Jagged Environment
Environmental and social time bombs
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Jagged EnvironmentEnvironmental and social time bombs |
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Mass extinctions |
The GM consumer backlash in the West is just like that heralded over CFC’s, being driven by governments, in control of the developing world. Keeping them in their place by enforcing economic hardship: not “letting them join the club”. The major impact of CFC’s on humans is economic - the costs of the mechanism of substitution and education; and a pressure of stigma to force developing and non-Western countries to comply with that mechanism. The developing world must, of course, deploy resources from other mechanisms (of development) to so comply. Geological records show that a massive and approximately correlated spike in both the atmospheric CO2 level and the global temperature occurred around 130,000 years ago, well before fossil fuels were being burnt. This simply went away again, after about 20,000 years, when the CO2 levels fell and global-cooling ensued, into an ice-age. Our current maximum - of so much concern, and into which so much is being read - actually began around 11,000 years ago! The relationship between CO2 levels and global-temperature is, in fact, less clear-cut than that of a direct correlation between them. More detailed examination of ice-core records shows that an increasing CO2 level follows an increase in the temperature at the Earth’s surface: the lag between the maximum of temperature and that of CO2 being around 900 years! The concentration of methane is also periodic, and matches well that of CO2. It would seem, then, that both arise from increased biological activity on a hotter planet, and that neither is the cause of global-warming, though they will exacerbate its effects. (The costs of removing CO2, by liquifying it and pumping it under the sea or into aquifers will be heavy, and may cause environmental damage in the future should the gas be released into the atmosphere, in addition to the destruction of marine environments by carbonic acid: Author's note). Copyright © 2001 Chris James Last updated 12 March, 2005 |
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