Carbon, human impact on climate and the Earth

Posted by jerry as Environment

How is Global Warming like God?

There appears to be an inverse relationship between the belief in God, and the belief that humans are causing global warming.  Certainly, there seems to be an increasing acceptance of human impact on climate, even within the ranks of the religious right, but it’s happening slowly.  I find the parrellels between the two quite interesting. 

In religion, an authority figure tells you that you must believe in the power of God.  You can witness his hand in all that you see.  Any time something bad happens, God is testing your faith, and any time something good happens, God is responsible, too.  In climate change, scientists or other authority figures tell you that humans are absolutely having an impact on the environment.  You can witness the impact in all that you see.  There are major wildfires, terrible hurricanes, droughts, floods, all having grave impacts on human lives, all clearly the impact of global warming.

But, the question needs to be asked: are scientificly minded people falling into the same trap as those religious people they criticize for taking things on faith?  It’s completely logical to think that all of the fossil fuels we burn - the billions of tons of it - must be have something to do with the super severe hurricanes we have experienced, and the droughts we have in the southeast US, among other places.  If you have a foundational belief that something is true (i.e., God exists, or Human Initiated Global Warming exists), then your observations are made through that lens.  Recovering from terminal cancer is a miracle from God, and a drought is the result of human production of carbon dioxide. 

I will grant that the climate changers have some science on their side, as well as a lot of imperical observations.  Pervasive smog is clearly a result of human activity.  Computer generated climate models roughly match the observations we see in the real world, given the same inputs.

Do We Really Understand the Causes and Impacts of Climate Change?

But, we have to concede that we just do not have the ability to fully model, and therefore understand, the impact of human activity on climate.  The number of variables is astounding.  It seems intuitive, though, that the largest factors are not within the control of humaity, though.  That being the natural release of CO2 (volcanic activity, oceanic gas exchange, etc) and the increasing output of the sun.  We can definitively say that the global climate has increased by 1 degree F in the past 129 years, but little more than that.  In the aftermath of the series of devistating hurriance seasons in the first half of this decade, we were put “on notice” that hurricane seasons were going to become more turbulent and violent becaue of the impact of global warming.  I do not mention this to dispute whether or not the climate is changing, only that our understanding of the causes and effects are limited.

Global warming received a lot of attention in the past months as wildfires raged in California.  But, realistically, can wildfires be blamed on global warming?  That implies that we can draw a definitive link between human CO2 release and a sudden reduction in rainfall over a short period of time.  Or, is it that humans have tried to manage the environment too closely?  As human population explodes, and we move into forested areas, we are duty-bound to save homes and businesses, stopping the natural leveling of fuel available to burn in forests.  Dire reports of out of control fires are much more likely to make it to the masses, both because of the pervasive amatuer videos & news outlets, and because we simply have more people living in the shadows of big forests.

And that’s an important point: as the human population on Earth continues to grow, we will occupy more and more of the surface of the Earth, even those parts that were previously too dangerous.  Once, where a category 5 hurricane would just knock down some palm trees and beach houses, we have major human disasters because we did not properly plan for evacuations, we did not properly design structures to take that kind of a pounding, etc.  Is a category 5 hurricane that only killed 5 people in 1808 and less severe than the same hurricane that hits the same area 200 years later, but causes 5,000 deaths and $100,000,000,000 in damage?

Trees, Trees, Trees! 

An apparently easy way to help offset the problem of our polluting ways is to grow trees that will pull the CO2 out of the air.  It makes a lot of sense.  But, it’s not a good solution. 

“One acre of forest absorbs six tons of carbon dioxide and puts out four tons of oxygen. This is enough to meet the annual needs of 18 people.” 

- US Department of Agriculture

The problem is that trees don’t permanently store the CO2 they absorb.  That CO2 is ultimately released back into the air, most commonly from the tree being burned.  The real issue is that humans have increased the amount of carbon on the suface of the Earth by digging up, and subsequently burning, fossil fuels.  The question is whether that’s an amount significant enough to cause an impact to the climate.  A potential solution could be to inject some amount of the CO2 we produce back underground.

In the context of the timeline of the Earth, the impacts of humans would likely not be perceptible on a graph of the climate.  In the end, the Earth will be fine.  If, in fact, humans are the cause of an out of control process of global warming, it is only the life on the planet that we hurt.  10,000,000 years from now, the only traces of humanity will be some really nasty layers of sediment, buried several hundred feet below the ground. 

In that respect, it seems like we should have a “Life Day”, rather than an “Earth Day”, since that is what we’re really trying to protect.

Conclusion

It’s hard to imagine that the constant and increasing amount of CO2 and other pollutants we are putting into the air have no impact on the climate.  We know that our pollution is creating health impacts.  It seems like a safe approach to reduce our emissions where we can, but we have to come to terms with the reality that we just don’t know if that is going to have any impact on the rising global temperatures.