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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.
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