Part II: Who are we saving the planet for?
The first part of this series tried to find out why there is so much hysteria over global warming – what dire consequences from global warming will end life as we know it…???
This second part looks at some of the ’solutions’ being proposed seem to be ‘reduce global warming at all costs’ – where ‘all costs’ seems to be at the expense of the environment and the many ecosystems that make up this world. Will reducing CO2 emissions have a big impact on man? What are we trying to preserve here? The environment and all its inhabitants on the planet? Or the levels of a gas which at best, will warm the planet a few degrees and most likely, only impact upon lifeforms which are already threatened by man invading and changing their natural habitat?
Silly solutions which would work to reduce human guilt but do nothing for the inhabitants of multiple ecosystems include:
Seeding the atmosphere with sulphur
If volcano’s can do it, why can’t we? Do people not remember that we spent the better part of the 60s, 70s and 80s reducing sulphur pollution because of acid rain problems?! And now scientific modelling also suggests than sulphur particles increase the hole in the ozone layer. But many seem to feel sacrificing the ozone layer over the Antarctica is OK, because not much lives down there. A lot lives down there, and the depletion in the ozone layer is the one thing which has been conclusively proven to be man made and the one thing we did seem to have been successful at turning the corner on and ‘healing’ it. How long would it be before penguins become ‘endangered’ as the polar bear if we start seeding the atmosphere with sulphur?
Biofuels
Growing food for fuels is a very inefficient and wasteful source of energy. Growing enough corn to fill one 60 liter tank will feed a person for a year. What a waste.
Top that off with vast amounts of native bushland and forest being cleared for people to grow various non-native plants for biofuels, and the vast amount of fertilisers which will ultimately be needed to keep these crops going, and you have an ongoing ecodisaster brewing for native habitats.
Curbing CO2 emissions
There’d probably be some kick to this – but not from reducing CO2 emissions from cars and power plants. Probably more from the same technology would make energy capture more efficient, pollution a lot less and hopefully, eventually, push people off buying products that use petroleum for fuel.
Of course… geologists have been preaching for decades that the oil dependency was going to end. A lot of the time they were accused of crying wolf. Sadly, the predictions are coming true and while the rest of the world buried their head in the sand about a pending end to unlimited oil, the end in 2008 is beginning to look a lot closer.
But it is not curbing CO2 emissions that concerns us, its technology being developed that only prolongs the use of petroleum based products by reducing the amount of petroleum used. It is time to invest in new, cleaner, petroleum free technology!
Seeding the ocean with iron filings
Horrifying! We can’t even manage fish stocks and scientists want to meddle with the bottom of the food chain to create vast patches of algae which will suck up CO2. But the covering the ocean in vast green patches, preventing light from penetrating to greater depths and pushing out other biota that live in the area being seeded by iron could have devastating effects on the food chain. Kill the little plants that used to grow where the algae now grows and the little zooplankton no longer have food. No zooplankton, no food for little fish, no little fish no food for larger fish, no large fish, no food for the really large fish – and mammals like whales and dolphins…
Think of a lake covered in a green algal bloom – no fish swim there, no life except insects seems to survive there… Want proof? Check out the alarming growth of permanent and season ‘dead zones‘ along coastlines around the world where fertilisers run off encourages algal blooms…
Pumping water from the cold ocean floor to the top
Aiiii! The ocean currents are one of the main things keeping our planet a pleasant temperature! It is a system which has been working for millions of years! Why meddle with it? Even if enough cold water could be pumped to the surface to effect ocean currents, the effect on all those warm-water loving species at the surface would be devastating. Vast tracts of ocean devoid of fish anyone? And lets not forget, at the end of the day, our ocean currents are currently propelled largely by Antarctica and Greenland, neither of which is going to melt in the next few 1000 years – so it will be a constant battle to fight mother nature on this one as Antarctica and Greenland will be oblivious to any attempt to cool waters away from their reaches and will constantly be creating cold denser water to propel the Ocean Conveyor belt.
At the end of the day, many methods proposed to counteract global warming seem mainly to focus on reducing CO2 emissions at the expense of the environment. And yet, the efforts to reduce the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere seem to be extraordinarily out of proportion to the whatever the intended result is – but appear to inflict even more damage on the environment than the actual act of global warming!
Ecoethix advocates a sustainable existence with the environment. To do that, the human race has to recognise two things:
- We need to learn to live and work with our environment. The climate is always fluctuating between slightly hotter and slightly colder. We need to make sure when we build our permanent settlements and clear land for crops, we respect the elements of nature which threaten them e.g rising sea level, storms, rising rivers banks, earthquakes, land slides, bushfires etc, and make sure we are protected from those natural hazards. Not focus on one thing – an element of climate we have at best, very little influence over, and then try to do everything to make the concentration of one gas in the atmosphere constant.
- Focus on developing clean energy that is NOT petroleum dependent in ANY way shape or form. Even nuclear is cleaner than petroleum… Responsible disposal of the wasted energy rods would reduce the threat from nuclear warheads. The western world needs to stop having a ‘not in my backyard attitude’ and admit, if we want to be sure nuclear waste is being disposed of cleanly and effectively, then we need to also develop the ‘bunkers’ that the waste rods will be buried in at the end of their life. For the next 3000 years. Uranium is probably the world’s answer to its huge energy demands – until the population reduces substantially and then maybe, other methods such as solar and wind can more adequately meet demand.
