What is far and away the most important present-day issue in human affairs
today?
Without any doubt whatsoever it is the question: Is the earth poised on the
verge of runaway man-made global warming, or is it on the edge of a major
ice age? There is evidence to think that either might happen. And perhaps
soon. If so in either case, they would be economically
expensive/destructive beyond anything caused by, say, a dollar/euro
currency collapse and a consequential long-term double-dip in the present
Western World Depression, or even a flash nuclear war between a couple of
minor countries. (I am assuming here that it is beyond the managerial
competence of America, Russia or China to start a total nuclear war between
them without at least three to six months of preparation -- by which time
any or all of their governments would be brought down by public anger. One
would hope so, anyway!)
On this, the last day of 2010, I thought I would do what Samuel Pepys used
to do on the last day of every year. He totted up his assets. (One can
readily imagine him bent over his gold coins gleefully as they glinted in
the candlelight!) In my case, I decided to tot up my ideas. And, with the
same sort of satisfaction as Pepys, I find that my ideas, as of 31 December
2010, have become consolidated and grown rather than diminished. Except for
one issue. Earth-temperature. I have been sitting on the fence on this for
the past 12 months. I decided this morning that it was about time I came
off the fence.
What provoked me this morning was happening to see a spinning earth on
someone's blogsite. If you do a mental snapshot at one point in the earth's
revolution, you see almost nothing but water -- the Pacific Ocean. This was
a reminder to me that two-thirds of the earth's surface is seawater. And
then I remembered that, until about five years ago, we knew almost nothing
of importance about seawater. It was not until Craig Venter -- the prime
force behind the Human Genome Project -- set off in his own yacht and began
sampling it. He wanted to collect more samples of life-forms he could run
through his DNA-sequencing machine.
He discovered a whole new world! In the top few hundredths of an inch --
the top millimetre or two -- he discovered a new ecology of tens of
thousands, nay hundreds of thousands, of new CO2-absorbing microbes which
no-one had seen, or even suspected, before. They all bathed in sunlight and
absorbed its energy and all were competing against one another for the CO2.
Most of them anyway. Some predated on the harvesters.
Altogether this new ecology is a massive machine that absorbs sunlight and
carbon dioxide. The bacteria also need nitrogen from the air. All three
items are thus freely available, of course. But bacteria also need trace
minerals such as phosphorus and iron. Unfortunately, many regions of the
ocean are short in these elements and the bacterial layer is more sparsely
populated. Bacteria only grow at maximum abundance when deep ocean currents
scour the sea bottom and bring minerals to the surface.
Experiments are presently going on in seeding sparse oceanic regions with
minerals, thus reviving bacterial populations -- and, of course, the
underlying vast food chain of other life-forms and fish which feed onwards
from the bacteria. But whether these experiments are successful or not in
the near future, this is not the main point of my thoughts this morning.
The main point is that this vast, recently-discovered ecology is the
predominant machine that sweeps up and stabilizes the CO2 in the
atmosphere, whether man-made or natural.
But, so far, no-one knows just what are the principal flows and
re-balancings of bacteria within this vast ecology. Some scientists say
that the oceans take 100 years to absorb "excess" CO2 (whatever that
means), some say less, some say 150 years. Some say that this could be
accelerated by selective seeding of the oceans; other suggest not. The fact
is that we still know hardly anything about the biggest natural machine on
earth and what are its natural gearings.
But what we do know for a certainty is that there's a lag involved. The
solubility of atmospheric CO2, nitrogen and oxygen in water increases with
lower temperatures. This can be demonstrated in the laboratory. Ice cores
of the last 400,000 years show that when temperatures decline after the
peaks of ice ages, atmospheric carbon dioxide also declines. More of it is
dissolved in sea water and feeds the bacteria. But the fall in atmospheric
CO2 always lags behind the fall in temperature. The concentration of CO2 in
the atmosphere depends on temperature, not vice versa.
We have been at the normal peak of earth-temperature for the last ten
thousand years. It has been dithering about all through that period. In
fact, drawing a line through the ditherings, the trend has been very
slightly downwards. Some scientists believe that the dithering has been
caused by the dawn of agriculture during the last ten thousand years (that
is, atmospheric CO2 caused by the burning of the forests). If so, then
man-made CO2 probably does have a slight global-warming effect.
But we're now long overdue for another ice age. They've appeared almost as
regularly as clockwork every 100,000 years for the past two million years.
Whatever the big causative events are -- planetary motions, large oceanic
currents, etc and how they inter-relate -- I'm now convinced that an ice
age is now due. It might be in the next year or two, or in ten years' time
or a century hence. I also believe in the man-made global warming
hypothesis of the IPCC. But I think the effects of this are relatively
trivial. Indeed, their own warnings have become increasingly diluted as the
years go by. The original "catastrophe" is now manageable, it would seem.
However, while the present currency catastrophe exists no bureaucracy (for
the IPCC is bureaucracy-driven) is going to convince any country's
politicians to penalize themselves by forms of carbon taxes or carbon
sequestration. I now believe that we will get by, whatever we do or don't
do about industrially-made CO2.
That is, until the next ice age finally get into motion! If that had
started to happen in 2010 I would have stopped writing my daily pieces long
ago and would have bought tickets for somewhere where my ancestors came
from -- Africa. But, of course, millions of others would have been doing
likewise.
I have, as it were, discovered a whole new world during 2010 and, in doing
so, have finally come off the fence.
Keith
Keith Hudson, Saltford, England
<http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/2010/12/>http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/2010/12/
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