Vardaman Virtual Forestry Company
FRIDAY REPORT OF 08/11/06
The Most Direct, Frequent Link to Knowledge Workers in the Eastern Forest Economy
“THE END OF NATURE
by BILL MCKIBBEN”
Our quotes below are from this outstanding new book:
“I write this introduction in the late fall of 2005…On this morning, for instance, Hurricane Wilma, the record-setting twenty-first named storm of the year, bears down on the Gulf of Mexico. The pressure in its center this morning was the lowest ever recorded in the Atlantic. It follows by a few weeks the unmatched destruction of Katrina – and by a few more weeks a paper in Nature demonstrating that on average hurricanes now last 60 percent longer and have peak winds 50 percent greater than a generation earlier.
“Meanwhile, here are a few of the other developments on planet Earth in the last ten weeks:
“The scientists tracking Arctic sea ice reported that for the fourth year in a row it was diminishing, and at an accelerating pace – an area the size of Texas had vanished…
“A British team released a new study of soils, showing that as the planet has warmed and the period between frosts lengthened (winter is now eleven days shorter on average than in 1970), microbial activity in the top layers of the ground is increasing…
“Similarly, researchers in Russia’s far north recently released data showing that the permafrost beneath the tundra is melting at record rates, and in the process releasing quantities of methane, another potent greenhouse gas. In fact, last winter so much methane was suddenly perking out to the surface that in places the bubbling kept open water from freezing…
“We also have a far better idea of what’s ahead than we did in 1989. The ever more finely calibrated computer models converge on a forecast of about 5 degrees additional warming in the course of this century unless we make heroic efforts to wean ourselves from fossil fuels. If that happens, the planet will be warmer than it’s been in at least thirty million years. Not warmer than it’s been in human history. Warmer than it’s been since before the beginning of primate evolution…
“…Global warming is not a problem for the future. It is here now, each year emerging with more power, each year closer to assuming its destiny as the most important fact in our politics, economies, and daily lives. That sense of imminence is new.
“But if cycles of the Earth now move more quickly – spring on average comes a week earlier across the Northern Hemisphere than it did just two decades ago – human society seems, at least on this most important of issues, to be paralyzed.
“In other words, global warming no longer belonged in the category of distant and speculative threats. It was not like the danger of an asteroid strike. Instead, it was under way – we were in the rapids, not the smooth water above them…
“There are plants on this earth as old as civilization. Not species – individual plants. The General Sherman tree in California’s Sequoia National Park may be a third as old, about four thousand years. Certain Antarctic lichens date back ten thousand years. A specific creosote plant in the southwestern desert was estimated recently to be 11,700 years of age…
“The world is not so large as we intuitively believe – space can be as short as time. For instance, the average American car driven the average American distance – ten thousand miles – in an average American year releases its own weight in carbon into the atmosphere. Imagine each car on a busy freeway pumping a ton of carbon into the atmosphere, and the sky seems less infinitely blue…
“By the end of nature I do not mean the end of the world. The rain will still fall and the sun shine, though differently than before. When I say ‘nature,’ I mean a certain set of human ideas about the world and our place in it. But the death of those ideas begins with concrete changes in the reality around us – changes that scientists can measure and enumerate. More and more frequently, these changes will clash with our perceptions, until, finally, our sense of nature as eternal and separate is washed away, and we will see all too clearly what we have done…
“Then, in 1957, two scientists at California’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Roger Revelle and Hans Suess, published a paper in the journal Tellus on this matter of the oceans. What they found was dismaying. No, more than dismaying – what they found may turn out to be the single most important limit in an age of limits, the central awkward fact of a hot and constrained planet…
“To be dramatic, what they showed was that most of the carbon dioxide being pumped into the air by millions of smokestacks, furnaces, and car exhausts would stay in the air, where, presumably, it would gradually warm the planet. ‘Human beings are now carrying out a large-scale geophysical experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past, nor be repeated in the future,’ they wrote. This experiment, they added with the morbid understatement of true scientists, ‘if adequately documented, may yield a far-reaching insight into the processes determining weather and climate.’
“While there are other parts to this story – the depletion of the ozone, acid rain, genetic engineering – the story of the end of nature really begins with that greenhouse experiment, with what will happen to the weather.
“When we drill into an oil field, we tap into a vast reservoir of organic matter that has been in storage for millennia. We unbury it. When we burn that oil (or coal or natural gas) we release its carbon into the atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide. This is not pollution in the normal sense of the word. Carbon monoxide is ‘pollution,’ an unnecessary by-product. A clean-burning engine releases less of it. But when it comes to carbon dioxide, a clean-burning engine is no better than the motor on a Model-T. It will emit about 5.6 pounds of carbon in the form of carbon dioxide for every gallon of gasoline it consumes…
“There has always been, at least since the start of life, a certain amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and it has always trapped a certain amount of sunlight to warm the earth. If there were no carbon dioxide, our world might resemble Mars – it would probably be so cold as to be lifeless. A little bit of greenhouse is a good thing, then – the plant that is life thrives in its warmth. The question is: How much? On Venus the atmosphere is 97 percent carbon dioxide. As a result, it traps infrared radiation a hundred times more efficiently than the earth’s atmosphere, and keeps the planet a toasty 700 degrees warmer than the earth. The earth’s atmosphere is mostly nitrogen and oxygen; there’s currently only about .035 percent carbon dioxide, hardly more than a trace. The worries about the greenhouse effect are actually worries about raising that figure from .035 percent to .055 or .06 percent, which is not very much. But plenty, it turns out, to make everything different…
“We have raised the number of termites, too, and still more dramatically. Termites have the same bacteria in their intestines as cows; that is why they can digest wood. We tend to think of termites as house wreckers, but in most of the world they are house builders, erecting elaborate, rock-hard mounds twenty or thirty feet high. Inside these fortresses an elaborate hierarchy of termites guards the queens – some of the termites sport sharp pincers longer than their bodies; others have heads shaped like drain plugs, so they can block up the interior passages against intruders; still others explode when attacked, or squirt poison. If a bulldozer razes a mound, worker termites can rebuild it in hours. They are like most animals in that their numbers are limited only by the supply of food. And when we hack down a rain forest, all of a sudden there’s dead wood everywhere – food galore. Termites have a ‘high digestion efficiency,’ much higher than earthworms, says Patrick Zimmerman of the National Center for Atmospheric Research. They can break down 65 to 95 percent of the carbon in the wood they ingest. (Wood is 50 percent carbon.) And they can excrete phenomenal amounts of methane – a single mound might give off five liters a minute. As the deforestation has proceeded, termite numbers have boomed. There is now, some scientists estimate, a half ton of termites for every man, woman, and child on earth – that is, six or seven people’s worth of termites for every actual person.”
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