So now one of the great minds of our time is in panic mode. I’m referring to Stephen Hawking, the ALS-bedeviled genius physicist who wants us to escape the planet before it becomes another Venus shrouded in clouds and rains of sulfuric acid and baking in temperatures hot enough to melt lead. He made his statements about colonizing Elsewhere after the USA pulled itself out of the Paris agreement on climate.
Hawking seems certain the first drops of that predicted acidic rain are about to fall. So, we need to leave before we disintegrate under the coming deluge of boiling liquid. “Save the genetic heritage of our ancient ancestor Yug who walked the tundra during much colder times.”
But where do we go? Certainly, life on any other body in our Solar System would be as harsh or even harsher than Stephen’s future Venusian Earth. And exoplanets, though incredibly numerous, are too distant to reach through an intervening stretching realm of dangerous cosmic rays and debilitating microgravity. Could you imagine a fourth generation child born in microgravity trying to move through the one G that makes climbing stairs a chore on Earth? Should we listen to Stephen and build our space arks to float through space until we settle on Planet Ararat?
Isn’t there anything “we” can do short of leaving our changing planet? Is there no hope of stability here on Earth? Was there ever the stability Stephen desires?
Alexandria and Syene lie 7.71 degrees of latitude apart on Earth’s surface. In the third century B.C.E. Eratosthenes used that difference to determine the circumference of Earth. He could do so because the angle of the Sun’s rays run through a cycle for each spot on our planet’s surface. If you know just a little bit of either geometry or trig, you can make the same measurements today that he made all those centuries ago. You can do math identical to that of Eratosthenes because there’s a long-term continuity in many physical systems like the Earth/Sun relationship. Both experience and celestial studies reveal that the angles of the Sun’s rays make a seasonally cyclic progression over Earth’s surface. Just check to see where you see the rising sun with respect to your bedroom window during three-month intervals.
Because Earth is tilted to the plane of its orbit and its tilted axis is oriented toward Polaris, the Northern Hemisphere alternatively in summer and winter leans toward and away from the sun. That self-luminous object is so big that from the perspective of tiny Earth its rays can be thought of as parallel as they strike Earth’s curved surface. So, for Eratosthenes, the noon illumination of the bottom of a well in Syene was not paralleled by the angle of shadow in Alexandria. He knew, therefore, that Earth’s surface was curved.
But enough of the description. There are some lessons in what I’ve written so far, and they concern panic mode, history, and personal choice. That the angles of the sun’s rays for different parts of Earth’s surface are now what they were when Eratosthenes used them as a measuring device gives us an example of how our planet has maintained its hospitality for us over thousands of years. Superimposed on this background of long-term stability are fluctuations that make natural accommodations for humans more or less comfortable in a given decade or even hazardous to our health in a single physical event.
The Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age are examples of fluctuations that affected humans. Those apparently natural fluctuations were caused by phenomena like diminished or increased solar radiation and volcanic activity and like wandering ocean currents. The problem for humans occupying the accommodations provided by our planet during such “aberrations” is that our lifespans prevent individuals from long-term personal experience. That Warm Period lasted more than a century. The Little Ice Age lasted more than three centuries.
So, we infuse our minds with predictive models. Now living at a time when the planet appears to be 0.6 degree Celsius warmer than the Medieval Warm Period, Stephen is predicting a temperature rise of hundreds of degrees; thus, his advice to leave Earth.
An adult who as a child experienced tragedies brought on by hurricanes and has children in a time when the tropical atmosphere becomes too quiescent to produce subsequent landfalls, might tell the children, “Well, when I was a child, we really had bad weather.” And so such stories are told by individuals of times past when things were “much different.”* But those sun angles keep repeating themselves throughout the seasons, year after year, decade after decade, millennium after millennium. Stubborn continuity long before Eratosthenes and long after you.
And now future stories will be fostered by a particularly hot, dry summer or the next very cold winter, by years of drought, or by episodes of precipitation. In the Sierra Nevada a great deal of snow fell in the winter of 2016-2017 compared to the previous winter. Maybe the winter of 2017-2018 will repeat the snowfall, maybe not. Depending on where one lives in eastern United States, the snowfall can be heavy for a few years and then, for whatever reason the jet stream shifts, such as El Niño or La Niña, light for a few years. Memories get shaped and ideas about the nature of the world then form in the short-lived—even genius—brains of humans.
Of course, we can argue with Stephen that this time is different. People have added carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, and its level is already over 400 parts per million in a dramatic rise that coincides with a global average temperature rise of 0.8 degree Celsius. Then there are warming feedback loops that involve other greenhouse gases like methane. Causes of causes of causes of warming. Venusian. Except.
Except Venus has an almost exclusively (96%) carbon dioxide atmosphere and is a third closer to the sun than Earth.
Stephen, as most people care, cares to make a sustainable future, but sustainability means and is worth different things to different people. Take India, one of the 152 countries that signed the Paris Climate Agreement, as an example. India signed the deal with the following caveats:
“The Government…declares its understanding that, as per its national laws, keeping in view its development agenda, particularly the eradication of poverty and provision of basic needs for all its citizens…and on the assumption of unencumbered availability of cleaner sources of energy and technologies and financial resources from around the world; and based on a fair and ambitious assessment of global commitment to combatting climate change, it is ratifying the Paris Agreement.”
Maybe Stephen signs contracts on deliverables with so many caveats, but would you? India’s participation is dependent on outside money, new technology, the commitment of other countries by comparison, and the “basic needs for all its citizens.”
So, what is that lesson? Be concerned about the temporary changes you experience, but never panic. If you want a world with less carbon dioxide in its atmosphere, then don’t personally add more. Even with an international agreement you can’t guarantee that the signers will reduce their anthropogenic emissions. India made that clear as air under a blue sky.
Just as those sun angles keep repeating, so you should know that a larger overriding continuity is most likely undergoing a temporary fluctuation even with human participation. The average will, whether someone in panic mode wants to believe it or not, be always close to average because Earth doesn’t care. Species, even human ones, have come and gone. But our survival as a species since the time of Yug and for more than 200,000 years of ice advances and retreats—of cooling and warming—seems to be evidence that Earth’s hospitality is a bit more stable than Stephen seems to think it will be. And the arguable effect of an agreement in which all signers are not equally bound hardly justifies building a space ark to places unknown.
Will the planet continue to warm? Right now it looks that way, but at what rate and to what degree is debatable. Will the signers actually do something to decrease their contributions to carbon emissions? Do India’s caveats call into question those commitments? In the meantime, all those large natural continuities play out their averages. Surely, those who roamed the ice fields and tundra of 10,000 years ago would think that Earth’s warming is a rather pleasant change. “Look, Yug, trees! Trees, Yug, trees!”
More: Whose genetic line gets to go to Planet Ararat? Stephen’s? Or, in general, Yug’s? And when the ark lands, will those on board disembark to find a stable world devoid of climatic aberrations and an unending supply of clean, green energy?
* In memory and hyperbole, it was a time when people wore duct tape for shoes and walked uphill in knee-deep snow both ways between home and school.
Hawking seems certain the first drops of that predicted acidic rain are about to fall. So, we need to leave before we disintegrate under the coming deluge of boiling liquid. “Save the genetic heritage of our ancient ancestor Yug who walked the tundra during much colder times.”
But where do we go? Certainly, life on any other body in our Solar System would be as harsh or even harsher than Stephen’s future Venusian Earth. And exoplanets, though incredibly numerous, are too distant to reach through an intervening stretching realm of dangerous cosmic rays and debilitating microgravity. Could you imagine a fourth generation child born in microgravity trying to move through the one G that makes climbing stairs a chore on Earth? Should we listen to Stephen and build our space arks to float through space until we settle on Planet Ararat?
Isn’t there anything “we” can do short of leaving our changing planet? Is there no hope of stability here on Earth? Was there ever the stability Stephen desires?
Alexandria and Syene lie 7.71 degrees of latitude apart on Earth’s surface. In the third century B.C.E. Eratosthenes used that difference to determine the circumference of Earth. He could do so because the angle of the Sun’s rays run through a cycle for each spot on our planet’s surface. If you know just a little bit of either geometry or trig, you can make the same measurements today that he made all those centuries ago. You can do math identical to that of Eratosthenes because there’s a long-term continuity in many physical systems like the Earth/Sun relationship. Both experience and celestial studies reveal that the angles of the Sun’s rays make a seasonally cyclic progression over Earth’s surface. Just check to see where you see the rising sun with respect to your bedroom window during three-month intervals.
Because Earth is tilted to the plane of its orbit and its tilted axis is oriented toward Polaris, the Northern Hemisphere alternatively in summer and winter leans toward and away from the sun. That self-luminous object is so big that from the perspective of tiny Earth its rays can be thought of as parallel as they strike Earth’s curved surface. So, for Eratosthenes, the noon illumination of the bottom of a well in Syene was not paralleled by the angle of shadow in Alexandria. He knew, therefore, that Earth’s surface was curved.
But enough of the description. There are some lessons in what I’ve written so far, and they concern panic mode, history, and personal choice. That the angles of the sun’s rays for different parts of Earth’s surface are now what they were when Eratosthenes used them as a measuring device gives us an example of how our planet has maintained its hospitality for us over thousands of years. Superimposed on this background of long-term stability are fluctuations that make natural accommodations for humans more or less comfortable in a given decade or even hazardous to our health in a single physical event.
The Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age are examples of fluctuations that affected humans. Those apparently natural fluctuations were caused by phenomena like diminished or increased solar radiation and volcanic activity and like wandering ocean currents. The problem for humans occupying the accommodations provided by our planet during such “aberrations” is that our lifespans prevent individuals from long-term personal experience. That Warm Period lasted more than a century. The Little Ice Age lasted more than three centuries.
So, we infuse our minds with predictive models. Now living at a time when the planet appears to be 0.6 degree Celsius warmer than the Medieval Warm Period, Stephen is predicting a temperature rise of hundreds of degrees; thus, his advice to leave Earth.
An adult who as a child experienced tragedies brought on by hurricanes and has children in a time when the tropical atmosphere becomes too quiescent to produce subsequent landfalls, might tell the children, “Well, when I was a child, we really had bad weather.” And so such stories are told by individuals of times past when things were “much different.”* But those sun angles keep repeating themselves throughout the seasons, year after year, decade after decade, millennium after millennium. Stubborn continuity long before Eratosthenes and long after you.
And now future stories will be fostered by a particularly hot, dry summer or the next very cold winter, by years of drought, or by episodes of precipitation. In the Sierra Nevada a great deal of snow fell in the winter of 2016-2017 compared to the previous winter. Maybe the winter of 2017-2018 will repeat the snowfall, maybe not. Depending on where one lives in eastern United States, the snowfall can be heavy for a few years and then, for whatever reason the jet stream shifts, such as El Niño or La Niña, light for a few years. Memories get shaped and ideas about the nature of the world then form in the short-lived—even genius—brains of humans.
Of course, we can argue with Stephen that this time is different. People have added carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, and its level is already over 400 parts per million in a dramatic rise that coincides with a global average temperature rise of 0.8 degree Celsius. Then there are warming feedback loops that involve other greenhouse gases like methane. Causes of causes of causes of warming. Venusian. Except.
Except Venus has an almost exclusively (96%) carbon dioxide atmosphere and is a third closer to the sun than Earth.
Stephen, as most people care, cares to make a sustainable future, but sustainability means and is worth different things to different people. Take India, one of the 152 countries that signed the Paris Climate Agreement, as an example. India signed the deal with the following caveats:
“The Government…declares its understanding that, as per its national laws, keeping in view its development agenda, particularly the eradication of poverty and provision of basic needs for all its citizens…and on the assumption of unencumbered availability of cleaner sources of energy and technologies and financial resources from around the world; and based on a fair and ambitious assessment of global commitment to combatting climate change, it is ratifying the Paris Agreement.”
Maybe Stephen signs contracts on deliverables with so many caveats, but would you? India’s participation is dependent on outside money, new technology, the commitment of other countries by comparison, and the “basic needs for all its citizens.”
So, what is that lesson? Be concerned about the temporary changes you experience, but never panic. If you want a world with less carbon dioxide in its atmosphere, then don’t personally add more. Even with an international agreement you can’t guarantee that the signers will reduce their anthropogenic emissions. India made that clear as air under a blue sky.
Just as those sun angles keep repeating, so you should know that a larger overriding continuity is most likely undergoing a temporary fluctuation even with human participation. The average will, whether someone in panic mode wants to believe it or not, be always close to average because Earth doesn’t care. Species, even human ones, have come and gone. But our survival as a species since the time of Yug and for more than 200,000 years of ice advances and retreats—of cooling and warming—seems to be evidence that Earth’s hospitality is a bit more stable than Stephen seems to think it will be. And the arguable effect of an agreement in which all signers are not equally bound hardly justifies building a space ark to places unknown.
Will the planet continue to warm? Right now it looks that way, but at what rate and to what degree is debatable. Will the signers actually do something to decrease their contributions to carbon emissions? Do India’s caveats call into question those commitments? In the meantime, all those large natural continuities play out their averages. Surely, those who roamed the ice fields and tundra of 10,000 years ago would think that Earth’s warming is a rather pleasant change. “Look, Yug, trees! Trees, Yug, trees!”
More: Whose genetic line gets to go to Planet Ararat? Stephen’s? Or, in general, Yug’s? And when the ark lands, will those on board disembark to find a stable world devoid of climatic aberrations and an unending supply of clean, green energy?
* In memory and hyperbole, it was a time when people wore duct tape for shoes and walked uphill in knee-deep snow both ways between home and school.
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