In 1942, mainland Australia was nearly invaded by a Japanese force fighting its way through the mountains and jungles of New Guinea, which Australian diggers (soldiers) engaged, halted and repelled on the bitterly contested Kokoda Track. Now, with the carbon crisis, another enemy is upon us — and it is time to awaken from the dreaming of better days to meet this challenge.
The most concerning feature of the carbon crisis is the news that too much carbon in the air, as carbon dioxide (CO2), has been entering the oceans and turning the old briny acidic — threatening to dissolve shells and undermine the global food chain. We are warned that the final destination of this process could result in giant algal blooms in dying oceans releasing toxic hydrogen sulphide gas — that can kill life on land and destroy the ozone layer.
It is now feared that this has happened before on Earth — and most dramatically in an event called the Great Dying, 251 million years ago, during which most of life on Earth perished. It took life 50 million years to recover from that blow with renewed evolutionary diversity.
The Great Dying happened over a period of 200,000 years, but the human impact of rapidly releasing a high volume of carbon into the air during the industrial era may now herald a much swifter and more catastrophic disaster.
When we have a sensitive system, as with the body of the living Earth, we may wonder why Mother Nature would allow a conscious species of life to interfere with her life-support systems. The answer to that puzzle could lie in life’s simple drive for expansion toward greater diversity.
Life on Earth is of itself unable to expand into space, or we would see strange forms swimming around in the Solar system, soaking in solar energy and feasting on comets. The emergence of a tool-making species that can build spaceships changes the equation for life’s expansion beyond Earth, but to achieve space technology requires the use of fossil fuel, long sequestered by Nature in the belly of the Earth.
If we can imagine the process as one of Nature giving birth to life beyond Earth, then fossil fuel can be seen as the birth-booster at a very sophisticated level of evolution. In this context, to delay the call of Nature for stellar expansion and burn fossil fuel too long, turns the birth-booster into a toxin to life and puts the whole planet at risk of stillbirth.
One of the first scientists to warn the world about the carbon problem was James Hansen, now head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Hansen is concerned that unless we keep CO2 levels below 350 parts per million (ppm), now at 388.92ppm, we run the risk of creating a second Venus, where the rocks glow in a heat that can melt lead, which he calls the Venus syndrome (p.223 ‘Storms of My Grandchildren’ 2010).
Cosmologists are puzzled as to why there is no evidence of extra-terrestrial intelligence in the cosmos. In the light of Hansen’s warning, we may wonder if many species have arisen on planets across the Universe to challenge infinity, but burned their birth-booster too long and drove their planet into a hot stillbirth.
If we survive our current carbon crisis, we may in time discover the husks of failed civilizations on Venus-like planets around distant stars and know the answer to the great silence from the stars. Do we need to lay our eyes on such stark evidence before we get serious about making the transition from an Earth-based carbon economy to a civilization built on stellar energy that could last as long as the stars shine?
In his 2009 book ‘The Vanishing Face of Gaia’, James Lovelock, originator of the Gaia theory for Earth’s life-support systems, pointed out that our Sun is now 25 per cent hotter than at the dawn of life 3.5 billion years ago and will one day expand to the size of Earth’s orbit as our star becomes a red giant in 5 billion years. Global warming on Earth will be an irreversible reality long before then.
Read the rest on Independent Australia, with related links, HERE
