The Earth Doesn't Care about what is done to or for it

[OconRecon]

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The Earth Doesn’t Care

About what is done to or for it.



Andrew Harrer / Bloomberg News
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The cover of The American Scholar quarterly carries an impertinent assertion: “The Earth Doesn’t Care if You Drive a Hybrid.” The essay inside is titled “What the Earth Knows.” What it knows, according to Robert B. Laughlin, co-winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physics, is this: What humans do to, and ostensibly for, the earth does not matter in the long run, and the long run is what matters to the earth. We must, Laughlin says, think about the earth’s past in terms of geologic time.



For example: The world’s total precipitation in a year is about one meter—“the height of a golden retriever.” About 200 meters—the height of the Hoover Dam—have fallen on earth since the Industrial Revolution. Since the Ice Age ended, enough rain has fallen to fill all the oceans four times; since the dinosaurs died, rainfall has been sufficient to fill the oceans 20,000 times. Yet the amount of water on earth probably hasn’t changed significantly over geologic time.



Damaging this old earth is, Laughlin says, “easier to imagine than it is to accomplish.” There have been mass volcanic explosions, meteor impacts, “and all manner of other abuses greater than anything people could inflict, and it’s still here. It’s a survivor.”


Laughlin acknowledges that “a lot of responsible people” are worried about atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels. This has, he says, “the potential” to modify the weather by raising average temperatures several degrees centigrade and that governments have taken “significant, although ineffective,” steps to slow the warming. “On the scales of time relevant to itself, the earth doesn’t care about any of these governments or their legislation.”




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Buy a hybrid, turn off your air conditioner, unplug your refrigerator, yank your phone charger from the wall socket—such actions will “leave the end result exactly the same.” Someday, all the fossil fuels that used to be in the ground will be burned. After that, in about a millennium, the earth will dissolve most of the resulting carbon dioxide into the oceans. (The oceans have dissolved in them “40 times more carbon than the atmosphere contains, a total of 30 trillion tons, or 30 times the world’s coal reserves.”) The dissolving will leave the concentration in the atmosphere only slightly higher than today’s. Then “over tens of millennia, or perhaps hundreds” the earth will transfer the excess carbon dioxide into its rocks, “eventually returning levels in the sea and air to what they were before humans arrived on the scene.” This will take an eternity as humans reckon, but a blink in geologic time.



It seems, Laughlin says, that “something, presumably a geologic regulatory process, fixed the world’s carbon dioxide levels before humans arrived” with their SUVs and computers. Some scientists argue that “the photosynthetic machinery of plants seems optimized” to certain carbon dioxide levels. But “most models, even pessimistic ones,” envision “a thousand-year carbon dioxide pulse followed by glacially slow decay back to the pre-civilization situation.”



Laughlin believes that humans can “do damage persisting for geologic time” by “biodiversity loss”—extinctions that are, unlike carbon dioxide excesses, permanent. The earth did not reverse the extinction of the dinosaurs. Today extinctions result mostly from human population pressures—habitat destruction, pesticides, etc.—but “slowing man-made extinctions in a meaningful way would require drastically reducing the world’s human population.” Which will not happen.



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There is something like a pathology of climatology. To avoid mixing fact and speculation, earth scientists are, Laughlin says, “ultraconservative,” meaning they focus on the present and the immediate future: “[They] go to extraordinary lengths to prove by means of measurement that the globe is warming now, the ocean is acidifying now, fossil fuel is being exhausted now, and so forth, even though these things are self-evident in geologic time.”



Climate change over geologic time is, Laughlin says, something the earth has done “on its own without asking anyone’s permission or explaining itself.” People can cause climate change, but major glacial episodes have occurred “at regular intervals of 100,000 years,” always “a slow, steady cooling followed by abrupt warming back to conditions similar to today’s.”



Six million years ago the Mediterranean dried up. Ninety million years ago there were alligators in the Arctic. Three hundred million years ago Northern Europe was a desert and coal formed in Antarctica. “One thing we know for sure,” Laughlin says about these convulsions, “is that people weren’t involved.”

[PB&J]

It's not that it matters whether or not the "Earth cares;" it is that those bad scenarios that have been predicted could severely impact human life. I mean, who gives a damn about crazy ass weather shifts, water shortages and stuff like that if there isn't any life to be affected? It is when it starts negatively affecting our lives, or life in general where we get a problem.

[Legacy Fan]

Great article, O. Totally agree. Also agree with PB&J (albeit selfishly), that the earth can have all the class 5's spinners it wants to, as long as they leave me & my family alone (and other people too!)


But again, this could be the Earth's way of saying, "Maybe y'all shouldn't build a house 50 yds from the ocean. Just sayin'."

[DeadWombat]

While we're at it, lets just light forest fires everywhere and kill all living plants in the continent. After all, the earth doesn't care.... 50 million years from now, there will be new ones.

....

Yea, great logic. As a biologist I can't tell you how incorrect this view could possibly be. Sure... technically in the long run nothing matters, but that's an incredibly selfish, short-sighted way of looking at things. I hear the same arguments from college guys who defend their daily chain smoking.

"Hey, I'm gonna die eventually so it doesn't matter what I do."

Hey, good job! So, go kill yourself and save the rest of us the trouble.

The last thing we need is for people to start going along with this way of thinking. Especially when human kind has been responsible for the extinction of thousands of species of organisms, the decline of nearly every single habitat except the desert, and the destruction of ecosystems around the world. This article completely ignores all the problems humanity has caused by their own short-sightedness. This article only encourages even more short-sightedness by essentially saying nothing matters at all. Its just an article about nihilism candy-coated with an anti-hybrid message.

As the most dominant and intelligent species on this planet, is it our duty to be its care taker.... This article is an attractive message because it absolves us of all responsibility and tells us to do whatever we feel like doing.

But it all this article does is encourage nothing short of selfishness and naivety.




.... and I'm not even getting into the extremely biased and skewed arguments he brings up. Neutral point of view, this ain't.

[Sez.EJ]

The earth can flick off the human race like a dog shakes off a flea. However, It is our duty to take care of the planet. God gave us that responsibility when we were created. But being sinful as we are.. we abuse our gifts.

26 Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all[b] the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” 27 So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. 28 Then God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

However..the above passage came before the fall of man..When we were perfect and not sinful.. That did not last long. So we abused and destroyed our gift. I know I'll catch grief about this..but I believe in God as the creator and saviour of my life.

[RPrepublic]

Amen brother preach it!! It is our responsibility to care for the earth. Global warming im not so sure. as described we have had meteors volcanos all kinds of stuff happen that put more in our atmosphere than we could. I am completely against pollutants that directly kill flora and fauna because that leaves less for us and less for our children. example being the destruction of our reefs that support so many organisms in the food chain and can have a huge impact on putting food on my table. Global warming however is a theory and its been admitted by scientists that there has been no significant warming in the last 15 years. 1976 cover of Nat Geo proclaimed there was an impending Ice Age!!