The sky may or may not be falling
Last night I watched a really interesting program on the History Channel about the history of the Earth. The geologic record tells this incredible story about where the Earth has been…it’s been a pretty violent history and there is no evidence that indicates that the Earth is not still vulnerable to cataclysmic events that would wipe the slate clean once again. From volcanic eruptions across an area as big as Siberia to other forces of nature that created the land bridge between North and South America, subsequently changing ocean currents, lowering the average global temperature and plunging us into an ice age, these events in our home’s history serve as a reminder of how truly small, insignificant and young we are as a species.
This rise and fall of Earth through the eons made me think of climate change and the role we play in exacerbating it, or our lack of a role, depending on who you talk to. I have always been a waffler on the climate change issue and have not spent a lot of time thinking about why that is. This show helped crystallize some of the thoughts that have been swimming around in my head.
First- that any change in climate patterns due to human action are insignificant in both scale and time. We are talking about scale in thousands of years, and Earth is on the hundreds of millions of years time clock when it comes to shifts in global climate. So, the moral of the story is that, no matter how badly we behave, we aren’t going to have a either a hugely positive nor a vastly negative impact on the life of Earth on the geologic scale.
So, when you really think about it, the only thing we have to lose when it comes to debating about climate change is life as we humans know it. Sliding the global temperature thermometer one way or the other by a few degrees over the course of the next couple of hundred years isn’t going to hurt anything but everything we hold dear.
The moral of the story? Even if you think global climate change is a load of hogwash dreamed up by tree huggers, if you are a human lover, a society lover, then maybe we shouldn’t take that chance. The Earth can take care of itself. And it may just take care of us as well.
