If you know who Greta Thunberg is and are moved by her cry for help, you might call the following more “heartless denial.” I do understand, however, how a young girl can become emotional over what she perceives to be an end-of-world scenario. I’ve seen and written about similarly panicked people and their motivations. Remember Heaven’s Gate? Remember Y2K? The Aztec Calendar? Howard Camping? In those historical examples of failed predictions and in probably hundreds or even thousands of similar examples, there are those who predicted and those who followed, the latter acting not as much with their frontal cortexes as with their limbic systems. And Greta? Who can blame her for her panic? But those who influenced her? Hmnnn… Who tells a child she has no future?
For those who influence others to panic over climate change—an environmental change which I acknowledge is a real possibility because it is the way of the planet—I have a two-part question for which I have as yet to hear definitive and irrefutable answers. I am particularly vexed by the lack of a definitive answer to the second part of my question.
If the count is correct, our atmosphere has topped the 400 parts per million by volume (ppmv) mark for carbon dioxide, and that amounts to an increase of more than 150 ppmv since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Now, as we all know, CO2 is an insulating atmospheric blanket, along with the more abundant and therefore more significant H2O vapor, the more efficient insulator CH4, and some other greenhouse gases. With extra CO2 the world should, one would think, get warmer. But to what extent and to what effect? Therein lie both my dual question and a point of controversy.
Regardless of the predicted dangers to life bandied about in the media and in the halls of government, one has to consider that it was a very warm period under which the mammals took over the planet after the demise of the dinosaurs, and later on, it might have been during another warm period that our pre-human ancestors developed bipedalism, a physical characteristic that freed hands to make ever more sophisticated tools and gourmet meals. Think Lucy. Our Australopithecus afarensis ancestor walked around in an atmosphere with about 400 ppmv CO2.*
Of course, we always have to consider the data and the time required for Earth to “correct” itself. We should, many say, consider today’s temperature data and trend as undeniable because they are direct; that is, the data come from actual measurements, and we have records that go back a couple of centuries. After all, a thermometer has no agenda and doesn’t lie though it can be mis-calibrated, placed inappropriately near an asphalt parking lot or in a city heat island or downwind of it, on a roof, or near a large mall’s parking lot. But the validity of the data? Well, when I think about them, I guess they can be misinterpreted, smoothed by selective generalizing that uses averages, or outrightly falsified to fit preconceived notions and narratives, or to support further research and the need for conferences that require scientists to travel abroad.** And then there’s the problem of areal coverage on the planet’s surface and the altitude data for various layers of the atmosphere. Similar restrictions on irrefutable temperature readings and trends apply to satellite instruments which up to now have predominantly measured mid-infrared wavelengths, ignoring one important reality: More than half of Earth’s outgoing heat leaves the planet in far-infrared wavelengths (those from 15 microns to 100 microns).***
Assuming the accuracy of today’s data, you and I could take current temperature readings and compare them to yesterday’s, going back, but mostly localized, for more than a century—again, assuming that past data collectors were people of integrity and meticulous accuracy and that the paucity of their records for nineteenth-century lands and seas is an irrelevant fact.
The history of temperature before anyone kept “accurate” weather records is a bit sketchy. For the long period before the rise of weather record-keeping, we have only “proxy data,” temperatures we infer from the products of chemical, biological, and physical processes, such as the incorporation of Oxygen-18 in the tests of foraminifera (chemical), the growth of ancient trees and even fossil-leaf paleoaltimetry (biological), and the position, shapes of, and extent of continents and oceans (paleogeography), plus old maps of mountain glaciers (paleocartography). We could also consider what Milankovitch argued, that the planet’s orbit and tilt of its axis to the plane of its orbit probably play a role in cycles that play out over periods ranging from 10,000 to 100,000 years. And don’t forget the role sunspot activity plays over shorter cycles in controlling Earth’s temperature budget. These are all legitimate proxies, but their use is in providing temperature ranges and good estimates rather than in giving us precise temperatures of Earth’s deep past. Most such temperatures always appear with a +# or -#, as, for example, in ±0.2 degrees C.
You might say, “Well, if ranges of temperatures are good enough for the scientists, they’re good enough for me.” Okay, but when the scientists’ numerous media and political proxies and little Greta say that just a two-degree Celsius rise will be “devastating,” how meaningful is a range with a “plus and minus” notation? Would you consider “It’s about one degree Celsius warmer on average today, give or take a quarter of a degree” to be an accurate and useful designation for climate sensitivity? And would you think that a change of about one degree Celsius, give or take quarter or half degree over a couple of centuries is, in fact, an indicator of instability or stability? Would, for example, the Romans during their experience with a “Roman Warm Period” or the Vikings during their “Medieval Warm Period” recognize Earth as radically different from your experience with today’s “about one degree Celsius” higher temperature? Were those rises in temperature not also tipping points, not forerunners of calamitous climate change? Had they had mass communication, would Romans and Vikings have worried about a warmer future? But, no, you say, they didn’t have to worry because carbon dioxide levels weren’t rapidly rising. Their warm periods were caused by… Hmnnn?
It seems to those who have convinced Greta to be worried, that the temperatures of the deep past are largely irrelevant. For example, the proxy temperatures for the warmth just before and just after the demise of the dinosaurs occurred on a somewhat different planet: Some continents lay in latitudes radically different from their current position. Fifty-five million years ago, for example, India wasn’t connected to Asia. And of course, with India far from Asia, there were no Himalayas to alter weather patterns. During the Eocene, which began about 56 million years ago, the oceans had different shapes: There was only a surmised small connection between North Atlantic and Arctic oceans on the east side of Greenland, but a seemingly well-established connection between Pacific and Atlantic allowed circulation between the two oceans where the blocking isthmus of Central America now lies. So, circulation of warm and cold surface waters was different then, an important consideration given the relatively high specific heat of water compared to air. The Appalachians were also somewhat higher, and the Rockies, in places, somewhat lower or even nonexistent during the Eocene.
At the time of that “hottest” period of the past 65 million years, called the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), the quantity of CO2 in the atmosphere, even with an accounted for error, appears to have as much as 900 ppm (by volume) or maybe even as much as 1,670 ppmv (2 to 4 times current levels). **** The proxy temperatures, even with the “plus and minus” values, indicate that this was a rather toasty world back then, maybe 6 to 9 degrees C warmer. Was that a bad thing? Yes and no. There appears to have been sufficient and persistent drought in eastern Africa, where forests collapsed. Apparently, the very warm early Eocene and the cooler middle and late Eocene saw the rise of many different kinds of mammals, including some predecessors to our primate ancestors. Certainly, the rise of mammals wasn’t quick as an individual human life is quick, so when we speak of the effects of a warmer Earth, we have to consider that we are looking back on periods of hundreds of thousands to millions of years, large swaths of time that are irrelevant to our short lives. And we might also consider that the descendants of mammals that arose in the Paleocene endured many climate changes.*****
Now the reason I mentioned a “point of controversy” above is that climate models have a tough time with proxy data and the effect of CO2. “The inability of climate models to match the warm conditions inferred from proxy evidence has been attributed to missing model components and physical processes, climate forcings, or misinterpretations and uncertainties in proxy reconstructions” (Zhu, et al.). So, in their simulation of the “extreme” warmth of the Eocene, researchers Zhu, Poulsen, and Tierney incorporate micro-cloud processes and components. I’ll bet that when you rose this morning, panicked over your impending doom by climate change, you forgot to consider micro-cloud processes.
Look up. See that cloud? It’s playing a role in Earth’s heat budget. The top of the cloud reflects light, processes within the cloud both store and release energy, and cloud extent plays a separate role. And if the micro-processes within clouds play a key role in the retaining or releasing of heat energy and if numerous climate models fail to take those processes into account, then what reliability do the models have at the level of our atmosphere’s sensitivity to change? In short, we’re still a long way off from making precise predictions about our own climate future if the models have difficulty determining historical warming and cooling events as we have identified them through proxy data.
Then there are the related side effects of the temperature variations. Warmer oceans might mean large die-offs of corals—or migrations of corals to higher latitudes—and warmer latitudes might mean insects and diseases common in tropical zones will invade formerly temperate zones—think Zika, Dengue, malaria. And higher temperatures in higher latitudes would change agriculture. The corn and wheat belts might move northward, but so might the tropical fruit zone. Maybe we’ll be eating more oranges and bananas and less bread where grains once prevailed. And more CO2 dissolved in the oceans means acidification, making more difficult the building of calcium carbonate and aragonite bio-structures, though some organisms seem to do better than others under more acidic conditions.
So, we’re back to the second of my two questions: Assuming that we can determine the extent of warming, what will the effect of a warmer Earth be? Greta thinks it will be an Earth without a “future,” or, at least, without “her future.” She’s not alone in thinking thus. During the recent wave of children’s “climate” protests, the theme of a doomed planet was the motivation: “Basically our earth is dying and if we don’t do something about it, we die,” said A.J. Conermann, a 15-year old sophomore. “I want to grow up. I want to have a future.”******
And in all of the ruckus over climate's and temperature's effect on environment, one environmental issue seems to be overlooked in favor of the temperature argument: The destruction of habitats by what we do and how we live. Temperature trends and climate changes aren't likely the reason that the megafauna of the past three million years are no longer roaming the planet. Wooly mammoths, for example, were wooly: Their shaggy coat was evidence of adaptation to climate. No, it's likely your ancestors are to blame. Yes. YOURS. You know what they say, "Give a guy a spear and a nearby herbivore...." But don't put the blame exclusively on Paleolithic hunters. Personally, you also bear some responsibility for continuing the destruction of habitat and the decimation of species that, by the way, at least for deforested landscapes, affects climate by affecting albedo, evapotranspiration, and runoff.
You don’t live in a tree; possibly, where a tree once stood, you now occupy a building made of trees. You drive on roads that cut through long-gone ecologies. You use iron and aluminum, whose miners altered the landscapes where they extracted the metals. You consume fish, or beef, or bird, and if you are a vegetarian (or vegan—I can never remember the difference), you eat organically grown plants that are cultivated in the place where other plants once grew randomly. Greta’s at fault, too. She might in her short life so far have been given vitamins that she flushed into the environment, maybe even estrogens enhanced by soy products. And she, like you, wears clothes made from both artificial and natural fibers. Were cotton fields always cotton fields? Were fertilizers widespread? Did all the trappings of her society arrive at her disposal by fiat? Did the sailboat on which she is pictured come from purple clouds in an imagined sky filled with unicorns or from ferrocements, polyester resins, adhesive composites, vinylester resins, epoxy moldings, aramid fiber reinforcing, carbon fiber masts, aluminum, and steel cables? Were all those products locally sourced or transported to a shipyard for building? And didn’t I hear that her sailboat returned to Europe after a crew flew over to pick it up?
Okay, the planet seems destined to become warmer, but we’ve altered or destroyed ecologies more efficiently by meeting the demands for civilized and urbanized life than we have by raising temperatures. It’s our nature as civilization-builders. But maybe it’s Nature’s nature to alter. Long before primates began altering their environments, other animals altered the environment, and plants have always been opportunistic (how else explain the spread of forests or grasslands?).
Again, to what extent and effect?
Gosh this is wearing me down, and I suppose it’s wearing you down, too. “Donald, you’re belaboring.” But I have to mention more about effect. We have “chosen” to build most of our great cities on coasts. Their position is a natural consequence of maritime trade in an age before airplanes, trains, and cars and a necessity in transporting goods to millions via large ships. But all coasts are ephemeral features. Look, for example at underwater archaeology finds in the Mediterranean, Black, and North seas. Sea level rises; sea level falls. It’s been both much lower and much higher during the reign of humans. If Greenland’s and Antarctica’s ice sheets melt, sea level will be higher again, varying locally as it always has.******* So, yes, a warmer Earth means higher seas that will inundate current coasts. Keep in mind, however, that when the first people inhabited the eastern seaboard of the United States, Chesapeake Bay was a river valley, and the coast was many miles eastward of its current location.
I have as yet to hear definitive answers to my two questions. I don’t believe, however, that Greta and A.J. Conermann will have “no future” unless they choose to have no future. I do think that their futures will be too brief to see the “destruction” they’ve been told to envision. I can’t imagine that our ancient ancestors, in running around killing off mammoths and other large mammals, were worried about a world without big game. And I don’t think YOU or any of your contemporaries, including me, will be willing to stop exploiting soils and changing ecologies on a scale that will mitigate our natural tendency to use whatever is available. Prove me wrong. Move out of your home, and do what you can to restore the land to some pre-human condition.
Think of the effect you have had just by living where you live. Think of the extent of your personal assaults on ecologies by your use of ANYTHING. But what’s your alternative? You probably don’t aim to destroy, but you certainly aim to live, and that living means changing some locality. And the way you live now means changing some other localities, simply because you eat fruits, vegetables, and grains in seasons and in places where they don’t naturally grow; you use minerals from elsewhere; you use metals from elsewhere; you probably even use wood from elsewhere (Own a guitar? Piano? Coffee table? Headboard?).
To what extent and effect?
Yes, I’ve turned this discussion of temperature and carbon dioxide into a discussion about Greta, you, and me, into a discussion about researchers presenting their findings in person at conferences in lands far from their homes, into a discussion about organisms enduring and adapting to changing environments and temperatures. And I confess that I can’t even answer my two-part question. But, maybe having asked it, I have motivated you to find the answers or to question the answers that have led millions to panic in the belief that they have no future.
*Grant, G. R., et al. The amplitude and origin of sea-level variability during the Pliocene epoch. Nature. 2 October 2019.
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1619-z Online at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1619-z Accessed October 4, 2019.
The 400 ppmv estimate for carbon dioxide is for the mid-Pliocene warm period and is derived from the work of Masson-Delmotte, V., et al. that was a contribution to the IPCC’s 2013 report entitled Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis.
**There is, as most people know, abundant grant money available for data acquisition and interpretation, and also for travel to “exotic lands” for academic conferences. As a point of disclosure, I here reveal that I received several grants to 1) make the official PA inventory of greenhouse gas emissions that the EPA said it would use as a model for the other states to follow, 2) write a policy for the Commonwealth on mitigating GHG emissions, and 3) identify green technologies PA could develop. I did that research in the 1990s; I can’t imagine in the time since I wrote those reports the amount of grant money spent on similar research or on sending people around the world to conferences in an age of SKYPE and other online meeting venues. There is in the back of my mind the faint memory that during the 2000s some reporter asked a climate scientist why he needed to travel to an exotic venue for a meeting, to which he replied, “That is where the action is.” Ah! The good life of the climate scientist! Life as a jetsetter on a researcher’s salary.
***The European Space Agency has a satellite in the works that will sense the far-infrared wavelengths. FORUM (Far-infrared Outgoing Radiation Understanding and Monitoring) will be launched in 2025 or 2026. See Amos, Johnathan. Satellite will gain hi-res view of greenhouse effect. BBC Science, 24 Sept 2019. But doesn’t this seem silly in a way. After all, if the “science” is set that we’re near the “point of no return” on warming, what good will come from finding out what we already know? Why bother with the expense of a satellite? https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-49799760
hey, our ancestors had to eat.
****Jiang Zhu, Christopher J. Poulsen, and Jessica E. Tierney. Simulation of Eocene extreme warmth and high climate sensitivity through cloud feedbacks. Science Advances 18 Sept. 2019, Vol. 5, no. 9, eaax1874. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aax1874
*****The horse-like Litopterns and the chubby Notoungulates persisted for tens of millions of years; obviously, therefore, they endured many climate changes. It was at the beginning of the “ice age” that these two orders saw their decline and demise. So, cold, not warmth, appears to have done them in—probably with the help of human hunters. At least eleven other orders of mammals evolved during the Paleocene-Eocene periods. And a mass extinction of certain large mammals appears to have been human-driven in Plio-Pleistocene times—hey, our ancestors had to eat.
******Q13Fox. Associated Press. https://q13fox.com/2019/09/20/young-protesters-around-globe-demand-climate-change-action/ Accessed October 2, 2019. Arnold Schwarzenegger supposedly offered to lend Greta an electric SUV for her proselytizing campaign. Noble, right? Like some movie caveat that “no animals or people were abused in any way during the making of this picture,” Arnold’s SUV probably has a caveat that “nothing in the ‘natural world’ was affected by the building or operating of this machine.” Inertia is the principle. Once the climates begin to change, they will begin to change. Once 7 billion people begin to exploit the planet on which they live, they will continue to exploit, even if they do so in ignorance.
*******If one removes weighty glaciers from the continents, the continents rebound from their depressed positions while more water in the oceans depresses the sea floor.
Postscript: I can't leave this without referring you to a picture of the beach at Dakar's Hann Bay. See https://phys.org/news/2019-10-divers-senegal-plastic-tide.html . Accessed October 5, 2016.
For those who influence others to panic over climate change—an environmental change which I acknowledge is a real possibility because it is the way of the planet—I have a two-part question for which I have as yet to hear definitive and irrefutable answers. I am particularly vexed by the lack of a definitive answer to the second part of my question.
If the count is correct, our atmosphere has topped the 400 parts per million by volume (ppmv) mark for carbon dioxide, and that amounts to an increase of more than 150 ppmv since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Now, as we all know, CO2 is an insulating atmospheric blanket, along with the more abundant and therefore more significant H2O vapor, the more efficient insulator CH4, and some other greenhouse gases. With extra CO2 the world should, one would think, get warmer. But to what extent and to what effect? Therein lie both my dual question and a point of controversy.
Regardless of the predicted dangers to life bandied about in the media and in the halls of government, one has to consider that it was a very warm period under which the mammals took over the planet after the demise of the dinosaurs, and later on, it might have been during another warm period that our pre-human ancestors developed bipedalism, a physical characteristic that freed hands to make ever more sophisticated tools and gourmet meals. Think Lucy. Our Australopithecus afarensis ancestor walked around in an atmosphere with about 400 ppmv CO2.*
Of course, we always have to consider the data and the time required for Earth to “correct” itself. We should, many say, consider today’s temperature data and trend as undeniable because they are direct; that is, the data come from actual measurements, and we have records that go back a couple of centuries. After all, a thermometer has no agenda and doesn’t lie though it can be mis-calibrated, placed inappropriately near an asphalt parking lot or in a city heat island or downwind of it, on a roof, or near a large mall’s parking lot. But the validity of the data? Well, when I think about them, I guess they can be misinterpreted, smoothed by selective generalizing that uses averages, or outrightly falsified to fit preconceived notions and narratives, or to support further research and the need for conferences that require scientists to travel abroad.** And then there’s the problem of areal coverage on the planet’s surface and the altitude data for various layers of the atmosphere. Similar restrictions on irrefutable temperature readings and trends apply to satellite instruments which up to now have predominantly measured mid-infrared wavelengths, ignoring one important reality: More than half of Earth’s outgoing heat leaves the planet in far-infrared wavelengths (those from 15 microns to 100 microns).***
Assuming the accuracy of today’s data, you and I could take current temperature readings and compare them to yesterday’s, going back, but mostly localized, for more than a century—again, assuming that past data collectors were people of integrity and meticulous accuracy and that the paucity of their records for nineteenth-century lands and seas is an irrelevant fact.
The history of temperature before anyone kept “accurate” weather records is a bit sketchy. For the long period before the rise of weather record-keeping, we have only “proxy data,” temperatures we infer from the products of chemical, biological, and physical processes, such as the incorporation of Oxygen-18 in the tests of foraminifera (chemical), the growth of ancient trees and even fossil-leaf paleoaltimetry (biological), and the position, shapes of, and extent of continents and oceans (paleogeography), plus old maps of mountain glaciers (paleocartography). We could also consider what Milankovitch argued, that the planet’s orbit and tilt of its axis to the plane of its orbit probably play a role in cycles that play out over periods ranging from 10,000 to 100,000 years. And don’t forget the role sunspot activity plays over shorter cycles in controlling Earth’s temperature budget. These are all legitimate proxies, but their use is in providing temperature ranges and good estimates rather than in giving us precise temperatures of Earth’s deep past. Most such temperatures always appear with a +# or -#, as, for example, in ±0.2 degrees C.
You might say, “Well, if ranges of temperatures are good enough for the scientists, they’re good enough for me.” Okay, but when the scientists’ numerous media and political proxies and little Greta say that just a two-degree Celsius rise will be “devastating,” how meaningful is a range with a “plus and minus” notation? Would you consider “It’s about one degree Celsius warmer on average today, give or take a quarter of a degree” to be an accurate and useful designation for climate sensitivity? And would you think that a change of about one degree Celsius, give or take quarter or half degree over a couple of centuries is, in fact, an indicator of instability or stability? Would, for example, the Romans during their experience with a “Roman Warm Period” or the Vikings during their “Medieval Warm Period” recognize Earth as radically different from your experience with today’s “about one degree Celsius” higher temperature? Were those rises in temperature not also tipping points, not forerunners of calamitous climate change? Had they had mass communication, would Romans and Vikings have worried about a warmer future? But, no, you say, they didn’t have to worry because carbon dioxide levels weren’t rapidly rising. Their warm periods were caused by… Hmnnn?
It seems to those who have convinced Greta to be worried, that the temperatures of the deep past are largely irrelevant. For example, the proxy temperatures for the warmth just before and just after the demise of the dinosaurs occurred on a somewhat different planet: Some continents lay in latitudes radically different from their current position. Fifty-five million years ago, for example, India wasn’t connected to Asia. And of course, with India far from Asia, there were no Himalayas to alter weather patterns. During the Eocene, which began about 56 million years ago, the oceans had different shapes: There was only a surmised small connection between North Atlantic and Arctic oceans on the east side of Greenland, but a seemingly well-established connection between Pacific and Atlantic allowed circulation between the two oceans where the blocking isthmus of Central America now lies. So, circulation of warm and cold surface waters was different then, an important consideration given the relatively high specific heat of water compared to air. The Appalachians were also somewhat higher, and the Rockies, in places, somewhat lower or even nonexistent during the Eocene.
At the time of that “hottest” period of the past 65 million years, called the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), the quantity of CO2 in the atmosphere, even with an accounted for error, appears to have as much as 900 ppm (by volume) or maybe even as much as 1,670 ppmv (2 to 4 times current levels). **** The proxy temperatures, even with the “plus and minus” values, indicate that this was a rather toasty world back then, maybe 6 to 9 degrees C warmer. Was that a bad thing? Yes and no. There appears to have been sufficient and persistent drought in eastern Africa, where forests collapsed. Apparently, the very warm early Eocene and the cooler middle and late Eocene saw the rise of many different kinds of mammals, including some predecessors to our primate ancestors. Certainly, the rise of mammals wasn’t quick as an individual human life is quick, so when we speak of the effects of a warmer Earth, we have to consider that we are looking back on periods of hundreds of thousands to millions of years, large swaths of time that are irrelevant to our short lives. And we might also consider that the descendants of mammals that arose in the Paleocene endured many climate changes.*****
Now the reason I mentioned a “point of controversy” above is that climate models have a tough time with proxy data and the effect of CO2. “The inability of climate models to match the warm conditions inferred from proxy evidence has been attributed to missing model components and physical processes, climate forcings, or misinterpretations and uncertainties in proxy reconstructions” (Zhu, et al.). So, in their simulation of the “extreme” warmth of the Eocene, researchers Zhu, Poulsen, and Tierney incorporate micro-cloud processes and components. I’ll bet that when you rose this morning, panicked over your impending doom by climate change, you forgot to consider micro-cloud processes.
Look up. See that cloud? It’s playing a role in Earth’s heat budget. The top of the cloud reflects light, processes within the cloud both store and release energy, and cloud extent plays a separate role. And if the micro-processes within clouds play a key role in the retaining or releasing of heat energy and if numerous climate models fail to take those processes into account, then what reliability do the models have at the level of our atmosphere’s sensitivity to change? In short, we’re still a long way off from making precise predictions about our own climate future if the models have difficulty determining historical warming and cooling events as we have identified them through proxy data.
Then there are the related side effects of the temperature variations. Warmer oceans might mean large die-offs of corals—or migrations of corals to higher latitudes—and warmer latitudes might mean insects and diseases common in tropical zones will invade formerly temperate zones—think Zika, Dengue, malaria. And higher temperatures in higher latitudes would change agriculture. The corn and wheat belts might move northward, but so might the tropical fruit zone. Maybe we’ll be eating more oranges and bananas and less bread where grains once prevailed. And more CO2 dissolved in the oceans means acidification, making more difficult the building of calcium carbonate and aragonite bio-structures, though some organisms seem to do better than others under more acidic conditions.
So, we’re back to the second of my two questions: Assuming that we can determine the extent of warming, what will the effect of a warmer Earth be? Greta thinks it will be an Earth without a “future,” or, at least, without “her future.” She’s not alone in thinking thus. During the recent wave of children’s “climate” protests, the theme of a doomed planet was the motivation: “Basically our earth is dying and if we don’t do something about it, we die,” said A.J. Conermann, a 15-year old sophomore. “I want to grow up. I want to have a future.”******
And in all of the ruckus over climate's and temperature's effect on environment, one environmental issue seems to be overlooked in favor of the temperature argument: The destruction of habitats by what we do and how we live. Temperature trends and climate changes aren't likely the reason that the megafauna of the past three million years are no longer roaming the planet. Wooly mammoths, for example, were wooly: Their shaggy coat was evidence of adaptation to climate. No, it's likely your ancestors are to blame. Yes. YOURS. You know what they say, "Give a guy a spear and a nearby herbivore...." But don't put the blame exclusively on Paleolithic hunters. Personally, you also bear some responsibility for continuing the destruction of habitat and the decimation of species that, by the way, at least for deforested landscapes, affects climate by affecting albedo, evapotranspiration, and runoff.
You don’t live in a tree; possibly, where a tree once stood, you now occupy a building made of trees. You drive on roads that cut through long-gone ecologies. You use iron and aluminum, whose miners altered the landscapes where they extracted the metals. You consume fish, or beef, or bird, and if you are a vegetarian (or vegan—I can never remember the difference), you eat organically grown plants that are cultivated in the place where other plants once grew randomly. Greta’s at fault, too. She might in her short life so far have been given vitamins that she flushed into the environment, maybe even estrogens enhanced by soy products. And she, like you, wears clothes made from both artificial and natural fibers. Were cotton fields always cotton fields? Were fertilizers widespread? Did all the trappings of her society arrive at her disposal by fiat? Did the sailboat on which she is pictured come from purple clouds in an imagined sky filled with unicorns or from ferrocements, polyester resins, adhesive composites, vinylester resins, epoxy moldings, aramid fiber reinforcing, carbon fiber masts, aluminum, and steel cables? Were all those products locally sourced or transported to a shipyard for building? And didn’t I hear that her sailboat returned to Europe after a crew flew over to pick it up?
Okay, the planet seems destined to become warmer, but we’ve altered or destroyed ecologies more efficiently by meeting the demands for civilized and urbanized life than we have by raising temperatures. It’s our nature as civilization-builders. But maybe it’s Nature’s nature to alter. Long before primates began altering their environments, other animals altered the environment, and plants have always been opportunistic (how else explain the spread of forests or grasslands?).
Again, to what extent and effect?
Gosh this is wearing me down, and I suppose it’s wearing you down, too. “Donald, you’re belaboring.” But I have to mention more about effect. We have “chosen” to build most of our great cities on coasts. Their position is a natural consequence of maritime trade in an age before airplanes, trains, and cars and a necessity in transporting goods to millions via large ships. But all coasts are ephemeral features. Look, for example at underwater archaeology finds in the Mediterranean, Black, and North seas. Sea level rises; sea level falls. It’s been both much lower and much higher during the reign of humans. If Greenland’s and Antarctica’s ice sheets melt, sea level will be higher again, varying locally as it always has.******* So, yes, a warmer Earth means higher seas that will inundate current coasts. Keep in mind, however, that when the first people inhabited the eastern seaboard of the United States, Chesapeake Bay was a river valley, and the coast was many miles eastward of its current location.
I have as yet to hear definitive answers to my two questions. I don’t believe, however, that Greta and A.J. Conermann will have “no future” unless they choose to have no future. I do think that their futures will be too brief to see the “destruction” they’ve been told to envision. I can’t imagine that our ancient ancestors, in running around killing off mammoths and other large mammals, were worried about a world without big game. And I don’t think YOU or any of your contemporaries, including me, will be willing to stop exploiting soils and changing ecologies on a scale that will mitigate our natural tendency to use whatever is available. Prove me wrong. Move out of your home, and do what you can to restore the land to some pre-human condition.
Think of the effect you have had just by living where you live. Think of the extent of your personal assaults on ecologies by your use of ANYTHING. But what’s your alternative? You probably don’t aim to destroy, but you certainly aim to live, and that living means changing some locality. And the way you live now means changing some other localities, simply because you eat fruits, vegetables, and grains in seasons and in places where they don’t naturally grow; you use minerals from elsewhere; you use metals from elsewhere; you probably even use wood from elsewhere (Own a guitar? Piano? Coffee table? Headboard?).
To what extent and effect?
Yes, I’ve turned this discussion of temperature and carbon dioxide into a discussion about Greta, you, and me, into a discussion about researchers presenting their findings in person at conferences in lands far from their homes, into a discussion about organisms enduring and adapting to changing environments and temperatures. And I confess that I can’t even answer my two-part question. But, maybe having asked it, I have motivated you to find the answers or to question the answers that have led millions to panic in the belief that they have no future.
*Grant, G. R., et al. The amplitude and origin of sea-level variability during the Pliocene epoch. Nature. 2 October 2019.
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1619-z Online at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1619-z Accessed October 4, 2019.
The 400 ppmv estimate for carbon dioxide is for the mid-Pliocene warm period and is derived from the work of Masson-Delmotte, V., et al. that was a contribution to the IPCC’s 2013 report entitled Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis.
**There is, as most people know, abundant grant money available for data acquisition and interpretation, and also for travel to “exotic lands” for academic conferences. As a point of disclosure, I here reveal that I received several grants to 1) make the official PA inventory of greenhouse gas emissions that the EPA said it would use as a model for the other states to follow, 2) write a policy for the Commonwealth on mitigating GHG emissions, and 3) identify green technologies PA could develop. I did that research in the 1990s; I can’t imagine in the time since I wrote those reports the amount of grant money spent on similar research or on sending people around the world to conferences in an age of SKYPE and other online meeting venues. There is in the back of my mind the faint memory that during the 2000s some reporter asked a climate scientist why he needed to travel to an exotic venue for a meeting, to which he replied, “That is where the action is.” Ah! The good life of the climate scientist! Life as a jetsetter on a researcher’s salary.
***The European Space Agency has a satellite in the works that will sense the far-infrared wavelengths. FORUM (Far-infrared Outgoing Radiation Understanding and Monitoring) will be launched in 2025 or 2026. See Amos, Johnathan. Satellite will gain hi-res view of greenhouse effect. BBC Science, 24 Sept 2019. But doesn’t this seem silly in a way. After all, if the “science” is set that we’re near the “point of no return” on warming, what good will come from finding out what we already know? Why bother with the expense of a satellite? https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-49799760
hey, our ancestors had to eat.
****Jiang Zhu, Christopher J. Poulsen, and Jessica E. Tierney. Simulation of Eocene extreme warmth and high climate sensitivity through cloud feedbacks. Science Advances 18 Sept. 2019, Vol. 5, no. 9, eaax1874. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aax1874
*****The horse-like Litopterns and the chubby Notoungulates persisted for tens of millions of years; obviously, therefore, they endured many climate changes. It was at the beginning of the “ice age” that these two orders saw their decline and demise. So, cold, not warmth, appears to have done them in—probably with the help of human hunters. At least eleven other orders of mammals evolved during the Paleocene-Eocene periods. And a mass extinction of certain large mammals appears to have been human-driven in Plio-Pleistocene times—hey, our ancestors had to eat.
******Q13Fox. Associated Press. https://q13fox.com/2019/09/20/young-protesters-around-globe-demand-climate-change-action/ Accessed October 2, 2019. Arnold Schwarzenegger supposedly offered to lend Greta an electric SUV for her proselytizing campaign. Noble, right? Like some movie caveat that “no animals or people were abused in any way during the making of this picture,” Arnold’s SUV probably has a caveat that “nothing in the ‘natural world’ was affected by the building or operating of this machine.” Inertia is the principle. Once the climates begin to change, they will begin to change. Once 7 billion people begin to exploit the planet on which they live, they will continue to exploit, even if they do so in ignorance.
*******If one removes weighty glaciers from the continents, the continents rebound from their depressed positions while more water in the oceans depresses the sea floor.
Postscript: I can't leave this without referring you to a picture of the beach at Dakar's Hann Bay. See https://phys.org/news/2019-10-divers-senegal-plastic-tide.html . Accessed October 5, 2016.
RSS Feed