The following is the text of an article I wrote some time ago for a school publication. Some numbers may now be inaccurate and my views on some parts (especially energy generation) have changed since I wrote it. I’ll keep it here for reference, and will update my views in a new post when appropriate.
I think we should admit it: we, the human race, have collectively succeeded in irreversibly disturbing the complicated equilibria in which our planet has comfortably rested for some half-billion years. I am talking, of course, about climate change, the several million tonne elephant-in-the-corner about which politicians and populace alike seem so sceptical. I intend in this article to deal with two main issues: first, why we are rapidly approaching cataclysmic disaster in the form of extreme climate change, and second, what this means for our society. It is not difficult to get a sense for what humanity has done to the planet: while ice ages, massive earthquakes, and earth-shattering planetesimal impacts have all come and gone over many millions of years, we need only open our eyes to see that what is happening now is quite different.
If an alien scientist were to give our planet a medical check-up, he would quickly notice that something was wrong. Earth is home to some 6.5 billion human beings, up from 5.5 billion in 1994. If 2005 fertility rates remain constant to 2050, global population will reach 11.7 billion. But what’s wrong with that? Why aren’t we allowed a thriving global population? Put simply: because we are destroying the world. Every year, 6% of the earth’s surface is burned. Every year 40 million people die from hunger and hunger related diseases—that’s equivalent to more than 300 jumbo jet crashes per day, with no survivors, and almost half the passengers being children. There are not enough fish in the all the oceans of the world for the Chinese to eat as much seafood as the Japanese. As you can imagine, this paragraph could go on for some time.
It’s not just ourselves we are wiping out: there may once have been as many as 10 million distinct species on Earth. We have already lost one or two million, and are predicted to have wiped out another two or three million by 2030. To put this in context, the background rate of species loss (i.e. without human presence) would be roughly one species every four years. As it stands currently, we lose 55 species per day.
Amongst all of this, we are also causing rapid climate change through our industrial activities. From 1800, ice cores from Greenland, Antarctica and other research stations around the world show a dramatic near-exponential increase in CO2 concentration which has continued to this day. The rising levels of the major five greenhouse gases, which include carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and some CFCs, account for nearly all global climate forcing—it is their presence that will cause global temperatures to rise by up to 6°C by the end of this century. When the ice caps melt, some 30 million cubic kilometres of cold fresh water will be released into the oceans, disturbing ocean currents so much that temperatures and salinities of almost the entire world’s water will change. In delicately balanced marine ecosystems many species will die out. Oceans will rise by several metres by 2100 due both to this meltwater and to the expansion of the oceans caused by rising temperatures. In this unstable state, natural disasters will be common, and developed countries will be put under massive strain as many primary production industries—fishing, farming, water management—begin to fail. For perhaps the first time, the Western world will be incapable of providing food or monetary aid to developing countries—the populations of which will be plummeting as storms, earthquakes and disease proliferate unchecked.
Chaos in Haiti over the past half-dozen years has led to mass migrations to Florida, causing serious border control issues for the Americans. Border control, however, will be something of a misnomer as millions move into Western Europe and North America following desertification of their homelands. Lack of food, water, and shelter will lead to incalculable death and destruction.
And as ghastly as that may sound, it may be just what we as a species need. I don’t know of any research that has investigated what sort of population the earth can stably support, but figures would probably fall much nearer 1 billion than 10 billion. The remaining 1 billion (perhaps fewer) humans will probably not belong to any particular group—not necessarily the rich or the intelligent, but rather those who learnt fast enough to be able to survive on post-civil-society Earth. Civilisation will return to its primitive beginnings, and over many hundreds, perhaps thousands of years, Gaia may eventually recover.
“Hell,” in the words of John Locke, “is truth seen too late”—and we are currently very much in danger of seeing too late. The sum total of human knowledge is colossal, and if we enter an apocalypse unprepared, we will lose close to all of it. James Lovelock, in The Revenge of Gaia suggests that we should be compiling a “start up guide for civilisation” and printing innumerable copies on good, old-fashioned paper, in the hope that at least some copies would survive cataclysmic disaster. While it would certainly be stupid to ignore such a suggestion, it is, as Lovelock himself realises, far more important to think about what we can do to halt, or at least slow down, the effects of global warming and human activity.
From the fence upon which I am most certainly not sitting, I see three major concerns as we progress further into the 21st century. First, and perhaps most important, humanity needs to sort out its impact on our planet. As horrible as it may seem, we must impose birth controls in as many countries as possible. The rate at which the human race is growing must be slowed down before we slash and burn every acre of farmland, chop down every rainforest. The land, especially the trees, are Gaia’s lungs, and if we remove them for the sake of fine furniture, we will soon be left with only fine furniture to comfort us as we rock quietly to sleep for the last time. We also need to sort out our priorities with regard to the distribution of essentials. It has been estimated that it would take a mere $40 billion to resolve problems of global malnutrition. The “developed” world spends that much on slimming aids every year. In addition, the developed world must look carefully at its own food production industries: not only do we waste a full 28% of all food grown; we also become less and less able to provide essential food aid as we switch to lower yield farming techniques—organic crops are just one example. So consumerism must die a quick, clean death. The human race will destroy itself all the more rapidly if we do not quickly switch to subsistence living.
The second major problem with the world is power: as a race we use a phenomenal quantity of energy every year, most of which is provided by the burning of fossil fuels, the by-products of which are often greenhouse gases. As the human race grows, our power requirements grow with us, and as we become an ever more technological race, so they grow more. No matter how clean we make fossil fuel burning, it just isn’t going to work. So what’s the answer? The question of power provision is probably the most divisive issue in green politics. Personally, I am more than unconvinced about wind and sea power. These “natural” forms of power generation have only ever been used as a top-up to our existing power stations, and in order to replace all fossil fuel based power stations, I worry that we would need weather-changing numbers of wind turbines. Harnessing the power of the sea is also dangerous: ringing the coast of the UK with floating generators would undoubtedly mess with tides, and the stagnation of our coastline does not strike me as a desirable phenomenon. Perhaps controversially, I believe the only way we can slow global warming is through massive capital investment in nuclear power stations. If memory serves, Canadian scientists have developed a fission reactor that produces next to no waste, but up to this point it hasn’t been widely adopted because governments like dirty reactors: depleted uranium comes in very handy when you’re at war. War-mongering aside, good nuclear reactors, monitored diligently, have nearly spotless safety records. There is, however, a significant risk posed by terrorist organisations. An attack on just one nuclear reactor could endanger hundreds of thousands of people. I feel that this is not in any way an insurmountable problem: we could build underground power stations (to protect from 9/11-like air attacks), and a clean reactor would not produce waste that could be used in “dirty bombs”. The question remains open, but whatever the solution, it needs to come fast. The third and last problem is organisation of information. Should a worst-case apocalypse occur, we will want to retain as much information as possible throughout a stabilisation period. To have entered the Dark Ages without the Arabs would have been a disaster for humanity. To lose everything now, when the scope of human knowledge is so much wider, would be indescribably moronic. Is James Lovelock’s “start up guide” the answer? If we are limited in what we can carry over, how do we choose what to discard? Will paper last long enough? What if we store human knowledge in a language that no-one understands 1000 years from now? These, and all the questions raised by this topic are difficult to answer, and while you must now turn the page, we must all ponder them as we stand at the crossroads of history.