Our Earth does not have an equilibrium that it tries to keep to. It does not balance itself to help us living things survive. That living things on this planet have evolved has led to some effects that cause the planet to be more habitable for a certain kind of life, but there is and has been no plan for this. The Earth does not care, or not care, about life or our human species. We tend to think of the story of our planet in humanized terms, as if it had feelings and a goal that should be nice for us. It does not. But the human species perhaps can. As we are creatures which are self-aware, and we have scientific knowledge, maybe we have the possibility of consciously intervening in our planet’s trajectory. It remains to be seen; at the present we are not capable of this, it is only potential.
Scientific findings
based on data have demonstrated that the planet on which we live has had
periods in its history when there have been mass extinction events in which a
majority of life goes extinct, and that these periods correspond strongly to times
when there have been rapid changes in climate, such as dramatic warming.
Sometimes these have been in response to ice ages, as a kind of ‘over-correction’
when carbon in the atmosphere has risen due to the effects of continuing massive
volcanism and when the ice and snow covering cannot absorb all the emissions,
leading eventually to extreme heating.
The Earth still has
periods of ice-ages, it oscillates between average temperature extremes, and we
are currently in an interglacial period, in fact more near to the end of it
than the beginning. Climate scientists say the evidence shows that fast human
caused climate heating due to our burning of fossil fuels will prevent the next
ice age from happening.
Yay! You might think. It
will be nice to avoid all that cold. But every such dramatic change in
temperature, and this human caused change is the fastest ever, has led to really
big extinctions amongst Earth’s creatures.
Why? Because
evolutionary alterations to adapt to such changes occur much slower than this
rate of change. Living things cannot speed up evolution. What the science has
noticed is that animals have instead had to, if they did not simply die out
(which they did), migrate to colder regions of the globe if they could. Sea
creatures migrated for instance, whilst some land creatures might have found it
more difficult due to being cut-off by seas or the landscape. One of the
science articles points to surface sea water temperature during a hot period of
40C, which meant that land temperatures must have been even hotter. Sustained
general average temperatures of this size lead to the mass deaths of plants and
animals.
The human species will
be unable to change course from their current trajectory of burning fossil
fuels and large-scale agriculture for crops and livestock, which causes the
increasing emissions of carbon in the Earth’s atmosphere which in turn creates
the heating effect. Political forces will be unable to tackle this problem in a
scientific manner, as we have already clearly seen, because science is not the
primary goal of our capitalist politics. To put it schematically, this is
because the most powerful and profitable globally spanning industries: energy,
security, and drugs, influence our politicians and shape their policies.
Just as importantly, these
industries also decide the discourse that the rest of us perceive through the
media. It therefore becomes unpopular to talk about climate warming, and again as
we have seen increasingly climate science is being depicted in the press as crackpot.
Add to this the fact that these industries provide a multitude of jobs for
people who obviously do not want to lose their livelihoods, then we have a
political environment which is totally opposed to doing anything substantial about
climate heating, and will fight it even in the sneaky and subtle ways that our media
industry knows how. It is the same with the offshoots of the petrochemical
industry, such as plastics and plastic pollution. This industry is profitable and
is hardly likely to give this up voluntarily, so there have been no agreements
over preventing plastic pollution (as recently seen).
The interests that
exist in these industries therefore are inevitably against the dismantling of
their dominance, something which would be necessary to prevent further climate
heating. But even if they wanted to do this, as a few people in the industries clearly
do, they would find it very difficult to change course because they are massive
juggernauts, and it would be too socially disruptive to capitalism. At the same
time, it is also unlikely that the democratic consensus could agree on a
globally unified approach to this enormous problem, given that all the
different nation states compete economically, and it would need some short and
probably medium term severe economic pain and disruption to even begin to
ameliorate in a real way the effects of the pollution.
So, what is likely to
happen in the future? Continuing the current course, we are likely, sooner than
later, to experience more instances of deadly heatwaves, especially in areas
that are already warm, such as nearer to the equator. Wildfires are likely to
become a constant feature of summers in these regions, but also in regions more
northern that still experience much less regular rainfall or only get the rainfall
in overly large downpours onto dry and hard ground and so produce floods.
Quite soon, apart from
the effect this will have on agriculture, these areas will become
non-survivable in the warmer seasons. And mass animal and human migration from
these regions will be likely. But this will be resisted by the cooler northern countries
by default, as is already happening. It is similar with the rise in sea levels
and the necessary abandonment of coastal cities, which will also lead to mass
migration which will be resisted.
In short, in human
terms, the social disruption and the massive numbers of refugees in combination
usually lead to wars and wars always lead to even greater and faster emissions.
We could call this and other factors of a similar nature the social feedback
loops that add to the climate disaster. Given that this will happen quite quickly
it will lead to great stress on the human population, and this will reach a
tipping point beyond which it will not be survivable.
The ever-increasing
temperatures may even lead to a Fireball Earth phenomenon, where the confluence
of the normal volcanism and geologic tectonic activity from beneath the ground
combines with the atmospheric heating caused by the burning of fossil fuels to
squeeze the habitable space in the middle. We have all heard of Snowball Earth,
where in the past our planet has been completely covered in glaciers, this will
be the reverse phenomenon. But it may be harder for the Earth to recover from
this hellish state and get back to its current fairly pleasant condition for
our species. Venus, one of our neighbouring planets, is like this, essentially a
fireball. Evidence suggests it once had oceans, long ago.
The Fermi Paradox is
the idea that intelligent life should be prevalent and even abundant in the
universe but strangely does not appear to be present to our astronomers. It is
likely one of the reasons that we have not discovered intelligent alien species
out in space is because this global catastrophe is the kind of thing that
usually happens to the top predator in an ecosystem. Its own success becomes
its failure because it cannot prevent itself from using up all the resources
that it needs to continue to thrive and so destroys itself.
We like to think we
are conscious and in charge of our destiny, but it is probable that we are not, and that this idea is mostly a self-delusion.
I have only been a little hyperbolic here, unfortunately. See:
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