Ok… one more on climate change then I’ll leave it alone… for now. 🙂
I’ve been watching the climate change debate for many years… longer than most people would believe it’s even been going on. So what? I’ve done my part to reduce my personal waste energy, and some others have too, while human population has gone from 2.5 billion when I was born to 7.5 billion now and there are more cities than ever, using energy in the standard way (the old fashioned, “we have infinite amounts of resources and burning them is fine” way).
Again, so what?
Now here’s this debate about whether the planet is getting warmer overall or not.
Why’s there a debate? It’s firmly established that since 1900 the world-wide average temperature has gone up 1.2 or 1.5 degrees centigrade. Doesn’t sound like much, does it? Well, it’s estimated that a 3 degree (centigrade) rise in global world-wide temperature would spell the end of life as we know it(1).
Ok… and what does that mean?
Let me discuss the planet, the “biosphere” (that is, our living room, the same living room we all have, the only one there is for us) in terms of energy. You hear about “CO2” and you hear about “weather changes” and occasionally about methane and some other things, but rarely do you hear about energy in reference to climate change. Yet energy is what all of Climate Change is really all about.
It’s a shift in the balance between stored energy and free energy.
First, Energy Exchange from Outside the System: Just to complicate matters a bit, there is a constant input of energy from the Sun on the day-light side of the planet and a constant bleeding off of “waste energy” into space on the night-time side. This is a very delicate balance, and the slightest change in the behavior of the Sun could be catastrophic, from a human point of view. Fortunately, our star is a pretty reliable one, as stars go. Obviously, or life wouldn’t have survived as long as it has (depending on your views that either 5 billion years [maybe more] or 6 thousand and some — either way, that’s a good traffic record for a star).
If something affected the dynamics of the atmosphere this could impact how much of the sun’s energy hits the ground to be absorbed by the biosphere — either more energy (bad), or less energy (bad). It might also affect how much or how little “waste heat” bleeds off on the night-time side of things (bad). This is what’s called a dynamic balance. Everything else, everything we know, exists between and around and among this dynamic balance of energy exchange. The planet bathes in sun light and heat, shedding just the right amount all the time so that the average temperature remains what it has always been. Until now…
Stored Energy. The biosphere stores energy in complex molecules: wood, petroleum, coal, forests, the oceans [though that’s a more complex tale in itself], lakes, snow and ice packs (yes, that also “stores energy” — just go with me), and so on. The planetary machine has been storing up energy (some of it’s own heat, but mostly the energy received from the Sun — a minuscule, tiny, tiny percentage of the Sun’s total output, by the way) as complex molecules for a great long time. Ever since the Sun ignited, more than likely — whether that’s when the primordial cloud collapsed and gravitational pressures caused Fusion to start, or whether it was the First Day of Creation, is irrelevant here — for our purposes it’s the same starting point. Complex molecules take energy to form, it’s how the biosphere creates increasing complexity in and for itself. Forests, petroleum and coal, for example, all store tremendous amounts of energy. This is why burning wood or coal can heat a room or power machinery, you are releasing the energy the biosphere put there over great time and with great effort. The human body is also large bag of stored energy(2).
Free Energy. Not a complete picture, but the vast majority of this could be thought of simply as the average temperature of the atmosphere, oceans and surface layers of the land and mantel of the planet. Free energy is, really, always a temperature thing. For our purposes here, at least.
This now makes “climate change” very simple to define. It’s a change in the balance between the biosphere’s stored energy and it’s free energy.
So… think about it for a moment: how much of the stored energy of the system has Humanity released, by burning or otherwise destroying? How much heat is that when released from storage and changed into free energy?
If the system was balanced with new energy coming in (from the Sun) and waste energy escaping (at night) but now People come along and release a whole bunch of new energy from storage, where’s it going to go? Waste heat was escaping as fast as it possibly could already. So where’s it go? into a global temperature rise. Simple. Period.
This is why a block of ice 70x the size of Manhattan just broke off from Antarctica(3). This is why 2,500 people died last June 3rd alone in India simply from heat, 31,000 in New Delhi in 2018. From heat. Just to mention a couple examples.
Climate change is not a thing that will happen some day;
it’s happening right now.
This is why California is burning up.
This is why some of the Pacific islands are in danger of flat out disappearing.
This is why summer in India kills 1,000’s each year.
This is why South Carolina [I *think* it was — one of the US southern coastal states] recently filed official changes in its coast line.
This is why many things that are happening all over the world right now are happening. Climate change is not a thing that will happen some day; it’s happening right now.
It’s not hard to figure out.
What’s hard to figure out is why our so-called leaders are dragging the silly heals over this issue. Leadership is what’s needed. Not heads-in-the-sand.
They didn’t need a whole lot of science to start the (albeit defensible) panic over CoVid, but they insist on more and more and more “science” on Climate Change, continue to brush it aside and continue to not start anything — neither panic nor something useful — over this far more serious issue.
I’ll leave you with this thought: a concerted effort to change how we do things on this planet would create so many new industries and jobs that we’d be flagging down passing UFO’s for additional temporary work force. Many jobs, many fortunes, many new industries are waiting to be had if we’d just embrace what’s necessary and obvious. It would make the “computer revolution” look like a minor flicker on the profit reports by comparison.
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(1) Probably not the end of life, though. Life as a general concept is incredibly tough and tenacious. The prediction is that a way for humans to continue on the planet after that would be difficult if not impossible.
(2) A point that the Matrix movies abused rather badly in what is their one unforgivable error: the human body is not a source of energy, unless you are going to burn it. Yes, it radiates at 97 degrees all the time, but only because of the constant input of the additional energy (i.e., food) that keeps it going. The human body is a vessel of stored energy, but it’s not perpetual motion, and that’s what Matrix treated the human “copper tops” as. Silliness. Other than that, a truly excellent speculative adventure, though.
(3) And such a chunk of mass shifting position will have enormous side-effects. Here’s one, for instance: because of the rotation of the Earth and Coriolis / centrifugal forces it will now make its way toward the equator, continuing to melt as it goes along. Secondly, when it broke off there must have been a counter-reaction — a recoil — in the mass it was breaking away from that would manifest as a new wobble to the Earth’s rotation and might cause a tiny change in the length of day (nothing that would be noticeable to the unaided Human, but may keep the Keepers of Calendars employed another year). That’s not necessarily as big a deal as it seems: wobbles and changes to Earth’s rotation happen from far smaller events, such as earthquakes and nuclear tests (yes, those are smaller events) can shift the rotation, put new wobbles on things. But this might be a big wobble. Oh well… many factors, many pieces… that’s why it’s called a Complex System. It’s complicated. This is also why focusing on CO2 emissions is not the argument with Climate Change: simplistic, too easily dismissed, when there are 100’s of major factors of which CO2 isn’t even the most important any more — we’re past that point now.