressmen that, "if the XL Pipeline is used, it is all over for climate change". 

In other words, if we use the dirty XL Pipeline oil it will be too much bad stuff in our air to fix and stop climate change from getting so bad that it will eventually make it very hard or impossible for people to stay alive on Earth any more.

The Trans Pacific Partnership is a sneaky scam by unscrupulous multinational corporations to get to do whatever they want even when it causes harm to the earth and all of the people and plants and animals on it.

If the TPP,  or Trans Pacific Parthership, goes into effect, it will allow corporations to sue any government on earth for anything the government does that hurt the profits of the corporation. The court where the suit will happen is picked by the corporation and the corporations will hire and pay the judges.

It does not take a genius to know what will happen in a court like that. The giant multinational corporations will always win. This will allow them to bankrupt governments and cause even more damage that leads to climate change. One of these damages is clear cutting forests that make our air we need to breathe. 

Another damages that giant corporations do to make climate change worse is strip mining. 

These are only small parts of the climate change-causing damage we can expect a lot more of, if the XLPipeline is fired up, and the TPP, or Trans Pacific Partnership is signed.

Be sure to use the links I gave you to contact President Obama and US congressmen and senators. Tell them to help stop making climate change a lot worse by voting against fast tracking the TPP and evading the US  Democratic process to get it signed, and tell them we don't want the XL Pipeline started. 

Tell them that you want to stop making climate change worse. Say that it matters a lot to you that we take our chance to do this now before it is too late to keep the earth a safe, healthy place to live on.

Please pass this message on so more people will know about our chance to stop making the earth and climate change worse and about our chance to start making them better instead.