Sunday 5 December 2021

climate change and the climate crisis

There are a number of aspects of Earth that make it a liveable plant - physical integrity and stability of the plant, an orbit that is reasonably clear of debris to minimise meteorite problems, the magnetosphere to manage the effects of occasional peaks in solar radiation, the right temperature (arising from energy from the sun plus internal geological activity), the right amount of light & moisture & other factors that enable plant growth and photosynthesis, and photosynthesis and other processes that create an atmosphere we can breathe and a climate that we can live in - reasonably comfortably, compared to past eras such as Ice Ages.

In fact, a key issues is that Earth has an atmosphere which has evolved over time to reach a complex dynamic equilibrium (including weather) suitable for life.

For more on that, see:

Part of evolution included the development of more complex (“advanced”, if you wish) lifeforms, including animals which eventually included primates, then hominins, and eventually modern human beings (and similar species) [1] .

Humans also “evolved” the way they lived, using their opposable thumb and ability to think & communicate to civilise fire, refine and develop tools [2] , and civilise each other through the development of agriculture [3] and cities [4] .

Note the following, from https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/History_of_agriculture:

“archaeobotanists/paleoethnobotanists have traced the selection and cultivation of specific food plant characteristics, such as a semi-tough rachis and larger seeds, to just after the Younger Dryas [5] (about 9,500 B.C.E.)”

and

“Because of agriculture, cities as well as trade relations between different regions and groups of people developed, further enabling the advancement of human societies and cultures. Agriculture has been an important aspect of economics throughout the centuries prior to and after the Industrial Revolution. Sustainable development of world food supplies impact the long-term survival of the species, so care must be taken to ensure that agricultural methods remain in harmony with the environment.”

This was not without problems - such as violence [6] , over-hunting (although evidence now suggests that climate changes in that era also were significant [7] ), social structures [8] & discrimination & abuses [9] , and environmental degradation such as slash-and-burn agriculture [10] , deforestation [11] / desertification [12] , and damage to the water cycle [13] .

The effect of these environmental problems was limited partly by the relatively small population of humans initially [14] , and the limitations of the tools available [15] . (The problems did not occur everywhere - for instance, the Indigenous people of Australia had a sustainable way of life for tens of thousands of years before the European invasion [16] .)

However, things like agriculture and the lack of any population control allowed an increase in the number of people (this was, in fact, often seen as desirable, as it allowed groups [later, cities then empires and then nations] to compete more effectively against each other), and, in the in 1700s, the industrial revolution began.

The industrial revolution included a shift from renewable fire sources such as timber (also affected by population growth) and charcoal to to burning coal for rapidly generating massive quantities of steam to drive the machinery of the industrial revolution.

Burning coal, which was the product of thousands of years of plant life, released CO2 into the atmosphere on a gradually increasing scale.

The gradually increasing scale of release of extra CO2 into the atmosphere has disturbed the dynamic equilibrium, and that has led to climate change and resultant problems such as an increase in sea levels and challenges to plant growth and the liveability of some places.

My personal summation (see also https://politicalmusingsofkayleen.blogspot.com/2019/07/notes-for-history-on-world-war-three.html) of the responses to climate change as it became the climate crisis is:

  • scientists spent decades (actually, more than a century) trying to get the world’s attention, but were ignored for range of reasons (economic fears, the problem overwhelmed some people’s ability to cope, denialism, etc);
  • governments and businesses resisted for their personal short term gains;
  • public activism grew through the last quarter of the 20th Century;
  • growing disasters and a reluctant admission of the increasing risks eventually got many (not all) businesses onside;
  • increasingly effective activism by young people [17] and others [18] including legal actions - but that was, in part, met by even more die hard resistance (e.g., some of the actions against protestors by police is, in my opinion, vindictive - and then there’s SLAPPs [19] );
  • some governments and political groups are starting to get with it.

 

[5] From https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Younger_Dryas&oldid=1054116367:   “The Younger Dryas (around 12,900 to 11,700 years BP) was a return to glacial conditions . . . The Younger Dryas was a period of climatic change, but the effects were complex and variable.”

[15] Horse drawn ploughs and hand and/or human powered clearing will not affect as large an area as mechanised tractors/bulldozers will, and hunting with gunpowder weapons will do more damage than bows and arrows etc - as exemplified by https://www.bioexplorer.net/extinct-birds.html/#9_Passenger_Pigeon_Ectopistes_migratorius   and   https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bison_hunting&oldid=1057303628#19th_century_bison_hunts_and_near_extinction.

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