By Steven Jonas, MD, MPH – October 18, 2009
There have been five Great Extinctions in the history of
Earth. And yes, all you
creationists out there, according to a great deal of scientific evidence, that
is evidence that is based on observation, experimentation and reproducibility,
the history of Earth does extend back just a bit more than 4-6000 years.
There have also been about 20 others, big but not so
big. The first of the Big Ones
occurred at the end of what is called the Ordovician Period, about 450 million
years ago. The last Big One, the
one that knocked off the dinosaurs and put the mammals on the road to
dominance, occurred about 65 million years ago. Now, it seems, we are all of a sudden facing the Sixth Big
One. What is the evidence for
this?
For one thing, there is global warming and the massive
climate change that will result from it. This is a fairly recent event, although the pace of global warming, as
is well known, is accelerating. Some societal elements, like the
carbon-extract-it-and-burn-it-now-and-forever industries like to tell us that global
warming/climate change is all a myth. They have much in common with the folks at the creation Museum outside
of Hebron (great name for its location, no?) Kentucky, who tell us that wearing
saddles our forebears rode on dinosaurs and that Noah loaded dinosaurs on the
Ark (baby ones to be sure, to keep the weight down). They don’t tell us what happened to them after the Flood,
but that’s another story.
Mythology can be such fun, but Creationist mythology is
highly damaging on a variety of levels, beginning with its undermining of science,
such as the science we will need if we somehow to survive global warming. And then too the
carbon-extractive-industries mythology is highly damaging because it seems to
be leading us down the primrose path to non-reversibility. Of course these industries also ignore
that fact that the way they are burning the stuff up ensures that it will
eventually run out. For no matter
how much more is discovered, if we continue to burn it up it has to get used up
eventually if for no other reason than that, those pesky Creationists to the
contrary notwithstanding, all those dinosaurs which made it haven’t been around
since their own extinction, about 65,000,000 years ago. And we do like to use fossil carbon for
so many other purposes besides burning it. For example, no oil no plastic wrap, and that’s just for
starters. But that’s another
story.
It happens that as virtually all of the readers of
TPJmagazine know, the evidence is overwhelming that if nothing very serious is done
about carbon pollution of both the atmosphere and the oceans, very soon it will
overwhelm us along with a whole bunch of other species. According to The Millennium Project,
which happened to be sponsored by such radical agencies as the World Bank, the
Rockefeller Foundation and UNESCO, “an effort on the scale of the Apollo
Mission that sent men to the Moon is needed if humanity is to stand a fighting
chance of surviving the ravages of climate change.” (In my view, it will take something much greater than the
Apollo Project. If we do get one,
let’s just hope that Tom Hanks is still around to star in the movie.) I cannot recall seeing any mention of
their report, “2009 State of the Future,” published on August 1, 2009, in the
US media. But maybe I just wasn’t
looking. I knew about it from a
pre-release article in London’s “The Independent” by Jonathan Owen that
appeared on July 13, 2009. I
happened to be on a private circulation list which carried it.
Among the individual scientists concerned, James Hansen,
Ph.D., Director of NASA’s Godard Institute for Space Studies who the Georgites
tried everso hard to muzzle, has said that “partly on the basis of his latest
modeling efforts and partly on the basis of observations made by other
scientists, the threat of global warming is far greater than even he had
suspected. Carbon dioxide isn’t
just approaching dangerous levels; it is already there. Unless immediate action is taken --- including
shutdown of all the world’s coal-fired plants within the next two decades ----
the planet will be committed to change on a scale society won’t be able to cope
with.”
So our species could go very quickly, it seems. And, as noted, we could take bunches of
others with us. In fact, we began
doing that about 50,000 years ago, in Australia. The disappearance of a whole group of fantastic animals,
like a land tortoise about the size of a VW beetle, coincided with the arrival
of humans from Southeast Asia. Similar
things happened more recently in North America and New Zealand. It is also likely that the humanoid
species we call “Neanderthals” (actually the name comes from the German valley,
the Neander thal, in which the first fossil remains of it were discovered),
which happened to have larger brains than ours, was wiped out by us, Homo
Sapiens. Currently frogs, toads,
and coral among others are succumbing to malign human influence even without
climate change. And of course the
latter could kill bunches of others, indeed possibly leading to that Sixth
Great Extinction.
Add to climate change other human threats to the biosphere,
such as over-population, nuclear war (of course Nuclear Winter would be one way
to combat global warming --- I could see some NeoCon like Bill Kristol proposing
that one if they haven’t done so already with the by-product of preventing Iran
from acquiring nuclear weapons themselves), the rapidly declining supply of
pure water, to say nothing of the availability of sanitary sewage disposal, as
well as massive pollution of the oceans both directly (detritus, as in that
Texas-plus sized “plastic island” in the middle of the Pacific) and indirectly
(acidification from excess carbon in the atmosphere), and there we have
it. The Extinction Distinction:
the first one to be caused by one particular species, in this case Homo
Sapiens, rather than one or more external (asteroid) or other physical factors
(massive volcanic explosions).
So why is this happening, one might ask. Not too many people do. Why is our species on its way to
creating the Sixth Extinction. It
goes back to that element of our nature and what we need to do to survive, both
as individuals and as a species, which distinguishes us from all of the other
species currently on Earth. (Presumably
we did share this characteristic with other humanoid species, like the
Neanderthals, but they are all long gone.) That is that in order to survive we need to take resources
that we find in our environment and convert them to something else, like cooked
food and woven clothing for openers. Every other species just uses what it does use from its environment
directly, without modification, except in very simple ways, like nest building
for birds and dam building for beavers. But in those cases either individuals or small teams do the conversion
for themselves.
For humans, as we became more sophisticated, means of
production became common and more sophisticated themselves, like flour mills
and cloth factories. With means of
production came private ownership of them. With private ownership came employment of others to do the
work, by the owners. And with
employment of others to do the work came profit resulting from their
labor. The same thing happened of
course with the ownership of the natural resources used to both run and supply
the raw materials for the conversion processes of the means of production. Profits were made from those activities
too. Private profit, that is. And where, you might ask, does the
resistance to doing anything significant about global warming, climate change,
and species elimination come from? Well, just look at what is going on in the United States Congress over
doing something really very minimal about climate change. The answer is obvious.
As one liberal-sounding observer said recently: “The consumer
societies and the wastage of material resources are incompatible with the idea
of economic growth and a clean planet. The unlimited waste of non-renewable
natural resources --- especially oil and gas accumulated throughout hundreds of
millions of years and depleted in barely two centuries at the current rate of
consumption — has been the major cause of climate change. Even if the
unfriendly emissions of the industrialized nations were reduced, which would be
commendable, it is a reality that 5.2 billion people on planet Earth, that is,
three-fourth of the population, live in countries that are still in various
stages of development and will therefore demand an enormous input of coal, oil,
natural gas and other non-renewable resources that, according to the
consumption patterns created by the capitalist economies, are incompatible with
the objective of saving the human species."
Liberal sounding, but it did happen to be Fidel Castro, commenting on President
Obama’s Sept., 2009 UN address. But it surely could have been a liberal. Trouble is, socialist or liberal, or even concerned
capitalist, as at the World Bank and the Rockefeller Foundation, the
profit-makers are going to simply ignore them, use every opportunity to
obfuscate what they say, and continue on their merry way. After all, most of them will be dead
anyway before the worst happens, or they think they will be. So why bother, when right now, for them
life with lots of money is so much fun.
This is a theme to which I will be returning periodically in
this space.
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(A partial list of resources for this column includes the
abovementioned “2009 State of the Future;” the Owen article on it mentioned
above; “The Sixth Extinction?” by Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker, May 25,
2009; “The Catastrophist,” by Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker, June 29, 2009;
“Getting Serious About Global Warming,”
The Progress Report, Sept. 23, 2209; EC-CCDS @ yahoo.groups.org Sept. 26, 2009 for the Castro quote; “New Analysis Brings
Dire Forecast of 6.3-Degree (F.) Temperature Increase,” Juliet Eilperin, Wash.
Post, Sept. 25, 2009; “Aqua Shock: The Water Crisis in America,” a book by
Susan J. Marks; and “Idiot America,” a book by Charles P. Pierce (yes, that aptly-named
book is where I found the dinosaurs-into-the-ark story.) 