The
Darwin Award For
Self-Extinction Goes To:
By Bill Henderson
10 April, 2006
Countercurrents.org
When
a young Edwin Hubble started looking out into the universe at the beginning
of the 20th century experts thought that this universe was only tens
or maybe hundreds of millions years old (most people thought the world
was less than 10,000 years old). Now, on a 4 1/2 billion year old Earth
in a 13 billion year old universe, the odds against the end of the world
today or tomorrow are astronomical. (Unless you belong to a willfully
ignorant cult like the President.)
But don't make fun of the
end of the world catastrophists . And don't be overly optimistic
about the resilience and adaptability of our civilization, profoundly
misunderstanding the challenge facing us today.
In man's long history - ten
thousand years since the innovation of agriculture and civilization;
seventy thousand years since the bottleneck
where geneticists have determined that only around ten thousand humans
out of a global population of tens of millions survived a 'volcanic
winter'; and back at least hundreds of thousands of years to taming
fire, learning language and the dawn of religion and culture - it has
been only in the last century that we have had the ability to alter
the surface of the Earth so that human life was in jeopardy.
Twice (at least) in the past
century we have created a possibility of our own accidental extinction:
nuclear winter and depletion
of the ozone layer.
So far the existing thousands
of powerful nuclear warheads haven't been unleashed in mutually assured
destruction (potentially blocking the Sun for a decade like the presumed
bottleneck- causing Toba explosion). But Bush Administration acceleration
of US militarization of foreign affairs, advocacy of a pre-emptive unilateralism
specifically aimed at any emerging threat to US supreme power, and pure,
grab the oil, aggression for self-interest in Iraq, is taking us down
a resource war path, putting us closer to that final nuclear world war
than any time since '62. (It is remarkably underappreciated how Bush
Admin aggression challenges still nuclear Russia and emerging power
China and how much more dangerous life is for all of us through the
choice of the resource war path instead of multilateral cooperation
and innovation.)
The second possibility of
extinction was one small family of the ninety thousand plus synthetic
chemicals created in the past century which floated up after their useful
life in aerosols and solvents and refrigeration to interact with and
corrode a thin layer of ozone surrounding the Earth and absolutely necessary
to the survival of most forms of life. Fifty years after their industrial
application scientists clued in that CFCs were not harmless inert gases
but, fortunately, the cumulative damage to the ozone was only thinning
and holes and not the possible century of invading radiation scouring
life from Earth's surface.
At the end of the 19th century
scientists began considering the long term effects of burning fossil
fuels and specifically the effects of the extra CO2 released into the
atmosphere. By the end of the last century measurement of accumulating
CO2 and other greenhouse gases and climate modeling based upon scientific
determination of climate changes over the past hundred thousand years
strongly suggested that there was a potentially very serious global
warming problem.
Several decades ago some
scientists predicted that raising global mean temperatures would lead
to the release of huge amounts of presently safely sequestered greenhouse
gases - methane, especially, stored safely away under the oceans and
in peak bogs - and that there was a potential for runaway
global warming pushed by this positive feedback of freed
greenhouse gases. They warned that runaway global warming could raise
temperatures to such a degree that most life forms on Earth including
man would certainly become extinct. Somewhere around 400 ppm amounts
of CO2 in the atmosphere and nature takes over.
Fortunately, as we have developed
the power to re-engineer the world for human use and therefor the power
to self-extinct we have developed a maturity to safeguard humanity's
future. Not.
Matt
Simmons re-thirty
years on evaluation of Limits to Growth is relevant. William
Catton Jr's OVERSHOOT
has been reborn on the net because the relevant catastrophe
graph isn't Hubbert's Curve but that graph we all know where human population
bumps along the bottom of the graph for millennia before spiking exponentially
beginning in the 16 century with the use of fossil fuel. Catton views
us as a species needing, using, and dissipating energy, as a species
that should be concerned by a tendency for animal populations to rise
exponentially, overshoot and crash. What goes exponentially up promises
to go exponentially down.
Exponential growth on a finite
planet has consequences.
Edward O. Wilson has developed
a Bottleneck
metaphor graphing the consequences of ever expanding human
populations with powerful technologies in the 21st century. Human populations
with a biomass a hundred times any previous animal except bacteria are
eliminating untold biodiversity in re-engineering formerly wilderness
habitat for human use. Humanities cumulative footprint will cause severe
resource depletion - now peak oil, but water and food in the future
too. Greenhouse gas production is another example of the possible negative
consequences of our overwhelming footprint. Wilson envisions human survivors
of the Bottleneck maelstrom, but his fear is a world where biodiversity
has been severely depleted, a Sixth Extinction that requires millions
of years to recover.
A
Darwin Award - how to explain this most terrible possible
idea to someone eating a burger before the next text distracts. Those
denying the very real probability of catastrophe help keep us in growth
economy business as usual 'muddling through' instead of taking urgent
corrective measures. Darwin Awards to all and every person
who chooses to remain willfully ignorant of who we are on this planet,
our precarious position, and our responsibilities.
Dad, Mom and the kids are
out boating on the reservoir: little Johnny's helping Dad fish (and
the fishing is hot); Mom's enjoying a relaxing nap and the twins are
playing in the front of the boat. Everybody's having so much fun they
aren't really aware that they are drifting towards the dam and the spillway.
Even if the fishing is wonderful, reasonable people would make sure
that they stayed far away from the point of no return past which they
couldn't escape death for the whole family.