We
are developing a Cassandra Complex, we who chime into silence about
what we ought to call the Climate Catastrophe. I suppose humans are not
biologically programmed to respond urgently to a threat that seems
distant. Behind the scenes, the scientists studying our Earth's patterns
rapidly revise the outlook in the direction of more severity, and
quicker consequence. They are dismayed, surprised, in awe of the
snowballing effect. Mark you this: not one -- not one -- study that
we've found, in a review of literature from the last four years, has
indicated a serendipitous mitigating influence previously undiscovered.
All the new discoveries are painting a scene increasingly grave. Like
blind men, the scientists have been groping what they thought was the
unseen elephant not discussed in our national conversation; what they
found they had hold of was rather a dragon.
Indefinite
proposals about cleaner energy in the future are not enough. 54
miles-per-gallon vehicles in 2025 is not enough. It is a start; but, by
then, we will have sailed far out into the sea of our own peril.
In
the absence of answers to my open letter (see below), I am left to
muse. Modern people are subject to a back-breaking load of cynical
realism. We convince ourselves that there is no hope, and we forget the
unfathomable successes that people have accomplished in the past. Since
our government is beset by greed and corruption, and bought out by
groups who care, each, about their one thing, and only that one thing,
we are unsure what it feels like to take a common action, to agree on something.
In
short, we have lost perspective of our life here on Earth. We have the
equivalent of a major asteroid heading on a collision course with Earth
(as one well-known climatologist put it), yet, instead of being
discussed in every living room, barbershop, supermarket, and deli, not
to mention the halls of government, only the most dramatic developments
-- like the record loss of arctic sea ice this year -- get briefly
reported. We are muffled in the soft, suffocating grip of human affairs.
Let's
step back a bit. When was the last time you looked at the sky? I mean,
really considered it, not just glanced upward and gave the names of what
you saw: sun, clouds, moon, stars, blue, blue, blue.
When
you stare into the blue, you are looking about 370 miles of atmosphere.
A bright object, such as the daytime moon, can be seen, even though it
is 225,000 miles away. As night falls, of course, you can see much
further: generally, about 17,010,518,400,000,000,000 miles out into
space, and 2.9 million years into the past. Compare this with the
approximately 100 miles that you can see, in the clearest conditions,
looking to the horizon on Earth (on a very open plain), and we might
suppose that upwards is where we will look if we really want to get a
handle on our lives, find the vantage point from which we can see our
existence in context. Indeed, our ancestors, without artificial
lighting, did interact with the ocean of the Universe as directly as
they fished in the earthbound sea.
But,
we moderns are fixated on life, on the terrestrial sphere. Actually, we
are indoors most of the time. The EPA estimates that a typical American
adult spends 90% of her time inside buildings, and, this year, the
Nature Conservancy reported that as little as 10% of American children
describe themselves as spending time outdoors every day. The main
deterrents to enjoying nature? Heat and bugs. When it comes to
considering stars and galaxies, most of us seem to regard them as an
exravagant celestial wallpaper, less relevant to our daily lives (even
though we are starting to realize how truly odd the whole Universe is)
than our ancestors considered them to be (though they believed the
starry heaven to be unchanging).
This
is true of our thinking about our own sun. For one thing, we’re not
supposed to look directly at it. This keeps our gaze level with the
ground, and it also makes us compartmentalize our knowing of the sun. On
a clear day, for instance, we will note that “it” is hot, that the day
is “sunny;” but when was the last time you completely considered the sun
for what it is: an enormous star, one million times the volume of the
Earth -- a thermonuclear reactor sending a tidal wave of energy out
through the solar system, washing over the Earth every single second.
The only thing protecting us from roasting under the eye of the sun (and
freezing to death in the dark night of near-absolute-zero temperatures),
the one thing, is Earth’s atmosphere.
The
atmosphere is an absurdly thin veil, comparable to the peel of an
apple, and it is a mere one-percent of that atmosphere that creates the
Greenhouse Effect which makes our existence possible. These gases
constitute less of the air than does O2
that we breathe into our blood, itself only 16% of the atmosphere. It
is not surprising, then, when we consider that we are dumping 100 times
the amount of carbon-dioxide into the air every year than do all the
active volcanoes on Earth, that we can really change the characteristics
of that one-percent of the atmosphere. It is a real game of chicken
that we are playing. The sun is a massive entity, storming our shores at
every moment. We are only lucky that our shelter has been so secure up
until now.
Let’s
take a further step back, however, and really survey the situation.
What, after all, are we who challenge humanity to do something about
climate change fighting for? In the future, several incredible events
will unfold. About 600 million years from now, the sun will have
appreciably increased its radiation, accelerating the weathering of
silica rock formations, which will lead to a dramatic decrease in
carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere -- to the point that most plant life
(and therefore, most animal life) will be unable to survive. Even later,
the Earth’s axis of rotation will begin to wobble chaotically,
sometimes pointing the north or south pole straight at the sun for
millions of years. This, too, will wildly upset what climate and habitat
zones remain on Earth.
Finally,
in a bit more than 1 billion years, the sun will have increased its
radiance by 10% or so, and this is expected to trigger a runaway
greenhouse-effect, due, this time, to water vapor, such that the oceans
evaporate totally into space. The Earth will then endure as a dry sphere
of stone and metal, until some 7.5 billion years from now, the sun, now
expanding into a star form called a “red giant,” engulfs our planet
within its corona, vaporizing it.
So,
what is the point of forestalling environmental ruin at this point?
Knowing what we reasonably predict about the future of the Earth and the
sun, and the unlikelihood of our being able to do anything to
successfully change that outcome,
why not leave the party early? We are triggering an early round of
catastrophic global warming, but we’re not “out-of-line,” ethically,
with the big picture, are we?
Well, first of all, there are, in
fact, methods being designed, on the occasional sleepy Sunday
afternoon, for moving the planet out of harm’s way from the sun.
However, that is not the reason to fight 21st century climate change.
People
sometimes deride environmentalists as trying to keep things precious
and perfect forever -- in other words, failing to embrace change. But,
that is not in the cards, and not the point. The reason to save life on
Earth now is that we’re only halfway done. 600 million years is also
about the amount of time that life has significantly populated the
planet. There is a quality to life on Earth that is more important than
its longevity, and that is its intricacy.
The intricate weave of life, intelligence, and communication on Earth is what makes it possible for us to have a
long perspective, to appreciate Deep Time, even though humanity has
only existed for a tiny beat of the geological record. What Buddhists
call the co-dependent arising of reality on Earth is only in midstroke, a
magical creation, and we are not yet in a position to evaluate its importance.
There is, in short, so much going
on here. It is a typically human attitude to both assume that we have
the index on the complexity of the orchestration, and also that the
significance of this symphony exists (if it does) somewhere in the
future. Our planet is bleeding off a signal of life into space, and
perhaps into the structure and the meaning of the Universe itself. If
we’re going to shut down the transmitter, if we are going to kill the
oceans and drive the lands into drought and make the storms unforgiving,
if we’re going to bring hell to Earth, let’s be damn sure we’re doing
it for a better reason than our forgetting to look up.
