Life abounds on our planet, but is the planet alive?
In Plato’s Greece, the word hubris
meant something quite different from the idea of overbearing confidence or
pride which we think of today. If mortals, out of hubris, did something to
offend the gods, those very gods would punish the offender. People and gods
had different roles in the world, and people, who were the subordinate
players, needed to take care.As this book looks to
the future, it needs to consider how to temper hubris with humility.
This history has made several references
to global warming. Science has demonstrated that these developments are,
beyond reasonable doubt, clear and present outcomes of fossil fuel
consumption. This activity is already affecting Alberta oil sands, for
example.
As far as oil sands operations are
concerned, the risk of forest fire disruptions has been on the rise for more
than a decade. That was the view of Mike Flannigan, director of the
University of Alberta’s Western Partnership for Wildland Fire Science.
“Global warming and climate change are real,” he said, “and they are
affecting the way the oil sands business operates.”
He said it was no coincidence that
Earth’s hottest ten years all took place in the 21st century. Indeed,
the 2014-2015 meteorological winter – from the beginning of December to
February 28th – was the warmest Earth had seen since
record-keeping began, more than 135 years ago. Another piece of evidence:
Alberta’s official fire season now starts March 1 – a full month earlier than
only five or 10 years ago.
Thomas Newcomen invented the first
commercial true steam engine, and in 1712 it quickly found a role pumping
water out of coal mines in northern England. As we have seen, since that
time, industry has found ever more uses for hydrocarbon-fuelled machines,
which meant that fewer and fewer people could produce more with less effort.
The outcome? “It
is wholly a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuel is
equivalent to a diminished consumption. The very contrary is the
truth.” The coal and petroleum stored deep within Earth over hundreds of
millions of years began to burn around the world, disturbing an equilibrium
developed over long periods of geological time.
Imagine our planet as a living creature –
bigger, more ancient and more complex than anything we could have imagined
before. That concept isn’t new – many peoples have seen Earth and our seas as
members of a pantheon of gods and goddesses. One of those names, Gaia, is a
transliteration of the name for the Greek goddess representing Earth. It has
also been transliterated into the Latin alphabet as “Ge,” and is a root for
the words “geography,” “geometry” and “geology”.
In September 1965, the British thinker
James Lovelock – with early support from Lynn Margulis, an American, and
other colleagues – came up with a notion he later developed into what he
called the Gaia hypothesis.
Because of his involvement with America’s
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which played a role in the American space program,
Lovelock had given considerable thought to issues related to interplanetary
space. So when the discussion turned to searching for life on nearby planets
he suggested searching for the reversal of entropy – the tendency of
closed systems to move endlessly toward greater disorder – a situation every
teenager’s parent observes in that boy’s or girl’s bedroom. Put another way,
the idea was to see whether there were any systems in Mars or Venus that
organized themselves, rather than moved toward increasing disorder. His
observation, of course, reflected the reality that living systems on Earth
continually reorder themselves – that is, reverse entropy.
Lovelock explains the concept in
his autobiography. “Chance favoured me with a view of the Earth from space
and I saw it as the stunningly beautiful anomaly of the solar system – a
planet that was palpably different from its dead and deserted siblings, Mars
and Venus,” he said. “I saw Earth as much more than just a ball of rock
moistened by the oceans, or a space ship put there by a beneficent God just
for the use of humankind,” he said. Since the planet originated nearly four
billion years ago, it “kept itself a fit home for the life that
happened upon it and I thought that it did so by homeostasis, the wisdom of
the body, just as you and I keep our temperature and chemistry constant. In
this view the spontaneous evolution of life did more than make Darwin’s
world: it created a joint project with the evolving earth itself. Life does
more than adapt to Earth; it changes it, and evolution is a tight-coupled
dance with life and the material environment as partners and from the dance
emerges the entity Gaia.”
After publishing his book about Gaia,
Lovelock received a mountain of criticism from other scientists. To express
the idea in another way, he developed a mathematical model which he called
Daisyworld. While never expecting it to be more than a caricature, he later
called it “my proudest invention” – a model that served as “a parable about
Gaia and Earth System Science.” He later developed it into a computer
simulation, which uses a simple model of a planet with two kinds of daisies
(one slightly darker than the other) and a sun which, like the one in our
solar system, has been growing progressively brighter and warmer for billions
of years. Although controversial still, to many his model helped confirm the
theory.
From far away it is possible to see Earth
as a living planet, according to the Gaia hypothesis. The atmospheric
compositions of its sister planets, Venus and Mars, are 95-96% carbon
dioxide, 3-4% nitrogen, with traces of oxygen, argon and methane. By
contrast, Earth’s atmosphere is 79% nitrogen and 21% oxygen, with traces of
carbon dioxide, methane and argon. By itself, the composition of our
atmosphere would cause interstellar atmospheric scientists to scratch their
collective heads, since oxygen has a habit of oxidizing everything in sight,
forming stable compounds. Similarly, nitrogen forms nitrates, which logically
should simply dissolve into seas, lakes, and oceans. According to Lovelock,
the difference was Gaia, which transformed the outer layer of the planet into
environments suitable for further growth. For example, bacteria and
photosynthetic algae began some 2.8 billion years ago, extracting the carbon
dioxide and releasing oxygen into the atmosphere, setting the stage for
larger and more energetic creatures powered by combustion.
As Lovelock explained the system,
self-regulating feedback mechanisms keep the planet habitable despite extreme
disequilibrium everywhere. The elements in the atmosphere are remarkably
stable – indeed, they are optimal for Earth’s dominant organisms. Gaia
mostly hosts carbon-based life, and those organisms require oxygen to breathe
and low levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to maintain moderate
temperatures. Indeed, for billions of years the brightness of the sun has
been increasing, which means that, if carbon sequestration had not developed
naturally, reducing to trace amounts the presence of carbon dioxide and
methane in the atmosphere, the temperature of our planet would have been
increasing instead of undergoing billions of years of decline.
To a large degree through the agency of microorganisms,
Earth developed systems for storing these molecules safely away. “The
continental shelves may also be vital in the regulation of the oxygen-carbon
cycle,” Lovelock said. “It is through the burial of carbon in the anaerobic
muds of the sea-bed that a net increment of oxygen of oxygen in the
atmosphere is ensured. Without carbon burial, which leaves one additional
oxygen molecule in the air for each carbon atom thus removed from the cycle
of photosynthesis and respiration, oxygen would inevitably decline in
concentration in the atmosphere until it almost reached the vanishing-point.”
If the Gaia hypothesis reflects what
industrial hubris may have wrought upon our planet, the petroleum industry’s
recent response to the issue does not reflect the environmental optimism that
Rick George, for example, displayed. In the 1990s
responded to criticism from environmentalists by encouraging debate about
climate change, and increased their investments in renewable energy. The
higher oil prices following the Great Recession, however, led the industry to
scale back its loss-making green-energy businesses. Instead, they
invested heavily in petroleum production and development.