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February 01, 2005
We're all doomed?
I apologise for my quote from "Dad's Army" and the cadaverous Private whose response to evry impending threat was the cry - "we're arl dooomed!" - but having watched another doom-laden analysis of the planet's attempts to rid itself of us, I feel it's appropriate!
There can't be much happening on the news front at the moment, or the disasterous tsunami has triggered a wave of doom laden documentaries to amuse some and frighten everyone else. It's a wonder we have survived this long if you consider that there are at least four "super volcanoes" just waiting to blast us into oblivion, the entire Western slope of one of the Canary Islands is teetering on the brink of collapsing into the sea and creating a tsunami that would make the one that hit Aceh and the surrounding area look like a splash in a paddling pool, the atmosphere is about to become saturated with Carbon Dioxide, the rain forests are dissappearing, and the deserts increasing their area, while the polar ice sheets melt. It seems that no matter what we do, or try to do, someone, somewhere has a potentially doom-laden scenario to run at us. All that is missing so far is a rogue comet or asteroid, and I have no doubt that someone will find one soon enough.
On the tsunami front, it seems to have dropped from most news channels altogether even though the death toll is still rising and has now topped 280,000 with the Aceh figure standing at 240,000 on its own. The US Carrier task group centred on the USS Abraham Lincoln is still there, as are the Australians, and the small British Group with the USS Bonhomme Richard and her group at Sri Lanka, but, as the shouting and the tumult of the early days has died, so too has the interest of the media.
This is, in part, the problem with trying to get a grip on what is happening as our climate changes. It is only news if it will attract a reaction, if it will sell newspapers, as one cynical editor put it. It does not help when you are looking at something which has a much longer timescale which has nothing to do with human attention span or the famous 30 second soundbite culture of the mass media. When it comes to global change, the issue is much, much more complex and simply cannot be addressed in soundbites! Is it a natural cycle and are we doomed, or is something else at work here. In part, the earth is a "living" organism in the sense that it has changed dramatically in the last couple of million years and is still changing. In purely geological terms we have been here hardly any time at all, so we actually have a bigger problem in that it is really only in the last couple of hundred years that we have even begun to fully analyse the way the planet works, never mind find solutions for any of the questions we raise every time we find an answer to any problem we have managed to identify.
A good example was the giant "Ecosphere" experiment a few years ago which was supposed to be totally isolated from the rest of the planet for three months and be a "self-sustaining environment". It failed spectacularly within weeks - because the designers simply had not fully appreciated the complexity of the interactions between ourselves, the plants, and the animals in the sphere. Seriously, this is something that will have to be resolved before we can attempt manned interplanetary exploration on any serious scale, and it is something we will have to get to understand if we are to find solutions to the problems we currently face, whether these are the result of human activity or not. The whole is far too complex to be corrected by simplistically addressing one aspect only.
As I said in my earlier post "Crying Wolf", I suspect that the problem for all parties in the debate at this point is that far too often the cry of "we're all doomed" has gone up with the intention of stirring up activity, but it has now been overused to the point of derision. This is not productive, and it will not serve to get the problem sorted out. Nor will the entrenched positions of the many well-intentioned lobby groups who seek to vilify those who disagree with their particular vision of the problem.
If we are to find a solution, it must be a carefully and scientifically based analysis which can then give rise to a supportable and sustainable programme to which everyone can sign up. Let us stop wasting time bickering and grasping at short term fixes which may, in the long term, prove to be disasterous. We should not forget, either, that, in part, the rapid change in the planetary heating in the last 20 years has been a result of action to reduce acid rain. Less Sulphur Dioxide has meant that the clouds are no longer as white as earlier in the 20th Century - ergo; they do not reflect away the heat radiating from the sun as effectively as before. Sure, we don't have the acid rain, but now we have the heating.
We must not, in solving that problem, create another worse one!
Posted by The Gray Monk at February 1, 2005 09:35 AM