[at-l] ANWR (Warming)

[rafeb@adelphia.net (rafeb@adelphia.net)]

On 9 Feb 2002 at 22:40, Clark Wright wrote:

> This debate always brings a smile to my lips; a perfect foil for my
> prior efforts at a bit more overall philosophizing.  If one accepts that
> the Earth is millions of years old, and that humans have only been here
> a small fraction of that time, then the first dose of humility is that
> we have a truly slender reed of time/data to work with.  The reed gets
> slimmer still when we talk about geological evidence of warming and
> cooling trends (ice ages, etc.); the reed just about disappears when we
> shrink back to recorded history; smaller still is the data set of
> reliable weather temp readings - my point being simply that it is very
> hard to say much re trends in the real big picture sense.  Having said
> that, I do not think many doubt that the present trend is towards
> warmer; recession of last ice age is a good place to start.  Where the
> real debate is, is over causation, and here we come to our own
> puritanical guilt complex, combined with inherent human egocentricities
> - i.e., we assume we have the power to impact such trends, and then we
> feel we must be impacting them "badly" [there is another one of those
> qualitiative value terms!]  In the long term geologic sense, who the
> heck knows; in the short term sense, if we are indeed accelerating
> global warming - and there is significant [albeit from a very thin data
> set timeline wise] evidence of that fact - then what should we do about
> it is a much more difficult question than it might seem at first blush. 

<snip>

This argument too fades away when you consider the age of the 
earth, and the period of most such geological cycles, compared 
to the time during which humans have existed on the earth in numbers large
enough to make a difference, or with the means to make a difference.

The odds of all this happening during *my* brief stay on planet 
Earth are so small as to be laughable -- and yet the changes 
have been large and obvious.  Then again, the population of 
homo sapiens has more than doubled in that short time, from 
less than 3 billion to over 6 billion.

The atmosphere may seem vast from where you sit, but it in fact 
there are about five or six miles of useable oxygen between the sea 
and the vacuum of outer space.  Most people would go unconscious 
in a minute or two breathing the air at 30,000 feet.

Small changes in the composition of the atmosphere can have 
huge effects, as we are just beginning to learn.  Few would argue 
any more that CFCs, even in small quantities, aren't intensely 
harmful to the atmosphere.

It's not so much "guilt" to want to slow this trend, but simply our 
continued existence (as humans) that may be at stake.  Perhaps 
not in your lifetime or mine, but over time, the risk is too large 
to ignore.

No doubt this is will be a difficult undertaking.  Overuse of fossil fuel
is one thing, but when you come right down to it, the use of fire really
is one of the key distinguishing features of our species, from the very
beginning.


rafe b.
aka terrapin