Global warming
For months I've been unable to write much of anything, including blog entries. But there's something that has been on my mind for a long time that I want to write about, and maybe not writing it out is part of my writer's block. So here goes:
A quarter of a billion years ago, at the end of the Permian Period of the Paleozoic Era, the greatest mass extinction of all time occurred, nearly wiping out complex life on Earth. It may even have come close to doing in bacterial life, though the processes responsible for it stopped before that point. It involved intense global warming -- a rise of some 18 degrees Fahrenheit in the average global termperature -- as well as deoxygenation of the oceeans and a drastic reduction of atmospheric oxygen levels. The causes apparently included massive outpourings of magma from a region that is now Siberia, building the Siberian Traps, a great mountain chain, and releasing countless tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. When it was done, 70 percent of all species on land and 96 percent of marine species were gone, extinct, in the largest mass extinction Earth has ever known.
Could anything like that happen now? Maybe -- for one thing, the Sun is a good deal hotter and brighter than it was back then, so it wouldn't take as much in the way of greenhouse gases to achieve the same amount of global warming. But where would such gases come from? -- If you go out at all, you see them everday: cars, trucks, buses, and even jets flying overhead pumping out countless megatons of carbon dioxide, with more on the road and in the skies every year. One human being in one car is no threat. Billions of people on the road in as many as a billion vehicles per day, on the other hand, contribute enormously to atmospheric CO2. Add in methane from industrial processes and, lately, melting marine and tundra clathrates -- methane is a ferocious greenhouse gas, 25 times more potent in that role than carbon dioxide -- and water vapor (another greenhouse gas) evaporates from a warming ocean, and you have a witch's-brew which, added to every day over decades, definitey can make for global warming. And does.
What do I believe ought to be done about it? Certainly not a government-based "solution," which is bound to corrupt over time into a completely useless exercise in futility, much as the Soviet Union's food distribution networks and the rest of its economy went completely to hell well before the collapse of the USSR in 1991. If there is to be a solution, it has to be technological, and driven by the free market -- when government meddles in anything, it robs the world of the initiative needed for radical technological and scientific development and application, after all. So I don't see an immediate solution to the problem -- and if there is one, it isn't going to be governmental.
For which reason we may be staring mass extinction in the face -- a mass extinction that could do it for Homo sapiens, as well. Nor will going back to primitive technologies work -- it many cases, it isn't possible, and in others, the "solution" would be worse than the original problem. I think we're screwed. I pray I'm wrong, but so far I can't see how.
So why am I writing this, then? Out of a forlorn hope that at least it might kick-start my writing again. I'm sick and tired of not being able to write. Maybe writing this will help.
A quarter of a billion years ago, at the end of the Permian Period of the Paleozoic Era, the greatest mass extinction of all time occurred, nearly wiping out complex life on Earth. It may even have come close to doing in bacterial life, though the processes responsible for it stopped before that point. It involved intense global warming -- a rise of some 18 degrees Fahrenheit in the average global termperature -- as well as deoxygenation of the oceeans and a drastic reduction of atmospheric oxygen levels. The causes apparently included massive outpourings of magma from a region that is now Siberia, building the Siberian Traps, a great mountain chain, and releasing countless tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. When it was done, 70 percent of all species on land and 96 percent of marine species were gone, extinct, in the largest mass extinction Earth has ever known.
Could anything like that happen now? Maybe -- for one thing, the Sun is a good deal hotter and brighter than it was back then, so it wouldn't take as much in the way of greenhouse gases to achieve the same amount of global warming. But where would such gases come from? -- If you go out at all, you see them everday: cars, trucks, buses, and even jets flying overhead pumping out countless megatons of carbon dioxide, with more on the road and in the skies every year. One human being in one car is no threat. Billions of people on the road in as many as a billion vehicles per day, on the other hand, contribute enormously to atmospheric CO2. Add in methane from industrial processes and, lately, melting marine and tundra clathrates -- methane is a ferocious greenhouse gas, 25 times more potent in that role than carbon dioxide -- and water vapor (another greenhouse gas) evaporates from a warming ocean, and you have a witch's-brew which, added to every day over decades, definitey can make for global warming. And does.
What do I believe ought to be done about it? Certainly not a government-based "solution," which is bound to corrupt over time into a completely useless exercise in futility, much as the Soviet Union's food distribution networks and the rest of its economy went completely to hell well before the collapse of the USSR in 1991. If there is to be a solution, it has to be technological, and driven by the free market -- when government meddles in anything, it robs the world of the initiative needed for radical technological and scientific development and application, after all. So I don't see an immediate solution to the problem -- and if there is one, it isn't going to be governmental.
For which reason we may be staring mass extinction in the face -- a mass extinction that could do it for Homo sapiens, as well. Nor will going back to primitive technologies work -- it many cases, it isn't possible, and in others, the "solution" would be worse than the original problem. I think we're screwed. I pray I'm wrong, but so far I can't see how.
So why am I writing this, then? Out of a forlorn hope that at least it might kick-start my writing again. I'm sick and tired of not being able to write. Maybe writing this will help.