Forget going green -- Earth doesn't care
Forget going green -- Earth doesn't care - Paul B. Farrell - MarketWatch
Cover story: "The Earth Doesn't Care If You Drive a Hybrid!" Or recycle. Or eat organic food. Or live in a green house powered by solar energy. Or squander commodities. The Earth just doesn't care how much you waste.
Was that a cover story in Mother Earth News? Or The Onion? No folks, it was the cover story in the elite American Scholar Journal by Nobel physicist Robert B. Laughlin of Stanford University. I bring it to your attention because in today's resurgence of Know-Nothing party politics few care what scholars say about anything.
But you better care. Laughlin pinpoints the key reason a global crisis is coming soon: What he says has everything to do with America's global warming policies, our deficits, hot commodities, investment strategies and how to live in an age of increasing warfare.
The Scholar's editor hammers home Laughlin's warning that "humans have already triggered the sixth great period of species extinction in Earth's history." The what? Yes, we are in an age of species extinction. And it's happening fast. The last extinction was 65 million years ago, at the end of the 250 million year Mesozoic era. But this one is very different. Ask yourself: Will the human species be the new dinosaurs, which vanished long before we arrived?
Your brain needs to shift into a new mindset to think like Laughlin, a physicist who thinks in geologic time, in hundreds of millions of years, about a planet that's been around over five billion years. Yes, geologic time is very long. But get this: The end may catch us by surprise. A sudden accelerating geologic quickie, like the asteroids that wiped out the dinosaurs. Or like the Earth's beginning, a sudden Big Bang.
But can anyone prepare? No. But not for lack of warnings. Why? Because our human brains can't see past our noses, let alone plan for obvious catastrophes.
Same when it comes to climate change and energy futures. Laughlin warns that our collective judgment is "fogged by misunderstandings about the Earth. Experts are little help in the constant struggle to separate myth from reality, because they have the same difficulty, and routinely demonstrate it by talking past each other."
We're committing suicide -- and our leaders are the executioners
And the experts will all miss it: "Respected scientists warn of imminent energy shortages as geologic fuel supplies run out. Wall Street executives dismiss their predictions as myths and call for more drilling. Environmentalists describe the destruction to the Earth from burning coal, oil and natural gas. Economists ignore them and describe the danger to the Earth of failing to burn coal, oil and natural gas. Geology researchers report fresh findings about what the Earth was like millions of years ago. Creationist researchers report fresh findings that the Earth didn't exist millions of years ago."
So the warnings just cancel out one another.
Laughlin's advice: "The only way not to get lost in this awful swamp is to review the basics and decide for yourself what you believe and what you don't." No, no, no. With the reemergence of Know-Nothing political discourse, myth and ideology beat reality and the facts.
Earth warns humans, you started the new species extinction
As anthropologist Jared Diamond put it in his classic "Collapse," our fate depends on leaders with "the courage to practice long-term thinking and to make bold, courageous, anticipatory decisions at a time when problems have become perceptible but before they reach crisis proportions"
Unfortunately, "this type of decision-making is the opposite of the short-term reactive decision-making that too often characterizes our elected politicians, focusing only on issues likely to blow up in a crisis within the next 90 days." Even if our leaders see a disaster coming, they'll ignore it, till it's too late.
Laughlin's no activist like Bill McKibben warning "that it might be too late. The science is settled, the damage has already begun." Laughlin's an academic scholar. You even sense he's talking to a dear old friend, Earth, in a special language both understand, a grumpy old friend who doesn't really give a damn whether you drive a hybrid, recycle, eat organic or live in a greenhouse fueled by solar power; a dear old friend who periodically (on its geologic timetable) gets extra grumpy and simply wipes out species that threaten its survival, including humans if we get too threatening. Listen to Laughlin:
"A considerable amount of evidence shows that humans are causing what biologists call the sixth mass extinction, an allusion to the five previous cases in the fossil record where huge numbers of species died out mysteriously in a flash of geologic time."
Like massive asteroids wiping out the dinosaurs "with the power of a million 100-megaton hydrogen warheads. The damage that human activity presently inflicts, many say, is comparable." Then he reminds us that "Earth didn't replace the dinosaurs after they died, notwithstanding the improved weather conditions and 20,000 ages of Moses to make repairs. It just moved on and became something different than it had been before."
The real problem? By 2050 we'll add too many cute new babies
So what's Earth now telling its old friend, Nobel physicist Laughlin? Earth is exposing the real problem that's forcing us into the sixth species extinction, the elimination of toxic species threatening Earth's survival: The "real problem is human population pressure generally -- overharvesting, habitat destruction, pesticide abuse, species invasion and so forth."
So what's the solution? "Slowing manmade extinctions in a meaningful way would require drastically reducing the world's human population. That is unlikely to happen." Get it? Population growth will continue inexorably from six billion to nine billion. Earth doesn't want 50% growth. So the sixth species extension is in progress.
Whether you're an activist or a climate-denier, you can rant and rave all you want -- for or against all the politically correct campaigns to cut carbon emissions, recycle plastic water bottles, eat locally grown organic food, tax breaks for solar energy, buying hybrids or greenophying urban skyscrapers. At best, all that jockeying around may delay the endgame -- the inevitable sixth species extinction -- by a few seconds on the geologic time-clock. But it won't stop the clock. Fifty percent growth guarantees extinctions.
Yes, you can delay ... but you cannot stop the inevitable
Yes, you can delay Earth's endgame scenario, says Laughlin. But nothing can change the Earth's trajectory on the new path of the sixth species extinction ... as long as China, India, Africa, Asia, the Americas and the rest of the world keep adding more babies, blowing up the population bubble from roughly 6 billion today to more than 9 billion by 2050. Remember, if all 6 billion Earth inhabitants used resources and generated as much waste as America today, we'd already need six Earths. With a 2050 population of 9 billion, it's "game over."
Laughlin's geologic-time equation says population is the key problem that renders all recycling-hybrid-organic-green-solar-energy solutions ineffective in stopping the inevitable species extinction. Population growth is the one key variable in the Earth's economic equation that actually accelerates all other problems.
Laughlin concludes like a conductor building to the grand climax of an orchestral masterpiece: "The great ice episodes were not the only cases of natural climate change, however. Six million years ago the Mediterranean Sea dried up. Ninety million years ago alligators and turtles cavorted in the Arctic. One hundred fifty million years ago the oceans flooded the middle of North America and preserved dinosaur bones. Three hundred million years ago, northern Europe burned to a desert and coal formed in Antarctica. The great ice episodes themselves were preceded by approximately 30 smaller ones between one and two million years ago."
This time is different. Why? The first 'species extinction' with people
"Nobody knows why these dramatic climate changes occurred in the ancient past. ... One thing we know for sure is that people weren't involved. There weren't enough people around during the ice episodes to matter, and there weren't any people around before the ice episodes." So can we do anything to stop the "sixth species extinction?" No.
Climate change "is a matter of geologic time, something that the Earth routinely does on its own without asking anyone's permission or explaining itself," warns Laughlin. Earth "doesn't include the potentially catastrophic effects on civilization in its planning. Far from being responsible for damaging the earth's climate, civilization might not be able to forestall any of these terrible changes once the earth has decided to make them ... climate ought not to concern us too much ... because it's beyond our power to control."
So if climate change is "beyond our control," why not accept it and enjoy life? Yes, forget about recycling, hybrids, solar cells, wind power, clean coal, desalination and living green. They're ineffective, can't stop the "sixth species extinction" ... as long as population continues growing out of control from six billion to nine billion.
In the end, however, no matter what Laughlin says, we are still masters of our fate, captains of our souls. Yes, we did light the fuse on the next "Big Bang," the population time bomb. Yes, we set in motion the "sixth species extinction." Yes, the "geologic time bomb" is ticking away. But we made the decision. Not Earth. Admit it. Take responsibility. Go enjoy life, live for today. And stop wasting time, money and energy on ineffective solutions to reverse the inevitable ending that we already set in motion.
The American Scholar: What the Earth Knows - Robert B. Laughlin
The sea has risen and fallen particularly vigorously over the past million years as a result of Ice Age glaciation. We know this because oxygen isotope ratios in the ocean sediments vary violently with depth. These ratios indirectly measure the amount of water locked up in glacial ice sheets at the time of sedimentation. The sediments record nine major glacial episodes, each of which lowered the sea level by more than 50 meters and then returned it abruptly to its present value. At least four of these episodes lowered the sea by more than 100 meters. This includes the most recent one, which lowered it 120 meters. The amount of lowering is corroborated by uplifted coral reefs, which show growth in places that would otherwise have been impossible because they require shallow water. It’s also consistent with estimates of the ice mass required to leave behind such industrial-strength mischief as Long Island, Nantucket, and the Great Lakes—about 50 million cubic kilometers in all, or five million billion tons.
The major glacial episodes are spectacular examples of the natural climate change that has occurred in geologic time. They took place at regular intervals of 100,000 years and always followed the same strange pattern of slow, steady cooling followed by abrupt warming back to conditions similar to today’s. We know this because chemical records in polar ice, the patterns of which match those of the sediments, contain a signal that strongly tracks the earth’s precessional wobble, the 24,000-year cyclic drift of the earth’s spin axis caused by the gravitational tugging of the moon and sun. The precession is a clock-like astronomical quantity, so its appearance in the ice data enables a precise dating of the ice. That, in turn, enables a precise dating of the sediments. The last glacial melting, cross-dated at 15,000 years ago by the radiocarbon age of wood debris left by the glaciers as they retreated, occurred rapidly. The sea rose more than one centimeter per year for 10,000 years, then stopped. The extra heat required for this melting was 10 times the present energy consumption of civilization. The total melt**water flow was the equivalent of two Amazons, or half the discharge of all the rivers in all the world.
The great ice episodes were not the only cases of natural climate change, however. Six million years ago the Mediterranean Sea dried up. Ninety million years ago alligators and turtles cavorted in the Arctic. One hundred fifty million years ago the oceans flooded the middle of North America and preserved dinosaur bones. Three hundred million years ago, northern Europe burned to a desert and coal formed in Antarctica. The great ice episodes themselves were preceded by approximately 30 smaller ones between one and two million years ago, and perhaps twice that many before that.
Nobody knows why these dramatic climate changes occurred in the ancient past. Ideas that commonly surface include perturbations to the earth’s orbit by other planets, disruptions of ocean currents, the rise and fall of greenhouse gases, heat reflection by snow, continental drift, comet impacts, Genesis floods, volcanoes, and slow changes in the irradiance of the sun. No scientifically solid support has been found for any of these suggestions. One thing we know for sure is that people weren’t involved. There weren’t enough people around during the ice episodes to matter, and there weren’t any people around before the ice episodes.
The geologic record as we know it thus suggests that climate is a profoundly grander thing than energy. Energy procurement is a matter of engineering and keeping the lights on under circumstances that are likely to get more difficult as time progresses. Climate change, by contrast, is a matter of geologic time, something that the earth routinely does on its own without asking anyone’s permission or explaining itself. The earth doesn’t include the potentially catastrophic effects on civilization in its planning. Far from being responsible for damaging the earth’s climate, civilization might not be able to forestall any of these terrible changes once the earth has decided to make them. Were the earth determined to freeze Canada again, for example, it’s difficult to imagine doing anything except selling your real estate in Canada. If it decides to melt Greenland, it might be best to unload your property in Bangladesh. The geologic record suggests that climate ought not to concern us too much when we’re gazing into the energy future, not because it’s unimportant, but because it’s beyond our power to control.
Robert B. Laughlin is a professor of physics at Stanford University and a co-recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize for Physics. This essay is adapted from his new book on the future of fossil fuels, which will appear next year.
