Climate change: things ain't what they used to be

The climate is one aspect of a biosphere of unimaginable complexity.

 Along with oceans, icebergs, lakes, rivers, glaciers, snow, sleet, hail, fog, mist, rain, water vapour, terrain varied in relief and texture, volcanoes and air comprising oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, various trace gases and meteoric dust from space there is a multitude of living organisms integrated into and affecting the global climate system.  Jungles, forests, grasslands, crops, flora, tundra, pollen, algae, bacteria, viruses, insects, reptiles, fish and mammals all have been shown to affect the weather.

Add to these 7 billion humans which have evolved powerful but polluting technology, including the ability to modify living systems through genetic engineering and which introduce into the biosphere all manner of pollutants previously unknown to nature.

 It is hardly surprising that no one can predict climate with any degree of certainty.

Nevertheless it is possible to construct computer models which approximate the long term meteorology and have built into them laws of physics which have been thoroughly proved, tested and peer reviewed by networks of scientists over decades. Greenhouse warming, e.g., is as certain as the law of gravity. The problems and uncertainties arise from the chaotic nature of natural processes on a global scale and the inherent unpredictability of interactions between living systems of all kinds and the land, sea and air which they inhabit.

Numerous climate models have been loaded onto computers, all getting different results; yet as far as I am aware all agree that  that things ain’t what they used to be before the Industrial Revolution and the long term temperature trend is upward.

 Here are some of the difficulties faced by climate scientists:

• The Arctic is warming and melting much faster than other parts of the planet. These are cooling in some places but the overall average temperature at the Earth’s surface is rising. But by how much?

• Parts of the Antarctic are melting, parts are cooling, but the balance between these two trends is uncertain.

• Land-bound ice melting (e.g. glaciers in Greenland) is the only melting that causes the sea level to rise. Icebergs melting make no difference to sea level although this may well affect ocean currents which in turn can affect the weather. But how fast are the icebergs melting and how much fresh water do they hold? (A recently launched satellite, Cryosat, should help a lot.)

•  Glacier melting is considerably accelerated by thin , invisible layers of soot from forest fires, older diesel engines and slash-and-burn agriculture. Again, just how much is the acceleration?

•  ice and snow cover as well as changes in the nature of the earth's surface and atmospheric composition affect the amount of heat absorbed from the sun

• Algae in the sea affect precipitation by mechanisms which are imperfectly understood.

• There are 4 large scale chaotic systems, imperfectly understood and synchronised to varying degrees, which sometimes counteract, sometimes enhance, global warming: the El Nino Southern Oscillation, the North American Oscillation, the Pacific Decalal Oscillation and the  North Pacific Index

• Sunspot activity is currently unusually low, as it is has been previously at various times over the last several centuries, and this has a small cooling effect to offset man-made greenhouse emissions. But what will the sun do next? No one is sure.

• Methane from ocean bed deposits and tundra is 20x more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. The hotter the ocean and atmosphere the more methane escapes into the atmosphere but we don’t have  enough data to know how quickly this is happening and whether it is likely to lead to runaway heating.

• Volcanoes emit greenhouse gases in very small amounts compared to artificial emissions yet it is possible that an unusually large one could erupt at any time. More significant is the sulphur dioxide from volcanoes which forms aerosols of sulphuric acid in the atmosphere and this causes cooling by blocking incoming radiant heat from the sun.

• Cosmic debris is burning up in the atmosphere all the time but there is always the chance of something big hitting the biosphere and disrupting it. The weather can be regarded as part of the biosphere. It certainly affects and is affected by it.

• Data on past climate change has to be indirect, based on such things as pollen and flora entrapped in lake or ocean sediments or ice layers as well as tree growth rates. The data has to be collated over large geopgraphical areas in order to reconstruct past climate scenarios.

• Clouds and aerosols of various types and thickness can have either a warming or a cooling effect and we don't have enough data on this - a major cause of discrepancy among climate models to date.

• The pollution by human beings is intrinsically unpredictable because we have ever more powerful technology coupled with free will (except for those who think they are machines).

• moss growing on rock causes CO2 to be absorbed into the dissolved rock

• plate tectonics affects the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere

The biggest danger is that some time in the next decade or so the 4 oscillating systems mentioned above will work in sync to cause a sudden jump in temperature and that this will set off a chain reaction (more heat causes more heating mechanisms causes more heat etc. etc.) leading to a catastrophic breakdown of the whole system. (Think of Venus, almost identical in size to the Earth, where the temperature is high enough to melt lead, partly because it is 27% closer to the sun but largely because of the prevalence of carbon dioxide.)

On the longer timescale of hundreds of thousands of years global temperatures are widely thought to be governed by the Milankovitch cycles associated with the orbit, rotation and tilt of the Earth. According to these we should now be entering a new ice age. Hopefully, this cooling trend will save us from the relentless upward trend due to man’s input since about 1800.

No one knows what the global temperatures and sea level will be in 100 years; but we do know that nature cannot continue to be arrogantly exploited without some kind of ecological breakdown.

John

Author, 2077 AD

cosmik.jo@googlemail.com

Green expansion of the human race?

It is commonly stated that if all the 7 billion people on our planet lived at the same standard of living as the average citizen in the USA or Europe, the environment would have to be plundered and polluted so much that the whole ecosystem would collapse to the point where humanity could not survive.

As a long time environmentalist I agree. This is a pity because the desire to create and expand is built into the human psyche.

But there is a way that humankind could expand in number, widen its horizons, satisfy its thirst for adventure and raise its standard of living while preserving the environment, even returning it to a pristine state free of global warming and with biodiversity increased.

How? Improved agriculture, recycling, repairing and updating products rather than scrapping them, eliminating planned obsolence, seeking a higher quality of life rather than raising consumption levels as well as improving efficiency of production, transport and energy generation, and voluntarily slowing down the rate of population growth (thanks to Ken for reminding me), would be part of the answer. Yet consumption per capita is still likely to grow enormously even with these measures fully in place, although physically there is quite enough land area to accommodate us all, with some 20,000 square metres of land per person. 

The real solution, I maintain, lies in the rest of the universe.

Once we have found a cheap way of getting into orbit and have constructed space elevators (now close to becoming practicable) we can mine lifeless asteroids, comets, moons and planets for minerals instead of digging large quarries and mines into the Earth’s crust. Solar power can be harnessed in orbit and beamed down to supply pollution free and abundant energy to supplement wave, tidal and wind power. Alternatively, our energy could be obtained by clean nuclear fusion (as opposed to fission, which is the current form of nuclear power), using helium-3 mined on the moon.

Obnoxious waste could be packaged and sent crashing into the sun. The sun is a thousand times the volume of the earth and is fiercely hot: all the waste ever produced by mankind would be vaporised in a fraction of a second.

Protein-rich food could be grown in orbital farms and so reduce the pressure to use land and sea at the expense of biodiversity.

Those of us with a desire to explore have a whole universe waiting for them – there is no need to claustrophobically confine them to the Earth. Who knows what may be discovered as men venture onto the surfaces of Mars, the moon and the satellites of the outer planets? Some may even wish to  live there in colonies  but in all likelhood explorers would wish to come back to this planet, a heavenly haven compared to anywhere else known to us.

In the very far future it may be possible to terraform entire planets, convertng them into earth-like worlds. Meanwhile, it seems to me that humankind has the ingenuity and will to open up the universe while making the Earth a Garden of Eden for as many as choose to live here.

John

Author, 2077 AD

cosmik.jo@gmail.com

More things in heaven and earth...

There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in thy philosophy

This is a quotation from  Hamlet.  Shakespeare had no idea how right he was.

All the things around us are made of atoms; yet each atom is 99.99999999999999% empty space (12 nines after the decimal point)  permeated by force fields. Even if everything we experienced was solid to the touch and there were no liquids or gases, only 0.000000000001 % of it would be genuinely solid matter. In fact if one took into account that much of our visible environment is water or air or the vacuum between planets, stars and galaxies, the per centage of solid matter would be even less.

The same applies to us.  We humans, too, are ghostly configurations of force fields in empty space punctuated by barely detectable points of matter  such as electrons and quarks. Yet our consciousness conveys to us the experience of living in a seemingly material world, filled with solid objects which jolt us if we knock into them.

Today, 95% of the material universe we observe takes the form of dark energy and dark matter and is outside the realm of current science. Even the 5% we have some theoretical hold on is incompletely understood or even wholly misunderstood – - life, evolution, subatomic particles and consciousness, for example. It is often ‘explained’ in terms of randomness. Radioactive particles are emitted from atoms at random. Evolution proceeds by selection pressure plus random mutations according to neo-Darwinism. 

But as mentioned in a previous posting, it is quite possible that meaningful realities are behind random events (e.g. random quantum events may be clues to some hidden deeper reality, just as the random digits forming pi correspond to the geometry of a circle).

We build increasingly powerful technology for probing the natural world. Yet every question we answer generates more questions, and the revealed knowledge allows even more powerful technology to be invented, resulting in yet more discoveries and so on ad infinitum.

Our centre of consciousness and creativity  exists in a ghostly mileu of particles and force fields. We are ghosts in ghosts searching for truth, love, wisdom, justice and some kind of fulfilment. Are these more real than the world we see, hear, touch, taste and smell?  We are confronted with choices between good and evil and, deep down, we know we have been given free will in some mysterious way.

The ancients were perplexed, inspired, awestruck and terrified by the world around them, by the creation of life from somewhere and its disappearance into somewhere.

So what has changed? Today we have science  to dissect the material world and see how it works as well as medicine to heal diseases of mind and body. Yet science has not tamed the universe. The more it discovers the more mind stretching, unpredictable and miraculous the natural world becomes, while free will, good and evil, justice, love, truth, beauty and immortality continue to be supremely important to every person on the planet, especially philosophers, artists, priests and mystics.

  

That’s how I see it . Feedback welcome!

John

Author, 2077AD

cosmik.jo@gmail.com