Thursday, July 25, 2013

Safety Alert For Cat Lovers

One of my cats is close to 24 years old. I gather that works out to over 100 years translated into people years. I really love him and take the best care of him that I can manage. I expect that has something to do with him reaching this advanced age in good health.

Two things that I watch out for especially with his health care are how he is doing with his poop and his urinating. I believe problems with these two health indicators kills most cats before they need to go.

I do all kinds of things that I have already mentioned in previous posts to make sure my cats can urinate and poop without health problems preventing it.

One of these things is cat litter. I make sure my cats like their litter okay and once I find a good litter that both my cats and I like, I stick with it for years. 

I have run into a problem with a cat litter that my cats and I have liked and used for several years. The litter is called, "Scoop Away". It is made by Colgate corporation. I liked it because not only did it meet kitty approval, but it also came in bags instead of plastic buckets that they had used before. This container is less polluting than the pails, even though considerably more awkward to carry and store at home.

Scoop Away seems to have made a change in their litter. This change is not good. It no longer clumps as well and it is not possible to get the litter as clean as it was before their change. My cats do not like it and started trying to hold in their poop and urine in order to avoid using the litter box because they dislike it so much.

This can cause health problems that can kill a cat in a short time. It is life threatening. 

I called the company and left a message with their customer service as soon as I noticed this problem. There has been no response. I believe this is because they have probably been inundated with complaints about their litter. 

They do not care enough about their customers or their cats to even respond to a serious complaint about their
Scoop Away cat litter product.


This reminds me of a huge mess a few years back with cat food. Several companies bought a cat food ingredient from China that had been deliberately contaminated to increase profits. This contamination caused the suffering and death of many cats. 

A friend had cats that ate the contaminated cat food and suffered permanent health damage from it. She had vet bills that ran $1,000.00 a month for several years until they finally died from it. Many owners sued the cat food companies over this problem. My friend did not have enough proof available for her to feel that she had a chance to win a lawsuit over her cats being injured by the cat food companies' products. Instead, she paid thousands of extra dollars to keep them alive for a little longer.

I believe that Scoop Away makers are doing something with their litter that is probably even more harmful to cats than the cat food debacle. 

I did not post about this problem without a lot of thought. I finally decided to do this post because I will not feel right if I do not share information that may help others to protect the health of their cats. 

I am changing the brand of cat litter that I use for my cats because I care about protecting their health. I am posting this to allow others to consider doing the same.

Friday, July 19, 2013

Evidence That You Will Probably Face Record Tornadoes And Hurricanes Because of Climate Change

It can be extremely difficult to get people to understand that climate change will affect their own lives. I notice people talking about how they need to stop climate change for the sake of their grandchildren. I also notice that most of the people who say things like this still drive around alone in their cars. Grandchildren dying when people are dead does not seem to be enough motivation to actually take effective steps to stop climate change.

I believe we will not get enough people acting to stop climate change before it is too late to do any good, unless people understand that their own comfort and maybe even their lives are at stake because of climate change. 

I want to use this blog post to show people some things that are happening that might help them to understand that they may die and certainly will have a miserable time surviving unless they make major changes in how they live, in order to slow and stop climate change from getting so out of control that it will not be possible to prevent the Earth from becoming difficult or impossible to keep humans alive here any more. 

Even if you can't get motivated enough to change your behaviors that are making climate change get rapidly worse and kill off the human race after you die, these links I intend to give you in this post should help you to understand that you may not be able to survive your normal life span, or will have a very hard time living as long as you are meant to, unless you make big changes in what you do now.

The first link is to a story about an enormous glacier, the biggest on Earth, that is breaking up much faster, than even the most pessimistic scientists expected it to. The reason that this matters to you is that this glacier is in the Antarctic. The polar regions affect weather all over the world. Such a large chunk of polar ice will affect your weather in a very bad way. It will make the storms that you get now, much worse and if you thought you did not need to worry about tornadoes and hurricanes in your area, you will soon get them.

Another bad thing about this glacier melting is what the amount of water in it will do to the oceans of the world. It will speed up the rise in sea levels. That will force more people than ever in history to move to keep from being drowned. 

When large numbers of people find themselves forced out of their homes, this usually causes wars. We already have plenty of wars, but this will mean a great many more of them. It is hard for any country to stay out of wars if they are nearby. Climate change means that so many people will be forced to run for their lives that it is unlikely that many countries will be able to avoid being drawn into wars.

Here is a link to information about the giant iceberg that broke off in Antarctica.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/02/26/us-antarctica-iceberg-idUSTRE61P15H20100226

Here is a link to an artist who uses altered photos to show what west coast cities will look like as the oceans rise. http://www.weather.com/news/science/environment/nickolay-lamm-west-coast-sea-level-rise-pictures-20130711

He already did illustrations of what the east coast will look like as sea levels rise. They say in the accompanying text, that these photos are what it will look like IF sea levels continue to rise. They only go up to 25 feet. Some scientists think sea levels can rise up to 50 feet. 

We can be quite certain that sea levels will go up over 5 feet no matter what we do, because it is already too late to prevent that much of a rise. All that we can manage, if we make serious changes overnight is to stop sea level rise from getting to the highest levels, like 25 feet or more.

Chances for an overnight change of behavior world-wide, don't look too good for now. The longer we wait to change what we are doing now, the worse the sea level rise will be.

I have already posted about how sea level rise is affecting the world right now. An example of this is what is happening where I live in Alaska. We have over 180 villages in Alaska that will be flooded by the currently expected rise in sea level. Two of them, Shismaref and Kivalina were already scheduled to be evacuated over two years ago. Some of their buildings have been falling into the ocean every time there is a big storm.

The villages in Shismaref and Kivalina have not evacuated because they want to save their villages by moving them to the mainland. The state of Alaska does not have enough money to move all of the threatened villages. The state wants to move the villagers to bigger towns on the mainland and let the villages die. If you want to know more about it, you can look at my posts about it. This is happening in other places in the world, but not as fast. Climate change is faster in Arctic regions like Alaska.

The next link is only a sample of what can be expected because of climate change. The link is to a tornado in Oregon. This has not been a normal occurrence in Oregon. It will, be though. There are lots of other places that are getting their first tornado and can expect to get more of them because of climate change. Places that are more used to tornadoes, can expect to get a lot more of them and worse ones as well. 
http://www.weather.com/news/tornado-central/oregon-tornado-mcminnville-jun2013-20130614

This post is already a bit longer than my old ones used to be and it would become a book if I put in a lot of examples of places that need to get used to tornadoes. I will probably do a post that is only on this subject. You need to look them up yourself, for now though. 

Scientists do not know exactly what weather will do because of climate change. They only know ideas of major trends that will happen. This is because having polar ice melt so much and so fast is already causing unpredictable weather. It will only get more unpredictable. 

An example of what could happen is that areas that are dry could become wet and vice versa. Oregon rainforests could become deserts and Florida swamps could become dry. The Mojave Desert could become wetter and so could the high plains desert in Nevada. If you live in areas of the world besides the USA, just think of the places that you know of that have extreme climates and imagine them going to the opposite extreme, or back and forth and in between.

Having schizophrenic weather will make it so much harder to raise enough food that millions more people will starve and even people who have comfortable incomes will feel the pain in their wallets. This will put more elderly people at risk of hunger, and as Baby Boomers retire, if that is you, you could be hungry too.

In the USA, elders are having to choose between paying for medicine or food. It will only get worse as climate change makes food production harder and more expensive. The increasing scarcity of fossil fuels like oil, gas and coal will cause power costs to increase which will make for an even larger jump in food prices along with everything else getting more expensive because of transport costs going up.

There are other problems that climate change will make worse in the near future, but they can be harder for an average person to understand. I will see if I can start explaining it here for anyone who want to know. I am a bit discouraged about doing this because so few people do want to know. The majority of the human race seems to prefer ignorance to understanding and working on our problems. We do not have long before this approach will prove fatal to the human race. We won't all die right away, but it will be as certain anyway. 

I posted a while back about a comparison of the human race treasuring it's ignorance, making us too much like a sheep that drowned in a creek that went through an alfalfa field that my family owned. The sheep died unnecessarily in spite of great efforts by me to save it. I am afraid the human race is preparing to die in the same way, through stubborn stupidity.

This blog is part of my efforts to try to keep the human race alive. My health problems are getting worse, so I don't know how much longer I can continue this part of my efforts, but I will do so as long as possible and I gather it will live on as long as Google does.  :-p I hope it helps. 

If you are reading this, you can be part of the solution to this problem of climate change. Learn to walk lightly on the Earth and take better care of it.

Sunday, July 7, 2013

500th Blog Post

Today I am celebrating my number 500 post on this blog. Sorry for the slight premature vacation last Wednesday.

I wanted to talk about preparedness by working on being self sufficient. Those of you who have been regular readers for a while already know that I am a fan of hydroponics for this purpose. 

I am still in the experimental and research stage for hydroponics, so I don't know all that much about it from personal experience. I still have toothpicks holding some lettuce plants over plastic yogurt containers of water. 

I like aquaponics even better than hydroponics because you don't have to worry about finding and buying nutrients for your plants if you use the fish water for the plants. The cycle is kind of beautiful. You feed the stuff that comes out of the fish to the plants and the stuff that comes out of the plants to the fish.

I believe that aquaculture and hydroponics and similar methods of raising food are the way that humans can keep eating in spite of climate change. 

Climate change has caused strange weather all over the world and this will only get worse. Agriculture is very dependent on weather. Having unpredictable weather is not good for keeping a good food supply going.

Most of the people in the world now live in cities. When you live in a city you can lose touch with nature and understanding of what it requires for you to be able to go to the market and get food to eat.

Most of the city people in the world today do not realize how serious a threat to their continued comfort and even existence, that climate change presents to them.

It is not our grandchildren or even our children who need be concerned about climate change. It is us. 

Unless you are deathly ill, with one foot on a banana peel an the other in a grave, you are already facing the consequences of climate change. It can make you starve to death, or at least be very hungry in the near future.

Hydroponics and aquaponics are ways that we can grow a lot of food regardless of most things the weather may be doing to us. That does not mean it will be easy. 

We have been so thorough about wrecking the Earth that we have squandered world oil and gas resources in a short time and are now starting to run low on them. We need fuel to run lights and heat and pumps to do hydroponics and aquaponics. 

We have to use ways of stretching the resources that we still have left, to grow enough food for the people of the world, when the weather makes it impossible to grow it outside in the traditional ways.

Growing plants is the most common spiritual gift. Most of the people in the world have that one. There is a good chance that you have this spiritual gift. You probably have a "green thumb" whether you are aware of it or not. You will never find out unless you try growing things. 

You are denying yourself a great pleasure that could some day save your life, if  you do not try growing plants. I think hydroponics or aquaculture are practical ways to use this spiritual gift. It does not matter whether you have a religion or belief system. You are hard wired with your spiritual gift or gifts anyway. Make yourself happy and grow something.