Grandstanding all the way to oblivion.
Today is Clean Tech week in Melbourne, so maybe we should take this opportunity to look at what's happening in the economic & political arenas as relates to saving the planet, and us, from ourselves.
It does not look good.
A first general observation is, ecology has all to do with hard numbers, applied within the context of the impacting sciences - first and foremost Physical Chemistry as applied to the environment, but with an added layer of bits and pieces of a wide spectrum of other sciences.
So here goes - a few numbers. More...
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Grandstanding all the way to oblivion.
Today is Clean Tech week in Melbourne, so maybe we should take this opportunity to look at what's happening in the economic & political arenas as relates to saving the planet, and us, from ourselves.
It does not look good.
A first general observation is, ecology has all to do with hard numbers, applied within the context of the impacting sciences - first and foremost Physical Chemistry as applied to the environment, but with an added layer of bits and pieces of a wide spectrum of other sciences.
So here goes - a few numbers.
Should not tabulated contributions to global warming not only include emissions, but alsoe per-country re-absorption of CO², and policies systematically address both sides of the ledger ?
According to reliable independent studies - easy to physically verify too - the USA recycles, through forests and vegetation etc., just over 100% of its CO² emissions. The UK recycles exactly one point five percent (1.5%). Now of course there are valid explanations for this - the US's immense territory, the UK's cold climate which gives only a short season to vegetation to bloom and pull CO² out of the air through photosynthesis, etc.
But should not the UK reforest as opposed to just talking and paying lip service and signing feel-good treaties?
Germany is covered with a dense 'Wald' forest cover - which recycles all the CO² Germany can possibly materially recycle during its brief non winter seasons ..... What is the point of all these bootless bare hills in the English landscape ?
Whether valid or not - numbers are everything.
As in:
China today, owing to its economic boom, has surpassed the US as the first emitter of CO².
Yet China is not part of the Kyoto Protocol.
Nor is India, with a population of over one billion, and who is catching up as fast as it can with economic development.
Denmark however, with a population of 5 million (something like the population of Sydney), is, with a vengeance.
I attended a conference given by the World Watch Institute of Washington in Brussels (Thus, a connection and visibility there the two most influential political capitals of the Western world), where the speaker rhapsodized at length over how great it was that a fourth of Denmark's population was now powered by wind mills, and how this was going to save the Earth.
Say again ? Let us array up a few numbers here.
So some 1.25 million people are powered by windmills in Denmark. It's not great. It's totally insignificant:
Fact.
Every year, the world human population currently grows by one hundred million (that's the overplus of births vs. deaths)
Fact.
There are thousands of coal mines in China.
And in those mines, there are hundred of out-of-control wild fires in hundreds upon hundreds of coal seams, most of which have been burning / simmering / smouldering for decades.
Now here's the kicker: the combined CO² output from these wild fires is greater every day, every year, every decade, than the CO² output from the combined automotive park of North America (USA and Canada). Some two hundred million vehicles, cars, trucks, SUVs.
Those fires serve no one: they are not in China's interest, not in the world's interest, not in anyone's interest. They are not taken into account in the CO² analyses that underpin policy analyses (CO² emission analyses look at the number of vehicles, of power stations, etc. Not wild fires.)
So it stands to reason, does not it, that a combined effort to extinguish these fires (for instance by drowning the seams with inert, oxygen-free gases - would be a great thing to do, with a fantastic bang for the buck return?)
But hey, it would not be sexy. It would be boring.
It would not make for the flights of lofty oratory that you can conjure up when you spew hot air about cold wind in Denmark. It would possibly shine a bad light on China (it would most definitely not, but some skitterish policy makers think it would.
So no one cares.
Fact
Planet Earth did not start out with breathable oxygen. Planet Earth began, upon its formation some 3.5 billion years ago, with gases that slowly drifted in from space and accumulated owing to gravity (the Earth's gravity being not powerful enough to bind hydrogen, so that any hydrogen drifting in drifted back out into outer space again, but nitrogen for instance remained.)
Then CO² began to accumulate, spewed by volcanoes.
Tiny anaerobic organisms started feeding on the carbon contained in the CO² and released waste - oxygen.
Then, when enough such waste - oxygen - had accumultaed in the air, first organisms making use of this oxygen began to develop and appear, slowly giving rise to the modern situation: both anaerobic organisms and vegetation consume CO² and extract the carbon and release the oxygen (O²), which in turn is consumed by animals and men. A balancing loop is thus created.
Well, here's the problem: since we started with mostly CO² in the air, and O² was created progressively, we can calculate the average rate of release of O² in the air during the O² formation years. We are currently going back in time, in terms of the chemical CO²/O² composition of the air, at a rate of 800,00 - eight hundred thousand years - per year.
So, yes, we do have a problem.
Sure, there have been cycles. Watch the BBC's excellent video 'oil' that illustrates some of this. But whether seen indepth or as a broad overview - Houston, and Washington, and Brussels, and Beijing, and any other big or tiny thorpe on the planet - we have a problem.
Fact
The policies pertaining to climate are run by lawyers, by politicoes, by folks who do not have a grasp of the science and the numbers involved, and mostly do not care much.
I remember a cocktail party in Brussels where I chanced upon a very major country's roving ambassador for his country's climate policy. This guy was in charge of explaining to various governments his own government's policy as relates to climate change.
Sun-tanned, sportslike, 35-ish, whippersnapperish, gung-ho, über-friendly, sunny, the kind of guy you want around as your friend.
Oh, I said, so you're in charge of explaining climate policy? So you must know a lot about the environment.
I just could not help it: Do you know how much oxygen there is in total in the Earth's atmosphere? It's all in the numbers, you know.
(By the way - it's very easy to calculate. The weight - the total amount of gas mass - in our atmosphere is 5 million billion tons (or tonnes). There is a grand total of one million billion tonnes of oxygen on (literally) Earth. That sounds like much, but for all kinds of reasons it actually is not that much. For instance: remember that we can breathe when the proportion of oxygen in what we breathe is at least 16% (it's currently 21%). We'd die by suffocating at anything below 15 or 14%)
Well, he did not have a clue. He avoided me like the plague for the rest of the evening - funny the way he promptly and unobtrusively vacated any hern of the room I might be standing in or heading towards.
To have a clue as to how much oxygen we have in toto to play with - is the 101, the absolute pre-foundation course, the pre-primer stuff. If he did not know that - if he was unable to calculate it in his head at the drop of a hat (easy to do), then Ladies and Gentlemen, why was this ignoramus drawing a salary ? Why was he there?
Fact
If the North Pole melts, this would lead to no consequence - except for the polar bears, of course.
However, if Antarctica melts, then the levels of the seas worldwide will rise by 70 meters. Yes, Sir n Ma'am. 70 meters. Enough to drown all coastal areas and far more, kill about 2 billion people, and totally destroy our economies. It's back to something like the stone age for the survivors .....
Now there are several mechanisms that could bring this about. To understand them, look at both the topology of the South Pole, and systems theory. Let's not go there in the framework of this angry voice - but the information is out there and easy to access if you need to do so.
And in the meantime, we're grandstanding.
In the meantime, we argue politically about Protocols whose scientific impact on the physics of climate change is at best negligible.
But that's what we always do, isn't it?
Hard science facts relating to cod fishing in Europe were overlooked, nay were deliberately gainsaid, by politicoes because of electoral considerations. The North Atlantic cod has never recovered - despite lawyers and political leaders and fishers' unions assurances to the contrary - and the North Atlantic cod is for all practical purposes extinct.
Not the first time it happened, of course. In America, the passenger pigeon, whose flocks once darkened the skies so that they turned noon into midnight, suffered the same fate.
The list is just so long.
Bring on the scientists before it's too late. Kick out the lawyers, and whilst you're at it, kick out the end-of-timers too - remember James G. Watts, the asinine erstwhile US interior secretary, who deemed it not worthwhile to care for the environment at all, because the end of the world was going to happen, like, next Tuesday? A self-fulfilling prophecy for pea-brained dinosaurs ?
The dinosaurs died out because of the meteor. But ultimately, they went extinct because they were a bunch of ignoramusses, because their maths skills were bad.
Had they been scientists and engineers, they could easily have sheltered themselves from extinction. They would have engineered their own survival, based on intelligent measures tackling hard facts.
It is stunning that we are treading the same path. We are the Grandstanding species, slated for hard times ahead because Life demands that we pay heed to reality, and we don't.
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