Goodness warming and footprints

Pierini Fitness is on a summer sabbatical until August 3, 2015.  Enjoy this blogflection until we return. Stand tall and be an awesome proud middle-aged man.

Well as a man with little science background, you’d think I’d be inclined to place all my trust in scientists for answers about something I know little about.  This is not what I’ve done in my middle-aged man wisdom-gaining journey.

Like scientist proclamations about global warming, running out of water due to drought and carbon footprint stuff.

Take global warming for example.  For every scientist and other interested-party “expert” warning us about this calamity is someone else equally scientific and an interested-party expert telling us it’s all a bunch of, pardon the pun, hot air.  I’ll let you do your own research, just like I have, and draw your own conclusions.  I’m not a scientist or interested-party “expert” but that doesn’t disqualify me from joining the “it’s a bunch of hot air” crowd.

How about running out of water due to drought?  That’s a hot topic in my California part of the world and our government water police will cite and fine you and me if we use more water than they decide we should.

One thing about aging is having the benefit of history to guide your present and this middle-aged man is blessed with some yesteryear drought-related history to guide his current water consumption, even if he has to do his watering in the wee hours of the night.

Twenty or more years ago I lived in a rural area that was in the path of residential development.  I would regularly read the local newspaper about the, then, drought and all the disasters it would eventually cause.  At the time, I lived on acreage and had my own water well so I read this constant dire news with emotional detachment even though, I suppose, my well could have run dry.  But it didn’t.

During this same time, not that long later, was news of an approved major residential development that would result in I can’t remember how many hundreds or maybe thousands of new homes to be constructed.  Where are they going to get water is what I thought to myself before eventually realizing that I had had enough of this drought nonsense like a well gone dry.  Those homes were eventually built and none of us every ran out of water.

So what about this carbon footprint stuff?  I’ve heard this sound bite term many times, can repeat it in environmentally-friendly conversations but, until now, couldn’t define it if my life depended on it.

So thanks to a morning Google internet search about carbon footprint, I learned that it has been historically defined as the total sets of greenhouse gas emissions caused by an organization, event, product or person.  To make a long story short, it’s something that can’t be calculated because of the large amount of data required and the fact that carbon dioxide can be produced by natural occurrences.

So this means the carbon footprint generated at a Sunday NFL football stadium packed with tens of thousands of hot dog eating and beer drinking middle-aged men belching and farting can’t be quantified but merely expressed as a figure of speech.

Your carbon footprint and $3.25 will buy you a large cup of Café Americano at your local Starbuck’s.

So where is all this Pierini Fitness rambling leading you?

Rather than focus on this global warming, running out of water due to drought and carbon footprint stuff designed to create fear and unnecessary worry about how your children and grandchildren may not have a planet earth to call their own like you and I have, why not direct your middle-aged man energies to something within your control?

Like gracefully aging and trying to live a good and honest life.  And from that effort, contribute something wonderful to the world we middle-aged men live in with our own contributions of goodness warming and footprints.

Pax Domini sit semper vobiscum