Editorial comment

	Vol. 229 No.4
PERRY A. FISCHER, EDITOR

The problem with nature

We humans haven’t cared about how natural anything in our lives was - at least not until “food” vendors started telling us that their manufactured, processed-caloric fodder was “natural” on the package. Yet, as a remarkably stupid political backlash for and against global warming, the naturalness of the phenomenon is of utmost importance. It’s as if another ice age or an inland sea was perfectly OK with folks.

A friend and I were talking about the billionaire Richard Branson’s offer of $25 million to anyone who can figure out a viable way to remove at least a billion tons of carbon dioxide a year from the Earth’s atmosphere. I wondered if CO₂ escaping from a volcano would qualify as being part of the atmosphere. “Would some sort of loose-fitting dome over the richest CO₂-belching volcano, followed by deep-sea sequestration, work?”

“No, it wouldn’t,” he answered, “because that’s natural CO₂.”

“How would that matter?” I asked.

“It would, because it’s not man-made; it’s natural CO₂,” he repeated.

(My friend is not the sharpest knife in the drawer.)

“Look,” I said, “If you think about it, whether climate changes are caused by humans or Nature, the solution set is generally the same. There could be some fine, but important points to discover, which is why research should continue, but the choice of solutions is likely the same.”

About 90 million years ago, the Gulf of Mexico was connected to Hudson Bay. If that were threatening to happen today, and it was what most folks wanted, then we could negotiate with the Great Plains residents and the Waterfront Realtors Association and come to some sort of agreement. Regrettably, both groups would no doubt lobby Congress and muck up the situation. New Orleans and the Netherlands would just have to move. Incidentally, those two places have millions of people who live below sea level-how natural is that?

Don’t like inland waterfront real estate? Then how about an ice age? If “climate change” today meant a rapidly advancing global ice sheet, would we let the naturalness of it convince us to do nothing?

Most people who like nature like only a small part of it. They don’t like being in the rain. Or the cold, or the heat. And they definitely don’t like most insects. “Oh, the mountains of Alaska are fantastic,” I remember saying, as thousands of black flies swarmed about, flying in and out of my nostrils. You haven’t experienced nature until you’ve swallowed a black fly. And the giant mosquitoes there sting when they bite. The problem with nature is that it’s all outdoors. I like those few perfect days a year, when the temperature, humidity and insect level are just right.

Does the fact that most of us love nature and want to enjoy it, but in a safe comfortable way, mean that we are arrogant? Truth be told, at least in our attitudes toward Nature, humans are indeed arrogant. Ahh...! The bearness of the bear. The deerness of the deer. It’s all so beautiful. “I love watching nature. I saw a bear today!” Yea, sure, through the windows of your new mountaintop home, the very location of which, especially considering the building materials, the driveway and road to get to it, destroyed more bear habitat than an outdoor global warming concert-and that’s a lot. Most nature lovers want a home in the woods, maybe even a mountaintop view, but they want nature to stay on the other side of a window, except for on those rare perfect-weather days.

Solutions to global warming are predicated on the belief that humans prefer the present-day climate to any other. Certainly other species do, given that they need very slow environmental change-at least a few thousand years-in order to evolve and adapt to the change. About half of all the species alive today will be gone by the turn of the century, due to changes on many fronts-climate is just one of them-that are occurring too rapidly for adaptation to occur.

When it comes to climate, in all likelihood, you have the same solution set no matter whether the cause is human or Nature. Too much or too little sunlight? Too hot or too cold? Either way, you have to change the atmosphere or the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth. “Just” lower or raise the amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, or put up a space-based shade/reflector. That should fix it. Like it or not, sooner or later, we humans will have to take responsibility as stewards of this planet. Oceans, air, water and land. What’s needed is to put some real effort into geo-engineering research.

There are many geo-engineering schemes that offer the potential of solving climate-change problems, but so far, they are little more than back-of-the-napkin ideas that need funding for modeling and supercomputer time. Some are space based, envisioning an armada of giant foil reflectors or millions of foil-thin diffraction rings to shade or reflect sunlight away from or toward the Earth. Other schemes involve sequestering vast amounts of CO₂ in soil, or on the deep ocean seafloor or in the subsurface. Still others have noted that various powerful aerosols, if placed in the atmosphere at the right levels, can increase the reflectance of clouds. There are many more.

Given our rather dismal success rate at modifying ecosystems, especially through the introduction of invasive species, we should use extreme caution in applying geo-engineering to the Earth, and favor those methods that are reversible, such as the space-based ideas.

We finally got funding for projects to catalog and measure the threat to life on Earth from asteroid or comet collisions, from both the US and Europe. It seems to be, at most, a 1-in-10,000 chance and is funded at a commensurate level; contingency plans are being considered by a small group of scientists. (Score one point for the humans.) We should also invest in research to develop geo-engineering schemes at a level that is equal to the threat of climate change. It’s time that we took our role as Ruler and Dominant Species on this planet more seriously.

Millions of species have come and gone on this planet: giant sloths, pterodactyls, horse-dogs, and so on. Our species has been around for about 3 million years. Civilization, for about 10,000 or so. Intuitively, no one should be surprised if we are just a few centuries or so away from extinction. Ice ages, asteroids, supervolcanoes-there are several ways that we could disappear. Handling global warming is just a practice run.