The Need to Take Risks

I saw the trailer for a new film today. The movie is called Chasing Ice. A team of scientists, photographers, and adventurists set out to create the most complete catalog of photographic documentation of retreating ice -- no, let me rephrase that -- of ice-sheet collapse that has yet existed. According to the project, James Balog created the Extreme Ice Survey in 2005 (with cooperation from National Geographic), and Chasing Ice is a documentary of his team's efforts to place revolutionary time-lapse photography cameras across the Arctic, in some of the most taxing conditions found on Earth, to image the vanishing of the northern glaciers.

I found the trailer riveting, in the same way that people in the first two decades of the 20th century found Sir Walter Scott's and Sir Ernest Shackleton's polar expeditions unforgettable. But there is more to it than that. Scott and Shackleton found the poles to be dangerous, of course -- but they were natural dangers. The trailer for Chasing Ice emphasizes that Balog and his team endure extremely risky conditions for a different reason: the whole environment is in an uproar, a massive shift brought on by our destabilizing of the climate. They put themselves on the very brink, the treacherous leading edge of the climate catastrophe, in order to capture photographic evidence that will indisputably point to our involvement with its causation, that will illustrate the scale and the severity of the change.

I am mindful of this, as we who are doing Pacing the Planet formulate our next steps. Our biggest risks faced so far are big trucks on narrow country lanes, the scorn of some passers-by, and the threat of running out of money while trying to do "the right thing." There is a palpable force trying to get us back in line, do the expected, perform our function, get small again.

That force is the collective disdain, the opprobrium, and -- ultimately -- the indifference of people at large to our situation, as we refuse to divert our attention from the emergency. We're not doing what we're supposed to do (according to our society), so we're starting to fall through the cracks. We're not earning money, we're not talking about the same things everyone else is talking about (like the economy), so we're fringe. It feels like we're being forgotten. In public forums, some people have questioned our sanity. Heck, some family members have questioned our sanity.

I admit that a small, angry part of me wants to believe that the obvious importance of what is at stake with climate change will rally the support of anyone who has ever known us, who even remotely cares about us, to lead our own bit part of the charge. "Don't worry!" the unseen chorus says in my hopeful ear. "We'll take care of the bills. (They are small). We'll provide the operating budget for Pacing the Planet, be the breath beneath the wings of the project and help it take flight!" Understand that I am so appreciative of the people who are supporting our first fundraising campaign, but I have to tell you that what the chorus whispers in my ear remains a fantasy for now. Not only do we need to succeed in our fundraising effort, but we need to generate a lot of support, to push the emergency front-and-center in the collective attention of humanity within the next four years. This is our job now. Not just money, you see, but people, too. A movement. (That is why we are going to Chicago on November 28, to participate in the "Do the Math Tour" sponsored by 350.org and Bill McKibben, so we can start working in parallel with others. 350.org has also invited us to provide a guest blog entry on their website...look for it soon!)

Then comes Chasing Ice. And I realize, we are not risking enough, yet. We must go bolder, be as wildly daring and creative as the Earth which is fomenting this change upon us. The surprising lack of concern among even those we've known directly in the past isn't personal to us. Somehow, global warming and climate change are not registering viscerally as a threat to our very existence. There is an apocalypse of zombie-like denial out there. What we need are a few, startling images that stir the reflex of disgust and shock, that provoke people to exclaim: "This cannot be!" Balog and his crew are risking their lives to bring those sorts of images. They will not be thanked properly until the great host of people on Earth stop in wonder at the vision they have brought before us, and then take action of commensurate sacrifice and willingness to change.

As for our own action, Pacing the Planet, we've only just begun.

A poster for you

Here is a link a downloadable poster that you can print on letter-size paper, and put up in your locality: https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B3iuIfRkjF1nX1lzbXFiSG9rTUU

It is styled after a traditional eye-chart, and looks like this:

Let us know if you are interested in contributing to a mass printing of these in large-poster format. A print run of 1000 would cost about $880. You can also order large-poster prints from Vistaprint.com for $9.73 each.

To our knowledge, there is not yet a public service media campaign to let people know about the startling announcement from the International Energy Agency in November of 2011 -- that we have 5 years (4 years, now) to change course globally with our energy policies, or so much new infrastructure for burning fossil fuels will have been built that we will be committed to irreversible climate change.

You can read about that announcement in the Guardian newspaper.

Clearly, this is a very important message to get out to as many people as possible. Help us convey the urgent time-frame by printing out some posters and putting them up today!

Pacing the Planet -- Update

We had a surprisingly effective and enjoyable walk today (we being: Dana, Gavain, and Tillwyn), weaving our carts in and out of traffic around the town of Kirksville, MO. Kirksville is 25 miles from our house, and is the nearest city with a population greater than 10,000 people. We brought the cart and wagon in by truck today (I'll explain why in just a bit), and paced around the town square, and over to the local super-market, about 1.5 miles away.

We did a bit of shopping in the grocery store, and for the occasion, we strapped a dry-erase board to the front of our cart, which read: "Do you know that a climate catastrophe is underway? Talk to us!" Mostly, for our troubles, we received a bunch of frowns, and some dirty looks, but one kind man did stop us in the parking lot, ask us where we were planning to pace, and wondered if we had yet received any media attention.

Afterwards, we walked our wagon and cart back the 1.5 miles to the square, where we encountered the homecoming parade for the Kirksville school system, just as it was warming up. Two marching bands, majorettes, a fire truck, floats with football players and prehistoric reunions, not to mention cameos by the Adair County Republican and Democratic election committees. We found a suitable spot by the sidelines, where our carts nonetheless drew considerable attention, and we had several valuable conversations about the climate.

At the end, we requested help loading our wagon and cart into the truck from some high schoolers who are volunteering for the Democratic candidate for State Representative of District 3 in Missouri. Dana had a chance to talk just a bit with the candidate herself, Rebecca McClanahan, and share with her about Pacing the Planet, and our concern with global warming. Ms. McClanahan was appreciative and supportive of our project.

We have modified our strategy this fall, so that we will be bringing our carts to special locations in our (soon-to-be) vegetable oil powered pickup truck, and then pace locally at those spots. Part of the reason for the change is that Dana is experiencing some health challenges that have been sapping her energy recently, and we need to take care of her. We also are valuing the practice for a more extensive endeavor in the spring.

Thirdly, we are evaluating our progress working with Jemma and Sasha, the donkeys; we believe that, with some more time for training, we can feel more confident in our relationship with them, and we believe we can train them to walk faster with us. (It is also possible that we will decide that the donkeys require more care and logistical support than they are worth to the project for the help they provide, but we haven't reached that conclusion, yet).

Last, we have so far found that, particularly since we are traveling with children, we have needed the help of a vehicle to ferry us supplies at the end of the day. If this is to be an implicit part of Pacing the Planet, we want to do it responsibly, by using our truck that can run on vegetable oil we reclaim from our local restaurants, and we need a driver (or drivers) who would be committed to the project, as well.

On Wednesday, Dana and I presented at Truman State University, in Kirksville -- our first college campus talk, with many more to follow, hopefully. I gave a revised version of the presentation I have previously delivered in Edina and at the Possibility Alliance, with more useful information on the basic mechanics of global warming, so that audience members will be able to explain it to others (as well as solid reasons and evidence why the leading "theories" of climate-change contrarians cannot explain the data). I also shared a detailed action plan of what we need to do, as citizens, to save our planet.

That was followed by an exercise called "What Brings You Joy," which helps people identify what they are passionate about and where their gratitude for living really resides. We concluded with a discussion, and Dana read her essay from this blog, entitled "Because I Want to Be a Granny."

There were tears in the eyes of a few participants, and genuine discussion. Although there are several ways we can improve the seminar, it seems that what we did share this time was well-appreciated, and about 20 college students (not all science majors, by the way) left with a focused awareness of the urgency of our planetary situation.

Next stop: University of Missouri, Columbia...old Mizzou!

The Clear, Severe, Crisis

Let's clarify what global warming is, the actual mechanism of it. It's not that difficult to understand, and will reveal to you the severity of the situation we're in. As a thorough primer on the subject, I again refer you to James Hansen's Storms of My Grandchildren (although, his final conclusions do not adequately portray the emergency of the situation).

So, what causes global warming? The answer may not be what you're expecting me to say. Energy imbalance in the whole sun-earth system results in global warming or in global cooling. Basically, the Earth is like a rock next to a campfire. If the rock absorbs more heat from the fire than it can simultaneously radiate into the air around it, the rock will grow hotter, until the point where incoming energy and outgoing energy balance each other. If the rock gives off more heat than it absorbs from the fire, it will cool down, until balance is reached. The Earth behaves exactly the same way.

There are three basic ways to increase the energy imbalance between the Earth and the sun. First, the sun could send more energy toward the Earth – that is, it could increase its irradiance. Second, the reflectivity of the Earth – its albedo, or shininess – can be altered. If the Earth reflects more heat directly back into space, it absorbs less heat, and vice versa. Third, the insularity of the Earth can be changed: heat can be held against the Earth for a longer time (like body-heat under your winter coat), creating an imbalance in the amount of energy coming in from the sun, and the amount radiating out into the deep night of space. (There is a fourth way, which is to bring the Earth and the sun closer to each other, but astronomical measurements show that is not happening enough to cause the warming measured on Earth.)

Our best measurement of the Earth's net energy imbalance has it somewhere in the range of 0.5 - 0.75 Watts per square meter. The location of this warming (heating in the lower atmosphere, cooling in the stratosphere) is the signature of energy imbalance caused by insularity, not greater solar irradiance.

Point-six Watts probably sounds like a small amount of energy. It is equivalent to one dim Christmas tree light-bulb on each square meter of the Earth's surface. However, when you consider the total brightness of all those light-bulbs together, the total magnitude of that energy, you can realize that it is actually very large.

By comparison, the Energy imbalance that triggered the Earth's entry into the most recent ice age (and more importantly, its rapid and chaotic exit from it) was a measly 0.1 Watt/m². How on Earth did that small jolt push the Earth into one of the biggest climate shifts ever experienced? The likely reason, revealed by the paleoclimate evidence, is that this miniscule energy imbalance was enough to trigger major feedback cycles that amplified the initial effect. The most major of those feedback loops was change in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and change in albedo due to transforming polar ice sheets.

Looking specifically at the end of the last ice age, we see that the 0.1 Watt/m² (resulting from slight changes in the Earth's axis of rotation, which increased the level of solar radiation reaching the northern hemisphere) was enough to kickstart the rapid melting of polar ice, which then reinforced its own melting, leading to the rapid disintegration of the icecaps. The oceans warmed enough to release significant amounts of CO₂ into the air, which drove us into our current age of unusually stable climate (after an initial spike).

Now, I'm going to tell you something that should shock you. Guess the amount of the current energy balance from our loading the atmosphere with carbon dioxide through burning fossil fuels (are you ready for this?). Not 0.1 W/m². Not 0.5 W/m². Not even 1 W/m².

Friends, the energy imbalance from burning fossil fuels to date is 3 W/m². Wow. That is 30 times the size of the force that previously changed the planet from a world of ice into the world we know.

In fact, there is a time in Earth's history that more closely resembles what is happening today. 50 million years ago, India was plowing northward through the future Indian Ocean, toward the Asian landmass. The subcontinent was moving at such a fast rate that friction with the ocean floor caused CO₂ that was trapped in the Earth's crust to be released in large volumes. So goes the theory. This is the closest natural approximation we have to the kind of situation we're in, where humanity has extracted carbon that was in long-term, stable storage in fossilized deposits, and converted it to CO₂ in the atmosphere.

So, what happened 50 million years ago? A sophisticated proxy of the temperature at that time (an indirect index recorded in the ratio of isotopes of oxygen and carbon) reveals that there was a dramatic increase in global temperatures, as much as 12-15º C. Alaska was tropical, and hosted crocodiles. At a certain point, early on in this temperature crescendo, 3000 million tons of methane hydrate, frozen on the sea floor, suddenly melted, and the global average temperature spiked for 200,000 years. There were no polar or mountain icecaps anywhere on Earth, and ocean levels were very much higher than they are now. Not only that, but ocean currents actually appear to have reversed direction for about 40,000 years. Suffice it to say, the Earth of the Eocene Optimum would seem like an alien world to today's humanity.

Our contemporary carbon pollution of the atmosphere is occurring at roughly 5 times the rate that created the Eocene Optimum. The ocean is already more acidic from industrial carbon dioxide than it ever was in the Eocene.

We begin to have some sense of the scale of the energy imbalance that we are engendering. Strangely enough, somewhere between 1/3 and 2/3 of that 3 W/m² imbalance that we are forcing with greenhouse gas emissions is masked by reflective aerosols that we are simultaneously emitting as industrial pollution – aerosols that block sunlight, and therefore artificially cool the planet. As we tighten regulations on other pollutants, like sulfur-oxides, without regulating carbon dioxide sufficiently, we stand the risk of revealing the true impact of our contribution to global warming. Because these aerosols are only suspended in the atmosphere for a short time, if we were to stop emitting aerosols completely today, within a few weeks or months, we could see the net energy imbalance of the planet double – and that would be catastrophic.

There is one thing worth mentioning, as well. In the time it takes to equilibrate an energy imbalance, other reinforcing feedback loops can be triggered which cause the balance point to shift, and the new forcing factor may not be something we can control. For instance, we certainly don't have any way currently to keep 5,000 million tons of methane hydrates from melting on the sea floor, if they start to do so en masse. There are indications that we have so far overlooked certain potential feedback loops that could have very significant impact on the scale of global warming. So far, for example, the Earth's landmasses have continued to absorb CO₂ at the same proportion, year after year, even though the total load of CO₂ output into the environment from human industry has been increasing. No one thinks that this surprising pattern can persist indefinitely. In fact, an ongoing study conducted in Colorado, comparing plots of Earth subject to natural conditions with plots of Earth which have electric heaters placed over them, reveals that, as temperatures rise, the soil itself can suddenly switch to become a source of CO₂, rather than a carbon sink. When it does, we can expect that the release from the soil will yield a doubling of CO₂ in the atmosphere.

This, then is the emergency. We are forcing the planet warmer at a speed and intensity unmatched by natural mechanisms of climate change. We're not even in the same ballpark of effect. Though our actions may seem routine to us, they are actually unprecedented in their impact, and will assault the stability upon which civilization has depended with unbelievable force. Every once in a while, there is an event on Earth that takes only a few hours, or days, or even a handful of years to happen, but whose consequences play out for millions of years thereafter, and fundamentally shape the history of the Earth. The comet impact that extinguished the dinosaurs and transformed the planet's climate was such an event. We are now well within the theatre of yet another one, though most people don't realize it, let alone accept that they are the principal actors on the stage. In a unique moment that challenges the human mind like nothing else in our species' collective experience, we are asked to accept that the choice among alternate histories, which will unfold for millions of years to come, will be decided in the next five years.

(Written by Gavain U'Prichard)

Update on the Status of Our Walk

Here is the latest news on what is happening with Pacing the Planet. We've gotten our carts and wagons painted, signs made, Donkeys vaccinated, harness prepared, wagon wheels installed, packing done.

On Monday, September 10, we set out to begin our walk. Egon (10 years old) and I led the two Donkeys (Gemma and Sasha) and our rugged stroller through town and down to the bottom of a steep hill on a gravel lane that would take us most of the 9.5 miles to our first destination, a camp-out at Sever Lake in our Knox County. About a half-hour later, Dana, Simon (4 years old), Tillwyn (15 months old), and another helper appeared at the top of the hill with our pony cart and larger wagon. We call the latter the "Pacing Wagon," and the former the "350 cart," because the pony cart is painted to advertise the social movement for bringing atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide back down to 350 parts per million. That movement is spearheaded online at the website www.350.org.

After carefully walking the (rather heavy) carts down the gravel hill, we got Gemma in her harness, and hitched her up to the 350 cart, and I started leading her down the road. This was her second time in harness and pulling the cart. Egon was leading Sasha, and pushing the stroller at the same time. Dana started out by pulling the Pacing Wagon, rickshaw style. So far, so good. The only challenge was that the donkeys were unexpectedly skittish of the sound the wagon wheels make when moving on gravel, so Egon and I had to walk them several hundred yards ahead of the Pacing Wagon.

Around the first corner, our troubles began. Egon was having a challenging time leading Sasha and pushing the stroller simultaneously. Gemma is very good at peacefully towing the 350 cart, but gets impatient when just standing still in the traces. And Dana was falling behind.

The road was just freshly laid with large gravel, and the large (but narrow) wheels of the Pacing Wagon were digging into the rocks as if it were slush. Dana was starting to see stars from the exertion. She and I switched places, and while she led Gemma, I tried my hand at pulling the Pacing Wagon, which was heavier than I had expected, once we had it all packed up. It was very slow, hard going for me, too; a passerby in a car informed us that the entire way to the town of Hurdland, MO, had received new gravel: about 7 miles. We had walked maybe a half-mile so far. Dana was hungry and not feeling well, so we found a tiny bit of shade, and made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. In the meantime, a gigantic harvester which had come to cut down the cornfield next to us on the road, began making slow passes through the field, sending a shower of dust and corn-stalk fragments billowing around us. We decided that we needed to make some different preparations, called for help, and, about an hour later, got every vehicle, animal, child, and adult back to our house. We felt worn out and morose.

Since then, we have revised some logistical details, and are making preparation for our next attempt within a week, should our newly-ordered supplies arrive. For one thing, we will be sticking to paved roads now, or else, well-packed roads scouted in advance. We will be attaching the stroller (which coverts to a bicycle trailer) to the back of the 350 cart, or not taking it at all. We have ordered a pack-saddle for Sasha, and she will be able to lighten the load of the Pacing Wagon in that way. We've also decided to bring a second tent, and got some warmer sleeping bags, and such items. After all, cooler fall weather is descending rapidly (though, as you hopefully understand, these normal seasonal variations in the weather don't contradict the overall pattern of global warming an climate change).

Probably the biggest change to Pacing the Planet is the formulation of a tighter strategy to our presentations and meetings, at least for this autumn. In the course of our research, reading, and conversations with other presenters on climate research, a clear direction for the first steps in restoring climate balance has come to our attention.

In the eight years (and very possibly as little as five years) that humanity has left to change course on our pollution of the atmosphere with CO2, the obvious necessary step is that we must shut down the coal industry. Coal still provides an unfortunately large proportion of our constant energy source in the U.S.A., and the data is clear that if humanity continues to extract and use coal, then the colossal impact of the carbon load in the atmosphere from that one source alone means that all the "going green," alternative energy, efficiency improvement, and rationing of other greenhouse gas sources won't make enough of a difference to offset the damage done by coal. In other words, coal burning, by itself, will drive us into catastrophic climate change.

So, coal has got to stay in the ground. We need to do this not only for our own responsibility, but to be in a position to credibly leverage China, Russia, and Saudi Arabia to keep their fossil fuel sources in the ground, too. In 2011, China was launching a new coal-powered energy plant every month.

A common question we've fielded, as we start to talk to people, is this: if making improvements in our personal lives ("going green") is not enough, what can we do? Shutting down coal is a goal that we can rally around, a clear community effort, and provides a measure of how serious our politicians are about addressing this problem fundamentally, before it is too late (if it is not, already). Even if we're already committed to very bad climate change, we need to stop using coal, so we don't trigger the sudden release of methane hydrates in the ocean, which will likely spike global temperatures to a level last seen during the major extinction event 50 million years ago. That spike, if history is anything to go by, could likely last for 100,000 years. Continuing to burn coal into the 2030s will almost certainly bring us to that point).

As it turns out, the Midwest, and particularly, Missouri, Iowa, and Illinois (what the locals call the "tri-state area") is one of the areas most heavily invested in coal extraction and burning. If you looked at the interactive map that I linked to in my last post, you will see that we are surrounded by coal plants and coal mines, within a 150 mile radius. If you pay attention to politics, you are probably also aware that Iowa is a key swing state in the upcoming presidential election, and that Missouri could come into play: partly thanks to Todd Akin's incredible, unintentional revelation of the logic behind the GOP's anti-abortion platform plank, and partly (we hope) if young people in Missouri are made aware of the coal fiasco surrounding them, its relation to this year's devastating drought, and what "business as usual" means for the future of the Midwest.

Therefore, we will be Pacing the Planet in Missouri and Iowa this fall -- and particularly, heading to colleges and universities, where we will be giving presentations on the science, the situation. We want to help young student activists understand the importance of Mitt Romney's campaign embracing a future in coal (not to mention supporting the disastrous development of Canada's bituminous sands oil industry). We're already working on establishing connection with our local Truman State University in Kirksville, MO, as well as the University of Missouri in Columbia (whose Atmospheric Science program is chaired by a notable oil-associated "skeptic" of human-caused global warming). We have our sights on the University of Iowa in Iowa City, as well.

Of course, we are still walking to do something different than the day-to-day routine, to highlight that we can't continue our individual day-to-days, and expect technology or experts to fix this problem for us. They won't, and we will die (and so will a lot of life on Earth) if we continue. We walk because, somehow, walking helps us embody the immense geological time-frames upon which the consequences of our actions now will play out (though the consequences are already starting, and will rapidly worsen, if we do nothing). Walking also helps our imaginations embrace the very different visions of Earth that the past serves up as examples of what our world will look and feel like, as we try to picture change on that scale, with that suffusion into our entire experience.

So, friends, we need more people to walk with us. If you can join us this autumn in Missouri and Iowa, please do! Also, please support our fundraising campaign as much as you can, and pass word of it along to your mailing lists and your contacts. We are so grateful not to be the only ones concerned about this turning point in our dear planet's history, and so grateful for the help and love that have been pledged so far. Please know that, although our departure date has changed, our resolve to walk has not wavered, nor has our enthusiasm and passion to do so.  As our vision has expanded, preparations and supplies have been more expensive than we originally budgeted, so we can use all the help you can send.  And, we're already at 34 percent!  Yeah!

A Valuable Resource

Here is an interactive map, courtesy of the World Resources Institute, that gives detailed information to those of us in the U.S. Midwest about where and how our electricity is being generated, and what is the environmental consequence of those actions. Unfortunately, as you will see, much of the Midwest is still getting its electricity from burning coal.

Power Almanac of the American Midwest (map)

Coal is the number one source of anthropogenic carbon-dioxide, as well as being a major source of mercury pollution, acid rain production, and water-contamination in the area where it is being extracted.

Coal is responsible for about 100,000 deaths per year (that's a conservative measurement). By comparison, Chernobyl, a poorly designed nuclear reactor, caused about 4,000 deaths when it exploded. So-called "slow" reactors do create many toxic by-products with a half-life of thousands of years. However, "fast" reactors can have a 90%+ efficiency (as opposed to the 1% efficiency of "slow" reactors), and therefore create much less radioactive waste, and that waste has a half-life of a few-hundred years, as opposed to millennia.

It is time to reconsider nuclear power (at least on a temporary basis), if we are to immediately end the use of coal as a base source of continuous power in the next few years. Coal, if we continue to use it, will most certainly carry us into the dangerous world of extreme climate fluctuation.

(Written by Gavain U'Prichard)

A Perspective Money Can't Buy

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.