Tim Flannery is one of my favorite scientisits to watch. Even so, I haven’t been keeping a close enough eye on him. Somehow this slipped by me. Flannery is arguing that if we keep on our current track with carbon emissions, we’re going to have to take drastic geoengineering action in order to maintain Earth as an environment suitable for continuing human evolution.
His solution: inject sulphur into the upper atmosphere to create a “global dimming effect” that will slow down global warming. In essence, he’s talking about replicating the effects of massive volcanic eruptions (think Krakatoa).
This is Big Scary Science, no doubt about it. A desperate Hail Mary pass aimed at heading off looming disaster. Flannery warns that we “don’t know” what the eventual impact of doing this would be. All we know for sure is that it would change the color of the sky … hence the title of this post, which should already have Gibson fans laughing. Or maybe crying.
PS — I just realized that I actually managed to mention global warming and evolution in one and the same post. Bring on the trolls!
PS — I just realized that I actually managed to mention global warming and evolution in one and the same post. Bring on the trolls!
But if evolution is true, surely we'll simply evolve to thrive with higher CO2 levels? (c.f. Venus – a totally cool place to live for the highly CO2 evolved organism, with extra sulphurous clouds).
I wonder if Venus is what happens when a technogenic civilisation tries to retard induced climate change, using politicians for decision making?
Wow, that sounds like a really drastic approach to global warming. Maybe we'll run out of fossil fuels before we need to go there.
Ah yes! The "if evolution works" argument. One of my favorites. I actually heard someone make this argument about frogs and the ozone layer once. And though I'd like to be generous and try to make the guy not sound like an idiot, he really was basically arguing that the fact that frogs weren't adapting to the hole in the ozone layer must mean evolution was "wrong." You really have to wonder what these people have between their ears ….
Hmm. Chris – I am going to take issue with you about your use use of the word ‘evolution’. I think what you may mean is ‘social evolution of humans’(which is IMO an abuse of the word evolution, anyway), rather than biological evolution – physiological changes – transmitted in the genome of the species to future generations. While you’ll still find a few proponents of the gradual genetic drift theories of biological evolution, a great deal of the fossil evidence, as well as the maths, points to evolution being saltational, and occuring when you have a combination of catastrophic change and low population. In other words – catastrophic global warming is more likely to cause human evolutionary change, than a lack of catastrophy. Of course, the caveat is that 99.999999999999% of evolutionary changes in the genome are not successful, and most become extinct (I always say ‘evolution’ conveys the wrong image – I think we should regard it as the rare and fortuitous survival of an extinction event by genetic change – but I guess that’s a bit of a mouthful.)
Personally I am hoping that humans don’t evolve in the natural fashion
(bio-engineering is a different matter)
Flannery’s last resort has IMO a fair chance of happening willy-nilly given the state of Katla and the date of it’s last activity.
I do apologise for the evolution ‘trolling’
Okay, you nailed me. I’m a confirmedd Dawkinite. I believe in the Power of the Meme! On the other hand I do hear your point about saltational evolution. Evolution, as you say, proceeds from crisis to crisis, and ironically the people who are cheerfully trashing our planet are doing a great deal to forward a process that many of them profess not to believe in. But on the third hand, we cannot saltate unless we have a life supporting biome to saltate into. And though a lot of science fiction (mine included, at times) portrays self-supporting biomes as ‘just around the corner’ a brief recap of the histories of Skylab, the International Space Station, the Biome Project, etc, shows that our track record of actually producing them is abysmal. So I guess what I was after in wantonly throwing around the E-bomb was simply this: that if we want to avoid going the way of the dinosaurs, we should probably try not to break the biosphere we have until we’ve actually figured out how to build a new one.
3)Are bad for the current socio-economic meme – ‘we can buy things to fix that’ – which simply don’t factor in the environmental cost of new products. It would require a lot more rigid environmental accounting of just when it is environmentally a good thing – for example to buy a new hybrid instead of driving your old clunker another 5 years.
Ok, long diatribe. Sorry. Sitting with my sick baby-dog and needed some distraction.