On the Earth’s Environment and Global Warming (Unthinkable Complications)

Soylent Green is people!  —Charlton Heston

     First of all, I would like to mention that I mainly studied Biology in college, and was pretty much specializing in Marine Ecology; and if I hadn’t become a Buddhist monk instead I possibly would be some sort of ecologist now, possibly trying to remain afloat in the fetid swamp of liberal academia. So I’m not a complete ignoramus when it comes to environmental issues, or the ecology of the earth, or scientific method.

     The earth’s environment is of course very important to us earthbound humans, so perceived dangers to that environment should be taken seriously. Going into knee-jerk denial or basing one’s position on mainstream political biases, or whatever, is totally irresponsible; we should attend to the facts, and bear in mind that this is the only world we’ve got, and if we mess it up we’re just plain screwed. Elon Musk’s planned Mars colony won’t be able to accept many refugees.

     Considering the potential importance of the issue, I must admit that the one position of the political right in which I am disappointed, is its relative indifference, if not aversion, toward protection of the earth’s environment. I’m not sure why so many right-wingers feel this way; maybe it’s resistance or pushback to what is viewed as leftist zealotry. I’m sorry that it has turned out like this, with the left championing environmentalism and the right mocking the championing—but the left has gone so insane that other issues are of more immediate concern. When one has a grease fire in the kitchen one tends to be less worried about the fact that the house is built on a flood plain, or over a geological fault line.

     It should not be too surprising at this stage in the game that the political left is discrediting its own position, and maybe a vital cause, by trying to politicize science. It is possible to politicize science legitimately to some degree, for example through government funding determining which fields are emphasized, or by influencing what hypotheses will be tested; but beyond a certain point, for example when scientists are pressured or just inclined through bias to arrive at predetermined conclusions, science ceases to be legitimate science. The new left, with its feelings-over-facts approach to reality, has overstepped that point, so that now we often find ourselves in the realm of pseudoscience, propaganda, and mass hysteria masquerading as scientific objectivity. I’ll return to the issue of politicized pseudoscience eventually.

     The big environmental issue lately is global warming, attributed primarily to human-originated emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. This has taken the lead in publicity and hype over such other issues as overpopulation, the threat of nuclear armageddon and/or nuclear winter, deforestation, ongoing mass extinctions (we are, as I write, in the midst of the so-called Holocene Extinction Event), and the depleted ozone layer. Consequently, I will mainly address the issue of global warming, or anthropogenic climate change, in what follows.

     Many, maybe even most, of the people on the right do not deny that the earth has been gradually warming up; rather they deny that we humans are responsible, or mainly responsible. Many deniers deny anthropogenic change, not change itself. It is not controversial in scientific circles that the earth’s climate fluctuates naturally, and has been much warmer than now in the past. Just 6000 years ago the global climate was warmer than now. And allegedly, there was more than ten times as much atmospheric carbon dioxide as now some 450,000,000 years ago (in the Ordovician period), but even then there was still some glaciation on the planet. (One reason for the high CO2 then was that land plants such as trees hadn’t evolved yet.) Even now we are still technically in an ice age, albeit an interglacial period within it, as there are still substantial ice sheets in existence; usually the earth has been almost completely free of ice even near the poles.

     Speaking of ice ages, it is a peculiar and interesting fact that scientists are not in agreement over what actually causes them; explanations for why they happen are still controversial. Some attribute ice ages, and global climate shifts in general, to fluctuations in the earth’s orbit called Milankovitch cycles. Others prefer the idea of fluctuations in the temperature of the sun. One theory that seems plausible to me, at least in some cases, is that huge forests or other organic masses deplete carbon in the atmosphere to produce a kind of negative greenhouse effect. An interesting one, which may be tested soon, is that the melting of polar sea ice can trigger an ice age; the theory goes that while bodies of water near the poles are covered with ice there is very little evaporation, resulting in a desertlike climate with very little precipitation. So when the polar ice cap melts, much more water evaporates into the polar atmosphere, resulting in much more snow, which accumulates over time to produce massive ice sheets on land more than a mile thick—ergo, the next ice age. Consequently it is a little ironic that so many scientists are so sure that we are headed toward planetary fever and not ice and hypothermia. On the other hand, quite a few climatologists are of the opinion that human activities have forestalled the next ice age, which they consider to be overdue. But nobody really knows for sure what the hell is going to happen.

     The trouble is that the earth’s environment is extremely complex, unimaginably so. There are all sorts of interactions and feedback loops that human brains, including scientists’ brains, cannot begin to fathom. To give just one little example, the greenhouse effect of atmospheric carbon dioxide, etc., is fairly uncontroversial, yet consider: when the earth warms up, the oceans warm up, and when the oceans warm up more water evaporates from them into the atmosphere. When there is more water vapor in the atmosphere, there are more clouds. But some kinds of clouds shade the earth and cool it down, whereas other kinds of clouds act like a blanket and warm the earth up even more—and scientists are not agreed on which kind of clouds will be more likely to be formed by a warmer ocean. Now multiply the uncertainty of that by about 10,000 and you might come close to the actual situation with regard to our understanding of what is happening with the earth.

     Here’s another consideration: there is no guarantee that a warmer planet will be worse than the one we’ve got now. It might even be better, considering that the tropics will warm up relatively slightly, while the much colder areas will warm up much more (or so they say). Maybe a warmer earth will be rainier and more jungly, like during the age of dinosaurs, and not desertlike and blazing hot as most environmentalists seem to predict. So global warming might actually be more good than bad, especially if increased snowfall in northern lands and in Antarctica (most of which latter has been actually getting colder) helps to prevent all coastal cities from being submerged by rising seas, and if megashitloads of methane (another greenhouse gas) trapped under the permafrost in places like Canada and Russia don’t spew into the air and really mess things up. But again, we don’t really know. (Another peculiar point: some scientists claim that dinosaur farts added as much methane gas to the atmosphere as does modern human industry.)

     Nevertheless, one thing is fairly certain, and I’m not sure why so many right-wingers don’t see it: It’s better to be safe than sorry. As I’ve already mentioned, this is the only world we’ve got, and if we mess it up we’re screwed. So some prudent caution is really called for, even if the cries of panicky environmentalists prove to be a false alarm.

     But now another trouble arises: Only the most fervently fanatical tree huggers are willing to do what would be necessary to cause carbon emissions to decrease anyway. Most of us simply are not willing to endure the inconvenience of not spewing carbon into the atmosphere. We recycle our bottles and cans, yet commute 50 miles every day to work, and fly halfway around the world for our vacation, or to attend environmentalist summits. Meanwhile the developing world, with the aid of globalism, is scrambling to catch up with the west with regard to rampant consumption. People are starting to realize this sobering fact, and an influential document called the Hartwell Paper, published at Oxford University in 2010, suggests that a realistic approach to the matter is simply to get used to a warming planet, and to make adjustments as well as possible.

     So, yeah, it appears that the earth, overall, is gradually getting warmer, on average, and may get much warmer before getting any cooler, again, on average. It also appears, for example with many of the nations which signed the recent Paris Accord already failing to live up to their agreements, that not much will be done about it soon. But one problem added to all the others is that the new left, whose insanity has driven me rightwards along with tens of millions of others, is using its feelings-over-facts approach, as already mentioned, to politicize and bias science, with left-leaning government agencies and academic science departments discrediting themselves, and their cause, by distorting science into propaganda. That will be the subject of the next post.