Burning Dinosaurs Will Make Us Dinosaurs.
In December 2020, António Guterres, Secretary General of the United Nations, declared that “the planet is broken” in a speech at Columbia University. The following is why.
Toxic gases, such as those from cars, would never naturally have been put back into the atmosphere. The planet is a living, self-healing rock covered with a thin layer of life clinging to the surface. Just the top half a kilometre of the earth’s surface supports complex life, whilst at sea, it ranges from the surface to around 10 kilometres deep. The rest of our world is dead rock, magma and iron. Think of an apple’s skin, a layer of life, even thinner, clings to the rock that is our world.
Our atmosphere from space looks like a thin glowing wrapper around our globe. It’s fine, delicate, and precious. Without it, we, and everything else alive doesn’t exist. Our atmosphere has layers from the Troposphere, where we live. to the Exosphere. At sea level, it’s mostly comprised of Nitrogen and Oxygen. As we go higher, Nitrogen and Oxygen thins dramatically. At the higher levels, such as the Stratosphere, Ozone becomes more prevalent. Ozone protects us from the sun’s rays. In the 1980s, the destruction of Ozone caused by human made Chlorofluorocarbons (CFC) gasses was a huge issue and humanity addressed it relatively successfully. The infamous ‘hole in the sky’ was prevented from growing too large at the poles before it impacted billions of people. This was due mainly to a concerted global campaign by governments which resulted in the 1985 Vienna Convention on the Protection of the Ozone Layer and in 1987, the Montreal Protocol. The Ozone threat was backed up by irrefutable science with few contradicting conspiracy theories, possibly due the lack of internet-fuelled misinformation. The solution was, in part, to ban and eliminate CFC propellant from aerosols, deodorants, paint and other common household products.
Coming together and solving that crisis is an example of reversing 50 years of human made atmospheric damage.
However, we have been burning oil and oil-based products for over 150 years and the impact has been far more devastating than the Ozone crisis but still solvable.
The Ozone recovery, in just 30 years, gives hope that if we correct our ways quickly, the planet will right itself naturally. At least, this is what I used to think.
The problem with the burning of fossil-based products is the sheer scale and more importantly, the speed of climate destruction; it’s just too fast for the planet to self-adapt and heal. Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, around 1750, we have burned and emitted 1.5 trillion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere. Today we pump out more than three times the level of CO2 per year compared to 1970. The United States has emitted more than any other country to date (400 billion tonnes since 1750). It’s responsible for 25% of historical emissions alone. The production of crude oil itself also produces 1.7 gigatonnes (1.7 billion tonnes) of carbon dioxide, or 5% of all emissions per year. This is produced from 9,000 oil fields in 90 countries.
Life can adapt, given time. 99.9% of all life has gone extinct since the beginning of life some 3.5 billion years ago. The asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs polluted the air and darkened the skies so much 76% of all species and nearly all of the planet's vegetation was wiped out. The eruption of Krakatoa in the 13th and 15th centuries triggered the Little Ice Age. This was a century long cold period known as a volcanic winter. The ‘Thames Frost Fairs’ took place during this period when Londoners could ice skate on the river. This was a single event from which the earth recovered once the dust eventually settled.
If the Earth can recover from catastrophic atmosphere pollution caused by volcanoes and asteroids, it can recover from the massive scale air contamination we have produced, right? The answer is yes, it can, in time likely reinvent itself, but it will be too late for us. We will be the dinosaurs.
As with the dinosaurs, a marked change in CO2 has always been incompatible with life on earth. All previous five extinction events involved massive increases of atmospheric carbon. Volcanoes take millions of years to produce the amount of atmospheric carbon we have produced in less than 150. We have effectively been burning millions of years’ worth of living organisms all at once. The Earth has taken it on the chin. The heat trapped by our increasing CO2 concentration has been largely absorbed by the planet. The ocean has been absorbing much of the excess heat masking the impact, however it is reaching its limit. The ocean’s inability to continue to absorb more heat has caused Earth to lose its balance. The speed of temperature change is faster than in the last 10,000 years. Too fast for natural recovery. Fossil fuels are the cause.
We don’t perceive geological time. The temperature rise in the last century has been faster than at any other time in the planet’s history. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the “scientific evidence for warming of the climate is unequivocal”. The Earth does periodically warm and cool over millennia. There have been seven cycles of warming and cooling over the past 650,000 years. This is due to minor variations in Earth’s orbit around the sun. The current warming, however, is nothing natural. Most of the warming has occurred in the past 50 years. 2020 was the joint warmest year on record, along with 2016. From satellite ice sheet monitoring, Antarctic ice core drilling and rock analysis, scientists have proven global warming. The oceans absorb 90% of the increased heat. They are almost one degree warmer on average since man walked on the moon. It takes enormous energy to cause this level of increase. We are frogs in the slowly boiling water with our own hand on the gas.
