Breaking Ice

Most of the scientific community has been aware of global climate change for more than 25 years. It was brought to my attention toward the end of the 1970s, and again in the early 1980s, and many times thereafter. From the start, the concept always made sense to me, because I was familiar with the greenhouse effect. My grandfather - a professional gardner - used hothouses to grow all his family's vegetables during the winters on Cape Cod. You would be surprised how hot a greenhouse can get! When I lived in Brookings, Ore, a 90+ year old neighbor did the same just 1 block from the cold ocean winds. Moreover, in his adult years he had been a vegetable farmer in Alaska, where everything is grown in greenhouses - even during the Alaskan winter! So, the greenhouse effect is powerful, even in far Northern latitudes. As I see it, how could anyone doubt the effect of increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases?

Homo sapiens have incredible capacities of delusion and self-conviction, especially when it suits. When the hormones are running, people are driven to copulate and reproduce. When hunger goads, they will gobble up anything edible. In starvation, people will even eat the inedible. When blood-lust is activated, men especially will do anything to gain victory - no matter how pyrrhic. Is it any wonder, then, that people can convince themselves there is no environmental damage on account of their activities? Those who dump toxic wastes or carry drugs are convinced they don't hurt anyone - at least not anyone they will ever hear about. The damage is invisible.

The difficulty with problems such as global climate change is exactly that they are invisible, until it is too late. Because climate dynamics are chaotic, there is a point of no return. On the other side of no return is unknown performance: we cannot know in advance what will happen. While it may be possible to put the genie back in the bottle, it will take more work to do so than caused the change. That's a result of the Third Law of Thermodynamics: Entropy.

If we suppose all of the human greenhouse gas wastes have a cumulative effect, we might have to undo all the burning and gas discharges of the last two centuries - plus the extra energy lost to Entropy - to put matters right. That amounts to abolishing everything that happened since the Industrial Revolution began. Think about how our ancestors lived two hundred years ago. That could soon be us. Of course, with the technology available two centuries ago, only about 1 billion people were supportable in the best of times. Going back to that pre-Industrial level of fuel use implies that 5 of 6 people now alive - about 5 billion people - must somehow disappear.

Something like this last case is what happens when we do nothing. Gaia (Nature) will adjust things to what is possible, regardless of what arrogant members of Homo sapiens believe.