Climate control?
I’m amused by the euphemistic phrase “climate control.” Have we become so politically correct that we can’t say “don’t poison the environment” or “don’t kill Gaia”? Even the latter phrases don’t put the blame where it belongs. The very liberal NYC mayor Bill De Blasio is calling to reduce the Big Apple’s greenhouse gases by 80% by 2050. That’s laughable not only for the date but because NYC’s contribution represents one little drop in a huge ocean of pollution in the Northeastern U.S. Every wee bit helps, I suppose, but the city and its people don’t produce most of the greenhouse gases and pollution. It’s industry. Our slogan should be “control industry’s excesses.” But industry likes the phrase “climate control” because it avoids blame. It wants people to forget that it’s industry that’s destroying the planet. De Blasio is a nincompoop falling into industry’s trap. But what else is old news?
NYC might be producing tons of garbage and polluting waterways with sewage effluent, but industry is the culprit for that and other pollution as well. Has been, is, and will always will be, unless controls are enacted to lower greenhouse emissions. I don’t want to hear any whining about the cost. Sure, we want to make this reduction as painless as possible—heaven forbid that we use a few millions out of the many billions industry makes in order to clean up the planet it’s made into a dirty mess! Industry is naïve. Do they think they’ll still be making these billions when the world’s population is starved of oxygen and simmering on the polluted planet that’s fast becoming another Venus? Greed obviously has no foresight, no appreciation for future problems in its haste to roll in the dough. Industry lives for the present, not the future. It doesn’t give a rat’s ass about human beings, let alone the environment.
I’m generalizing, of course. But the hypocrisy or laissez-faire attitude of industry is evident when we consider how much money is now spent by various industries and their lobbyists in denigrating and trivializing people and movements calling for the control of pollution and greenhouse gases, protecting our water supply, and caring for our wildlife, both flora and fauna. Strip mining and fracking, chemical processing plants, and the transportation of toxic materials are all dangers for the environment. Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, there are many examples of environmental disasters affecting our planet. The list of culpable industries is long and includes some worldwide corporations that have transferred their polluting activities to the Third World as a means to mollify the protests in industrialized countries. The ultimate disaster will be a run-away atmosphere turning our planet into a Venusian hell.
Friday before last, 300+ thousand people marched in New York City, not for climate change, but for protecting the planet. People from all walks of life and from all political persuasions are concerned. Gaia is being destroyed. We might soon reach the tipping point, the point of no return. It’s hard to tell because Gaia is resilient. We might kill ourselves, and she could still recover. The cockroaches could inherit the Earth. Or, some X-sapiens in the future will study our fossils and try to figure out what happened—why the planet-wide extinction? It should be a sobering thought that human beings haven’t been long on this planet. We’re short-time renters and the landlord, Gaia, might soon cancel the lease.
The first problem is to convince people there is a problem. Too many people think there isn’t. I don’t think all of them have been brainwashed by industry’s PR and marketing campaign. I can’t believe that they’re all that gullible. Even fellow scientists are divided on the issue, and I don’t think all of them are paid flunkies of industry. Freeman Dyson, one of the most vocal about calling environmental activists loonies, might know physics, but he clearly doesn’t know anything about the environment. He has joined the ranks of many engineers and scientists who have swallowed whole industry’s PR. I’d like to think maybe they’re too optimistic or not cautious enough, not stupid, as Dyson has called global warming alarmists.
Gaia is complex. Any discussion of her cannot reduce to egotistical hand-waving; to pretend to know all her secrets is the epitome of arrogance. Sure, she has had climate cycles in her past. The glaciers that scoured through New England and elsewhere during the last Ice Age are examples of what a change in climate can do all by its lonesome. The Cro-Magnon and Neanderthals around at the time weren’t numerous enough to send Gaia on this cold course—they weren’t responsible. Maybe they were responsible for making the mastodons extinct, but otherwise they were scared little bipeds who thought strange gods were changing their world.
Other climate changes swing the other way. Gaia runs a tight ship. She swings the climate back and forth, a global pendulum, and all this is largely self-correcting—the oscillations are damped in ways we have yet to understand completely. It probably would be entirely self-correcting if external inputs to the system like giant asteroids crashing down and human beings’ Industrial Revolution hadn’t come along. It’s not a closed system and therefore not automatically stable. Run-away modes can occur; slight changes to a few parameters can send it into entirely different regions of thermodynamical phase space where human beings can’t survive. Gaia is indifferent about this; we can’t be, Mr. Dyson. In your infinite wisdom, you still don’t have all the answers. No one does!
I’m not worried about Gaia’s climate cycles. I adopt a Zen attitude: they are what they are. But pollution from industries affects Gaia like smoking affects a human being—you might not die from it, but it can’t be good for you, so why take the chance? Gaia is receiving our second-hand industrial smoke, and she’ll develop lung cancer over time. In many parts of the world—China, for example—that second-hand smoke is already so noxious that humans beings have to wear masks. Think of what that’s doing to Gaia. She’ll try to correct and disperse the pollution. Eventually it will reach everyone. That’s the way she works. She’s an equal opportunity planet—what we do in one place eventually affects everyone, due to the winds and oceans that Gaia provides in her vast circulatory system.
Readers of this blog know I often use the name Gaia. I want to give the impression that we’re all in this together, even that scurrilous old Freeman Dyson. We are all part of Earth—Hindu, Buddhist, Jew, Muslim, Christian, atheist, agnostic, and so forth, and all flora and fauna—because we are all living creatures on this planet. Saving Gaia goes beyond any religion, but the moral obligation is still imperative. In the coming 2014 elections, make sure your Congress people understand your concerns. They might already be moved by the massive demo in New York City. Don’t count on it, though. Evil lobbyists have their ear; PAC money is right around the corner. Go beyond the elections if you can by pressuring the newly elected and the old hands to keep their promises about climate control—in other words, putting the screws to the industries who are killing Gaia. Future generations will thank us. And acting now might actually allow that there are future generations!
And so it goes….
