Something George Carlin (the comedian) said on a youtube video I saw reminded recently me of the subject of climate change:
George Carlin on "pride"
His main point was about how we shouldn't be proud of our nationality or race, because those are accidents of birth, not something we had anything to do with. He said we should be proud of what we had actually accomplished instead, completing a degree, doing some kind of work, raising kids, maybe even something tied to a social cause and change, etc. All that sort of relates to Buddhism, or at least it's closer than what I'm actually going to talk about.
At one point he also said that it doesn't make sense for people to always want to save things, to save the whales, save the earth, etc. His point was that they really want their own world to stay the same, remain unaffected, and it is about ego, being seen as doing something interesting and positive. He claimed the earth is doing fine either way, and that it would eventually just shrug us off like a bad case of fleas. This reminded me of climate change.
On the one hand he seemed wrong, because he said some plastic bags and soda cans won't affect the earth at all, but on the other hand we seem to be changing the climate and causing mass extinctions now. Of course someone could argue there were mass extinctions in the past before we existed, a point he raised, but that's really a separate issue as to whether we are causing this one or not.
After thinking it through a little it matches what he was saying perfectly, even though he made the video before the climate change subject came up in the present form, so he wasn't referencing it. We can cause a major change that can kill us all (probably), and the earth will remain relatively unaffected, just not the other species living on it now, many of which will cease to exist along with us.
Better to speed this up, to get to the point. I did a report on climate change for an ethics class a decade ago, roughly, when the data was essentially the same but the evidence wasn't as well thought through. Weather patterns are a little more inconsistent now, so it becomes more personal, during events like a major flood or polar vortex. That report was initially about saving the rain forest, evaluating if that made sense, but transitioned when I researched and realized that was just part of the much more important larger issue (which was essentially common knowledge then, just the details aren't really clear to most even now, meaning the limited best-understanding of the issue).
Really I should have concluded that the Bush administration was unethical for cleaning any climate change data out of government site sources, which they clearly did. But I had too much ground to cover and just fleshed out what was happening, not really completing the link back the subject of ethics.
I want to share what seemed like the most obvious discovery. Based on just a little research then it seemed really obvious we were experiencing an very unusual 10,000 years of climate stability now. Of course I don't know what will happen with the climate over the next century or 1000 years; scientists reviewing this are sort of just guessing, projecting. It's easy for that one simple point to get lost in the data, in the graphs, that the anomaly is the climate period we've just experienced, but if you look at different time-frames it's clear as could be.
It seemed really, really obvious that's why people have thrived over the last 10,000 years, the period of recorded history (not written history, necessarily, but what we can go back and get great evidence for). That frozen cave-man guy in the Alps (Utzi?) I think was from longer back, 12k maybe, and he has some impressive gear and clothes, but that's kind of a separate subject, or at least I'll need to simplify it out by not taking into account how things were then. On to the data.
Climate history: into the charts
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| http://climatechange.umaine.edu/Research/MaineClimate/SysPerspective.html |
A bit cyclic, isn't it? This also shows where they are getting the link between CO2 and climate from, although really being convinced of that link or sorting out what it is might take a good bit more research, so I'll leave that aside. I'm not claiming to have figured out climate change, I just want to point out something obvious in the graphs.
The problem with reading this sort of graph and saying what's going to happen in the next 100 or 1000 thousand years is that the time frame is too long. Even if it really will get warmer or colder again (the latter more likely, based on history) over the next 10 or 20,000 years we're a bit more concerned about the next 200 or 300 (or as individuals, just this century). None of the past trends are going to be specific enough to say that, what's going to happen in the next 85 years, but we'll get to what they can say for sure (nothing really, they just point towards some likelihoods).
Note this last graph was about ice-mass versus CO2 levels, not about temperatures, although these are obviously related, maybe just not so obvious how closely linked. But we need different data to get a feel for how temperatures and the warming idea works out.
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| http://muller.lbl.gov/pages/IceAgeBook/history_of_climate.html |
Seems clear: it's relatively warm now, and will get colder. The problem is that those are kind of long cycles (400k years, and roughly 100k cycles repeating), so we're still more concerned in human life-span time-frame, or at least human history time-frame, but this seems to show where things stand now. It might seem a good thing that things are warming up just now, if the long term prognosis is for another ice-age, but it turns out to be not so simple. We are paused at the top of one of those temperature spikes now, and it may be that the pause was more significant than where we actually stopped related to ongoing changes. Lets check another graph.
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| http://climatechange.umaine.edu/Research/MaineClimate/SysPerspective.html |
This doesn't seem right, does it? On the last graph it was warm now (relatively), on here it looks like it's relatively cold now. This is how long-term trends and changes get to be a bit confusing; someone can show you what should come next or where we are relatively speaking by moving around the chart time-frame. Here they've shifted it to include a different scale length at the bottom (five different time scales, looks like, showing much longer time intervals further back, so the pattern isn't really clear). What is clear is that the last 10,000 years was stable, almost the only straight line we're seeing on the chart.
Really some of that could be just a function of the interval time-frame; it seems likely if you look at the relatively stable time between 3 1/2 and 4 1/2 million years ago spread out by tens of thousands of years (as the section on the right) it would be a lot more jagged too, but it does seem to bunch across only 3 degrees of average temperature variation or so, not so much.
Again that's really the main point. There aren't periods of stability like that so often, although again to some extent that might be because in the short term there are (10,000 years) but in the long term there aren't (100,000's or millions of years). Lets take one more look at a very long time-frame to see how that works.
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| http://muller.lbl.gov/pages/IceAgeBook/history_of_climate.html |
There it is then; it's warmer now, right? In a sense, yes, in the sense of looking at over the last 3 million years it is. This graph is a little hard to read since they've shown "age" instead of time present back; put another way, it's "backwards." As a side note, since the earth is 4 billion years old there are different longer counts to check, and different scales that would show different trends, so 3 million years can be seen as either a really long or a really short period of time. It was hotter at times, for sure (clearer on the last graph than this one), so it's not as if this is the peak temperature the earth has experienced, just on the high side related to most "relatively recent" graphs.
The graph prior showed some warmer times around 50 million years ago, and then 200 million years ago in a long period prior to that. 65 million years ago when the dinosaurs disappeared (sound familiar?) there was a "tiny" 2 degree shift on that chart, but it wasn't clear that change caused that, or if it was related to a common cause. In the short term (100,000s of years) it is warm now, and we'll go through another ice age again (if the former pattern holds, which may actually not be the case), but this longer graph is a bit hard to read; there are patterns here that don't intuitively mean much.
Lets get back to the shorter term to see what that shows:
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| http://muller.lbl.gov/pages/IceAgeBook/history_of_climate.html |
Back to that recent period of stability, 10,000 years, and the idea that it should get colder. Note that 100k (or so) year cycle that was clear on the 400k year graph just seems to drop right out; the time-frame is too short to really show it. If we just went back another 20,000 years we'd see that upward spike that would put it in perspective, that we're right at a point where we can expect a "sudden" drop-off in temperatures, but that gets cut off here. The temperature will drop at some point, it seems, we've just paused at the top of the cycle for some reason (a reason I really don't know, to be clear, and I've not really ran across theories about that since I didn't try to find out).
One more graph and I'll give my interpretation of all this.
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| http://ete.cet.edu/gcc/?/resourcecenter/viewResource/3/ |
This is the kind of thing that's showing the current trend of changes. Not impressed? The trend gets a little clear if you go back to the beginning of the 20th century, and sliding around the scale make the line pitch change dramatically. You can adjust that to make it look flat or steep, whichever you personally want to emphasize, like in this one:
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| http://muller.lbl.gov/pages/IceAgeBook/history_of_climate.html |
The reality is the same, global surface temperatures are rising, and it might seem slow to us (a one degree change in a century) but to climate change related scientists it's a bit serious. Of course no one can really say how serious, or where that graph goes over the next 100 years. The point that stood out to me is that the 10,000 year flat line of climate stability was an anomaly. It seems likely that's essentially over now, and remains debatable if we (people) caused that, mostly through carbon dioxide emissions, but we probably did.
The obvious point here I'll let another source summarize, although in this case it's a citation of a citation, a bit sloppy work, but this is just a blog post:
Paleoclimatologist J.P. Steffensen in the January 7, 2002 issue of The New Yorker Magazine (Kolbert, 2002) comments on how paleoclimatic research may help provide perspective on the development of civilization: "Now you're able to put human evolution in a climatic framework. You can ask, Why didn't human beings make civilization fifty thousand years ago? You know that they had just as big brains as we have today. When you put it in a climatic framework, you can say, "Well, it was the ice age. And also this ice age was so climatically unstable that each time you had the beginning of a culture they had to move. Then comes the present interglacial-- ten thousand years of very stable climate. The perfect conditions for agriculture. If you look at it, it's amazing. Civilizations in Persia, in China, and in India start at the same time, maybe six thousand years ago. They all developed writing and they all developed religion and they all built cities, all at the same time, because the climate was stable. I think that if the climate would have been stable fifty thousand years ago it would have started then. But they had no chance."
It's not completely clear to me that the development of individual people (the human organism) and the development of societies can be closely linked, that it wasn't a good thing for us as individuals--in terms of development, not personally--that things were so chaotic and difficult but a bad thing for the development of civilizations. Maybe it's as well to not speculate a lot about that, still interesting though.
In conclusion, you can't really conclude anything
What happens next, after the stability? Hard to say. It could get warmer for awhile, maybe even given that this change is artificial (probably, almost certainly, caused by us rather than other mechanisms) the future won't be like the past. It seems quite possible we will trigger the ice age change that was already going to happen "any minute now" over the next couple thousand years or so, but instead it will happen in this century, or the next.
There are lots of sources that explain these long cycles, the different inputs and factors, but that really is a lot to take in (for example, this is one). The wild card seems to be that if we really are a separate, unique input (which seems clearly the case, that greenhouse gas emissions by us is the most relevant short-term factor) then it may not be so easy to use the past to predict the future, and it was already hard enough to sort out. Most likely we won't be able to regain the stability, since that was an anomaly, so more dramatic and frequent change seems more or less a given. Or that might not "kick in" for another 1000 years, but it seems more likely to happen on the 100 year time-frame, or maybe we really are seeing it during this decade, just the beginning.
Odd you never run across this much detail, though, right, that changes are occurring over different time periods, and we've almost certainly screwed up the one thing that let human societies exist as it had for 10,000 years. The free ride is over, most likely. It could be a good thing; people will grow through the challenge, as a group, it just might not be so pleasant if that involves a "die off."
Of course I can't help but tie this to the "global Eve" idea, that in the not-too-distant past there was one female ancestor that gave birth to people that eventually gave birth to all of us. How could they know that? Easy; by analyzing the part of our DNA only transmitted by females, mitochondrial DNA (really a separate subject, more on that can be researched by starting from Wikipedia and going on from there). Or at least genetic research seemed to imply that at one point, but who keeps up, maybe that's been completely disproved. The point was that not so far back we were down to a small group, according to a relatively well grounded theory, but then those sorts of ideas tend to change over time.
That could have meant more than one thing, of course. It could have meant things like climate change nearly ended us, a very natural read. It could instead mean that the way natural selection and evolution worked out in our own case one successful genetic group shut the door on others (a bit muddied by the modern knowledge that we did interbreed with other hominid groups like the Neanderthals, but that doesn't change the general point).
Either way it's an exciting time, in terms of climate, and we owe it to ourselves to take a bit of a look at the data rather than just listen to interest-group driven media to interpret it for us.
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don't worry about climate change; these two will sort it all out |
