Does wisdom come with age?

Dear Editor,

The saying goes that wisdom does come with age or as someone once put it: “We get too soon old and too late smart.” I remember as a younger person, I was very unworldly and ignorant (uninformed) of far too many things. But, with age and experience, one can’t help but become more informed and, hopefully, wiser.

Another saying is, “Ignorance is bliss.” I take this to mean that when one chooses to be uninformed that life is much simpler. I suppose this is true to a certain extent and for a certain amount of time.  But, after a while, because you are not participating in the fullness of life, you are giving up control to others and your life becomes controlled by those others and for their purposes. One example of this would be the Jews in Germany during the late 1930s and early 1940s. Ignorance didn’t work out to be too blissful for them.

There is another saying that, “The more you know, the more you know you don’t know.”  Scientists and scholars experience this more than most of us. As you find an answer to one question, it raises more questions. Another way of putting this might be, “The more one searches for the truth, the more elusive truth can be.”

And that pretty much describes the internet and politics. There are so many untruths out there that one needs to use all the wisdom he or she has to find the truth and, still, one can never be sure whether one has found the truth or not.

The internet is a wonderful thing. One can get so much information and misinformation from it that it can boggle the mind. If you thought advertising on TV was complicating, try the internet. You can get, supposedly, scientific information that supports both sides of the same story. You can learn where corporations and governments and their agencies manipulate the people on massive scales, and all for their own benefits. There are conspiracy theories galore, and what better way to cause people to disbelieve them than to put out your own conspiracy theories to counteract them. And, if you put out enough conspiracy theories about enough topics and make sure there are enough obvious holes in them then you can convince a lot of people that all conspiracy theories are bunk.

For example: who believes the end of the world is near? There have been so many “end of the world” situations throughout history that I doubt very many people would believe the next one. And, who knows but it might even be true, just like the little boy who cried wolf.

Sorry, I don’t have any words of wisdom on this. I have been reading a lot of different theories that have made me question a lot of things that I had always accepted to be true.  As an example, we have always been led to believe that CO² was causing global warming.  But, a recent speech by someone from the University of Ottawa supported a lot of the research I have been doing that indicates the opposite.

I don’t know if this would be considered wisdom or not but consider this: water vapour makes up 95 per cent of greenhouse gases (GHG). I am referring, in part, to clouds. When the sun goes behind a cloud one can feel a change in temperature. But, it is a cooler temperature, not warmer. That would seem to indicate that the GHG effect is a cooling effect, not a warming one.

Now to consider CO², trees absorb CO². If one were to consider that during an ice age, (and there have been many of them in the past) there are a lot fewer trees. As such there would be less absorption of CO² and that would seem to suggest that there should be more CO² in the atmosphere during those times. There appears to be a lot of scientific evidence to back this up.

On the other hand, when the earth has been more temperate (warmer), trees have been in abundance. So, considering that all this flora has absorbs CO², it would follow that there was less CO² in the atmosphere. Again, there is scientific support for this.  Considering the cold and warm cycles the last tens of thousands of years it appears that CO² levels, instead of being the cause, are a product of the situation.

I don’t know, maybe ignorance is bliss after all. Too much information can boggle the mind and cause one to ask too many questions. Next thing you know, they will be telling us that the earth is flat!

I can certainly see where a government, any government, might want to keep its people ignorant. Much easier to keep them under control and not asking too many questions!

Eugene Eklund

Whitecourt, AB