A new, holistic perspective gleaned from the book "Six Degrees".

[tom_paine]

OK, on this one I readily confess. For one of the first times I can remember, I bought the book "Six Degrees" just to satisfy the Cassandra in me.

Most of the other books I have read on climatology have been for education and edification, but with Six Degrees, after hearing about it here and reading the blurb on Amazon.com I decided to just get it for the sheer "disaster movie" quality of it. After educating myself on the math and the science involved, and seeing, sadly, that the evidence is getting as close to proof as we can get without starting to have warm November nights and 10 feet of sea level rise, I decided to indulge myself.

I already knew most of the science and math that was in Six Degrees, so I bought it as one would rent a good disaster movie. For the most part it was the case, although some new aspects of the ecology and environmental crises were revealed. But one paragraph, one idea, not even a piece of data or a sub-branch of science but a holistic perspective, was to me the most worthy aspect of the book and made it well worth the price of purchase.

It was this, That, considering the earth as a very long-lived Gaia-type system or even an organism, if you will, the overall trend is clear that life...all life, particularly since the Permian Extinction that almost ended all life, has been laboring very hard to lock carbon away and out of the atmosphere.

That all the oil we are burning represents the photosynthetic energies of millions upon millions of years and quadrillions upon quadrillions of organisms, all which had been locked away and taken out of the atmosphere by planetary evolution.

Now, one can be as numinous or prosaic as one likes about the whys of it. One can be all "Carl Sagan" about it and say the Earth is evolving conditions conducive to intelligence so it can understand itself and the universe, or the God thing, which is basically the same idea from another perspective. Or one can just say this is a blind planetary evolutionary process, which at this moment has been calibrated by billions of years of planetary climatological evolution to be ideal for the flourishing of human civilization.

But no matter how you put it, the reality is the same. And the holistic idea represented in the book Six Degrees is a slightly different, even longer-viewed than most, perspective and worth considering, in my opinion.

[FirstLight]

1. Sounds like a book I should get...

I have never heard of it before now...but I agree with the Gaia concept, and that we are undoing what the planet has been trying to accomplish in equilibrium for hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years. nd in a "blip" of time...we humans have trashed the place.
Some stewards we are!


edit: oops...spell check is my friend!duh

[cedric]

2. Solutions

I agree that the idea in the book is worth considering but isn't it time that we now started to consider ways to respond to these statements. This board seems to be a mechanism for flagging up the dire state that this planet is finding itself with few posts looking at responses to that situation.

[tom_paine]

3. Well, a good place to start would be Gore's movie, "An Inconvenient Truth"

In it, if you haven't seen it, he hypothesizes a mutli-pronged strategy, each responsible for reducing CO2 emissions by "a sliver" until the cumulative effect is sizeaqble.

Carbon Sequestration was one, I remember, so was expanded solar and wind plus tidal. There are several others. See the movie, if you haven't already. Fast forward to the end few scenes for the discussion of potential solutions.

Personally, you can change your bulbs, grow a garden and feed yourself from it, buy a more fuel efficient car and rent a truck when you need to haul large items or lots of items. There are many lists on the web.

Personally, I think we are in big trouble as a species and there may be no solution. I think fusion power might be the long term solution, providing cheap, limitless, pollution-free energy. But it also might be akin to giving a bunch of monkeys a bunch of flamethrowers in a paper factory. We might REALLY render the earth uninhabitable by life under those conditions.

But I don't see a choice. Fusion it must be if we are to have any chance of havign "civilization" survive.

Problem is, we let it go for too long. There might not be a solution but for what the Earth has in mind to re-equilibrate the global ecosystem and environment, which we are still a part fo no matter how technically advanced we become.

And what the Earth has planned, so to speak, is not pleasant at all, from the perspective of the human species.

[havocmom]

4. I have always appreciated the Cassandra in you. Thanks for book tip

One of your best posts, lad, Damned glad to read it the other evening and happy to kick it this morning.