Doomed Planet?

One of my few pleasures is reading the editorials in the Sunday papers over a cup of coffee.  That's papers plural, as I subscribe to two local papers; one center-right and the other far left.  This Sunday I was intrigued by an editorial in the far left op-ed pages, Changed Climate, Doomed Planets, a reprint of an article in the New York Times from this January.  In it, one Adam Frank, an astrophysics professor at Rutgers and co-founder of NPR's 13.7 Cosmos and Culture blog, had some interesting takes on how climate destroys planets.  The title along with the writer's bonafides is a spoiler; you can guess where this one is going.  The substance of this piece is that climates can make or break a planet, and that we humans can't do anything about it.  That's a switch from the left's constant drumbeat about reversing the Earth's non-existent climate change. Nonetheless, Frank cites Fermi's Paradox, which is the apparent contradiction between high estimates of the probability of the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations and humanity's lack of contact with, or evidence for, such civilizations. No evidence of ET?  Says who?  But I'll refrain from a tangential departure just now.  Extraterrestrials haven't been here to visit with us, he says, because in their quest for technological advancement, they polluted themselves into either oblivion by destroying their planet, or simply devolved into a stone age status.  Lovely.

You Are Here

If, as he states, as the thirst for energy envelopes a given life form, then it also requires the waste created from the use of that energy to reside somewhere. In Earth's case, he says, all those 100 billion megawatts hours of energy we create produces 36 billion tons of carbon dioxide that gets pumped into the atmosphere.  And that rate of CO2 discharge will change the atmosphere's chemical composition, change the climate irreversibly, and destroy all life of Earth. Lost in his cause-and-effect structure is the notion that if true, then we humans should accept our fate, and just lay down and die.  Free will is an illusion, and God's will is manifest.  Uh oh.  I used the G word.  Liberal hand-wringers don't believe in God, so fate must be an illusion, as well.  This is their paradox.  As irrefutable proof that we're doomed, Frank cites that 2 billion years ago on Earth, the atmosphere was made up of mostly ammonia and hydrogen sulfide, mixed with methane gas. As microscopic bacterial life thrived, died and decayed in the oceans, it gave off tons and tons of a deadly poison, oxygen, which began to permeate the atmosphere.  And for the next 2 billion years, life forms adapted to oxygen as a requirement for life, and the predominate atmospheric gases were now considered poisonous to the new oxygen oriented life.  

NASA Image of Earth's Plant Life, Western Hemisphere

So life changed and adapted and subsequently thrived.  How does that doom the planet?  There's no evidence that Earth is doomed in any way.  Possibilities do arise, such as catastrophic asteroid strikes, or a massive volcanic eruption.  Even those possibilities may not eradicate life and destroy the planet:  those events have happened before, even in recent history, and yet here we still are. Even if there's a preponderance of CO2 being pumped into our atmosphere, it would take centuries, if not millennia, to result in a complete change like that of The Great Oxidation Event that took billions of years to complete.  Developing nations like China and India are not going to curtail their industrial and technical pursuits - and their use of vast amounts of energy - just to solve a non-existent problem.  And taxing citizens in the US to compensate won't slow the rate of CO2 being produced, either.  It just devolves the US into becoming a third world nation, as we are required to cut our energy use dramatically so others may have it.  This is just more zero-sum thinking  from the left: that there's a finite amount of energy available. But there's more.  In a strained attempt to connect the dots, Frank claims that a catastrophic atmospheric change on Earth could actually alter other planets, and possibly even the balance of the solar system and more.  He cites the ruin of Mars as an example, and tries vainly to attribute the cloud covered atmosphere of Venus to its own global warming.

Trees Absorb CO2 And Give Off Oxygen

It always amazes me how far the left will go to express their own self hate, and how willing they are to impose it upon others.  To them, humans are bad for pure and sentient Mother Earth, and everything we do should be for the protection of Gaia.  Even if that means self sacrifice.  Nonsense.  The Earth is a magnificent, viable planet, and we humans are a part of this thriving ecosystem.  Want to limit CO2 in the atmosphere?  It's really easy and painless. Start a program in which each person on Earth plants at least one hardwood tree.  That's 6.5 billion new trees.  Trees absorb CO2 and give off oxygen, so we'll have more trees, more food, less CO2, and more energy.  It's good for trees, good for humans, and good for Earth.  And stop this defeatist, doom-saying, hand-wringing negativity.  Go hate yourself somewhere else, and stop ruining my Sunday morning solitude.