Thin Blue Band

 Buena Pond-Pond 6 between Zilla and Union Gap off Hwy I-82 is stocked with catchable size rainbow trout, as well as crappie, and channel catfish. A state record 36.2 lb cat was pulled from Pond 6 in 1999. If you’ve driven to Pond 6 from Richland, you’ve covered the distance our atmosphere stretches from the earth’s surface to the edge of space. According to NASA, our atmosphere, the unique feature of the planet responsible for life as we know it, is a paper-thin 60 miles in depth.

For the most part, we humans take the planet and its systems and resources for granted. The crux of the problem is that we see ourselves standing apart from our planet’s interacting physical, chemical, and biological systems. That is a natural, but faulty perception of reality. Humans are an integral part of the Earth’s biosphere. As our numbers have grown and our technology progressed, we’ve had an outsized impact on the planet and its climate.

In pictures taken from space we see the atmosphere as a fragile, thin blue band between the Earth’s surface and the blackness of space. Be warned, that thin, blue band is what keeps us alive.

Deny, Deny, Deny

People who deny that human activities are contributing to global warming use many arguments in defense of their position, including: increased solar activity (this is a favorite); the imperfect rotation of the earth around its axis (it "wobbles"); and volcanic eruptions spewing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere (they actually throw a lot of dust up that can cause temporary cooling). Other causes have been postulated, including some fairly esoteric ones, such as reversal of the earth's polarity, cosmic rays, and terraforming by extraterrestrials as a prelude to their invasion (they like every place to be like Florida).

As bizarre as the extraterrestrial terraforming may be, another position seems to me to be even more outlandish, viz., humans are just too insignificant a presence to cause such a major change in the environment. One of my critics argued that, "We know the global climate is on a up and down cycle of hundreds of millions of years with mini up and down cycles of hundreds and thousands of years along this path of millions of years." Yeah, I mean what impact can puny humans have on the environment?

Burning the rain forests: http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/AmazonFireRise/

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_Garbage_Patch

Species extinction/declining biological diversity: http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/news/press_releases/2009/population-speak-out-02-26-2009.html

Purple Mountains Majesty: http://www.ohvec.org/galleries/mountaintop_removal/007/

Los Angeles, January 29, 2004
I grew up in LA, 1938 -1961, and it didn't look anything like this; damn extraterrestrials!

It's encouraging to see that Americans generally (~70%) have come to accept the fact that the planet is warming, although it's disappointing that there is still so much disagreement over what's causing it. Even when people agree that human activities are causing warming, there is disagreement over what to do about it, if anything. Another of my critics says, "Why bother trying to reduce our emissions, when China, India, and other developing nations are more than offsetting our efforts with their emissions?"

While China is the world's greatest emitter of greenhouse gases (it took over that dubious distinction from the United States in 2006), the US ranks at the top of the GHG leader board in cumulative emissions since 1850, with the EU second. Between them, the US and the EU account for over 55% of cumulative emissions. China is a poor fourth at 7.6%, and India is further down the list at 2.2%. Thus it seems to me disingenuous to tell the world that we're not going to do anything about our emissions because China, and other developing nations, are now emitting GHGs, too.

One of the more unfortunate aspects of dumping so much CO2 into the atmosphere is that for all practical purposes, it never goes away, i.e, "carbon is forever." University of Chicago oceanographer David Archer has stated that, "The climatic impacts of releasing fossil fuel CO₂ to the atmosphere will last longer than Stonehenge, longer than time capsules, longer than nuclear waste, far longer than the age of human civilization so far."

Thus, if we really work hard at decreasing our GHG emissions (instead of increasing them as we're doing now), our best hope is to avoid accumulating more atmospheric CO2 and maybe be lucky enough to avert a "tipping point" crisis, where positive feedback effects overwhelm current climate dynamics and, like flipping a switch, plunge the planet into climate hell.

The Earth's Hadean period, roughly 4.7 billion years ago.

Eating the Earth

“They're not creatures you can fight--they're an elemental--an 'act of God!' Ten miles long, two miles wide--ants, nothing but ants! And every single one of them a fiend from hell; before you can spit three times they'll eat a full-grown buffalo to the bones. I tell you if you don't clear out at once there'll he nothing left of you but a skeleton picked as clean as your own plantation."

Just as the voracious Army Ants in Carl Stephenson’s short story, Leiningen Versus the Ants, devour all before them, we seem a people insatiable, searching every last shore, aquifer, forest, plain, and plateau desperate for that last barrel of oil, that last board foot of lumber, that last drop of water. We stumble on imprisoned between ignorance and greed, to be delivered into the annihilation that is our god.

The earth has existed for some four and half billion years, created in some cosmic catastrophe of colliding matter and formed from toxic fumes and molten rock, its history replete with cataclysmic events of unimaginable magnitude and violence. It was 800 million to a billion years after the earth’s fiery birth before the first vestiges of primitive life were created in the form of cyanobacteria that ultimately reacted with other elements to transform the earth into an habitable planet. And along came man. But not for billions of years.

Homo sapiens, or “modern man” emerged only about 120,000 years ago. That makes man’s time upon the earth clock about 2 seconds out of 24 -- a blip of miniscule proportion. But, like a bacteria, we have morphed and multiplied many times over.

At the dawn of the first millennium A.D., the world’s population was around 300 million people. Growth into the second millennium was modest, but by the time of the American Revolutionary War, the population of humans on earth had grown to over a billion, despite the ravages of the Black Plague in the thirteen hundreds. Human population is today, some 230 years later, over 6.7 billion and growing exponentially. By 2050, 42 years from now, the number of people on earth will increase by over 40%, to 9.5 billion.

It is unreasonable to expect that a presence of such magnitude and rapacious appetite would not change the earth upon which it dwells. According to some geologists, humans have so drastically altered the earth that the Holocene epoch, which started 10,000 years ago, has ended and we have entered a new epoch - the Anthropocene.

Early humans, hunter-gathers -- had little impact on the planet. But with the advent of technology, the human footprint grew disproportionately. Man is dominant on the earth, and like the cyanobacteria of eons ago, is reshaping the earth dramatically, but not in ways that make it more habitable. We are making the world hotter, drier, dirtier, and biologically less diverse. We have destroyed over half of the world's wetlands and original forests, polluted rivers and the ocean, and poisoned the land. We cause the extinction of an average of 100 species per day. Sociobiologist E. O. Wilson predicts that if we don’t slow our consumption of natural resources, we’ll extinguish half the species of plants and animals by the end of the 21st century.

According to Lord Robert May, Professor of Zoology at Oxford University, and winner of the Royal Society’s Copley medal, the world’s oldest prize for scientific achievement, "We stand on the brink of a global extinction event -- the sixth episode in the history of the Earth." The most recent extinction event, approximately 65 million years ago, closed the Cretaceous period and ended the reign of dinosaurs. "The difference is that the current global extinction event is being caused by the actions of a single dominant species rather than a 'natural' event," said Lord May. We are part of the Earth's great fauna, but we are also its greatest menace.

The human species has become a plague on the face of the earth.

And the Lord said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth...for it repenteth me that I have made him.