Art, Meaning, Green Living & Health

Lately we've been watching fascinating documentaries on Netflix and reading books * that explore past and potential threats to our planet. Maybe it's just 2012-mania, maybe a bit of intuitive preparation, or maybe just an effect of getting older and ever-closer to our personal "end times." 

First, the Bad News

In any case, humanity surely faces some big challenges now and in the coming decades:

 (1) A rapidly-growing population already beyond the Earth's carrying capacity; 

(2) Global warming that is melting the ice caps, destabilizing the climate, spawning hurricanes, floods,  drought and the melting of Himalayan glaciers that supply the great rivers of Asia on which billions depend for survival. 

(3) Add to that: depleted fisheries, aquifers, forests and coral reefs and lessened oxygen levels from deforestation and carbon-generated acidification of our oceans;

(4) Not to mention what our microwave/RF/cell technologies seem to be doing to reduce honeybees, whose pollination is crucial to crops;

(5) Plus, of course, the unknown longterm impacts of our wholesale release of GMO's, pesticides, radioactive particles and thousands of other dangerous and toxic substances  we've injected into the soil, water and air.

All this is really hard on our food supplies, let alone our health and DNA. So, sadly, it seems inevitable in this century that we will undergo a good-sized population decline from starvation and other issues resulting from our own actions (or inactions). It will be heartbreaking, and heart-opening.

As if that wasn't enough potential catastrophe to deal with,  there are several wild cards that could come our way any time: including occasional monstrous earthquakes, solar flares,volcanic eruptions, asteroid hits, magnetic pole shifts, and glaciations. They could take down the grid, destroy communications, play havoc with the weather and much more.  

Well, that's the bad news in a nutshell, sorry to say.

It's more than enough to make one wonder, can humanity survive all this?

The Good News

The good news is that, yes, we can. We've done it before. 

As it turns out, Homo Sapiens is all about climate change.

In fact, the pressing need to adapt to the especially challenging cold times of the last two million  years is precisely what led to our unique intelligence, language, social cooperation, innovation and the ability to plan. 

Huh? Read on.

Two Million Years Down, Six Million Years to Go

Well, it's a long story, painstakingly pieced together by countless  archaologists and paleoclimatologists from evidence all over the world. Here's the short version of what they've found, as I understand it from some fascinating books.* 

Believe it or not, all we humans have ever known is a Glacial Age, mostly consisting of challenge after challenge.  And ... we've got millions of years to go before it ends.  

The climate has been tough, cold and unstable since our origins. In fact, our big brains are really just one of Nature's evolutionary responses. Only by learning to think, plan and use symbolic language could our nomadic ancestors survive the bitter cold, droughts and shifting landscapes typical of the mostly-cold periods of the current  long Glacial Age. Their smarts enabled them to:

• Make and use hunting tools;

 • Create the cooperative hunts needed to take down large, dangerous Ice Age herbivores best adapted to cold dry conditions;

• Find, gather, preserve and store whatever was available: meat, berries, nuts, tubers, etc.;

• Build fires in caves or nomadic shelters in order to keep from freezing to death (after all, we all started out in Africa);

• Clothe ourselves in thick fur capes (as far as the Neanderthals got), and, eventually, layered sewn clothing (CroMagnons);

• Through language, to share valuable information with neighbors, like  where to find food, water and better conditions (uniquely CroMagnon). 

And that's how we did it. That's how we have so far survived the cold, dry Glacial Age that is all we've ever known. And it seems to be why we made it and the Neanderthals did not.

"Huh? " you may say, "Sure doesn't LOOK or FEEL that cold! And what about global warming?"

For those of us who vaguely thought there were one or two Ice-Age-blips  in the past, with the last one ending about 15-17,000 years ago, it's time for a serious update. Decades of careful science from global archaelogy, paleoclimatology and deep core samples have pieced together a rather surprising picture. Here are the highlights:

• In the last billion years, there have been three major Glacial Ages, each lasting about 8-10 million years.

• We are now just at the start of the third one, which began about 2 million years ago. (brrrr!)

• So far in this Glacial Age, the Earth has gone through 19-20 periods of glaciation  (what you and I think of as Ice Ages, typically 60-90,000 years long ) with shorter inter-glacial warmings in-between  (10-40,000 years). 

• During all of agriculture and recorded civilization, our ancestors have been basking in a shorter "interglacial" (the last  17,000 years).

• The short term forecast: Expect extreme cold and increased glaciation within a few hundred years.

• The long-term forecast: Expect ongoing cold trends and climate gyrations for the next six million years.

  Hang in there, humanity. We can do this. It's all we've ever done, and it's not like the whole planet is under glaciers. It just kinda shifts things around and creates different landscapes and niches. And at least we have a heads-up this time so we can do some prep!

What Creates Glacial Ages?

So what make these long cold spells? In the big picture, each Glacial Age is  thought to be the result of how the continental plates split apart, drift and sometimes obstruct the free flow of warm tropical waters to the poles. Like the Gulf Stream that moderates Europe, a good equatorial-polar exchange has made for a nicer global climate for most of the last billion years. (Think widespread tropics, Californias, Gulf Streams, Mediterraneans, redwoods, dinosaurs, lots of warm ocean...)

But, during  Glacial Ages that flow is relatively obstructed, creating greater contrasts between the Equator and poles. That makes for lousy summers in the high latitudes farther from the tropic, too darn cool to totally melt last winter's snowfall and definitely too cold to grow a decent tomato So, year by year, snow and ice build up, far too much to scrape and shovel. Before long, you've got some mighty glaciers ever-extending their range.

These glacial sheets are huge, locking up global water supplies. That means lower ocean levels (exposing continental shelves, creating bridges between land masses) and less rainfall. The result: most of a long Glacial Age has cold, dry, wind-swept conditions with more grass and scrub, less forests and more large migratory grazing animals like bison, mammoths and their predators (including us). It's not all buried in ice; I'm pretty sure it's still fairly warm in the tropics, but definitely drier and more temperate, more dominated by dry grassy savannahs than by rain forests. That's not all bad. It can make for some large herds of grazing beasts, for example...

Sometimes it's wetter and more enjoyable overall, though, like in this  interglacial period that we now know is soon coming to an end.

 Why the Shorter Interglacial Periods?

Why do these variations even occur in a Glacial Age? It's now been found that by a guy named Milankovitch, that, within all ages since the Earth coalesced from the heavy particles of a supernova some 4-5 billion years ago,  there are certain predictable cycles that significantly impact how much sun we receive. That is a major driver of  minor climate fluctuations within larger periods. (Plus sun-clouding debris from asteroid hits or from huge volcanic eruptions like Sumatra's Mt. Toba that some 73,000 years ago that nearly wiped out our predessors, reducing us to maybe 10,000 people worldwide and leaving as much as 9 feet of ash in some lakes in India. But I digress...)

Known as the Milankovitch cycle, there are mathematically predictable intersections of three astronomical cycles of our planet that make for a bigger phase about 100,000 years long:

1. a 105,000-year cycle in the degree of elongation in the Earth's elliptical orbit;

2. a 41,000-year cycle of in the degree of tilt of the Earth's axis (creating lesser or greater seasonal contrasts);

3. a 21,000-year cycle of when the equinox occurs (January, February or March; please don't ask me to explain this one...).

The Amazingness of It All

Isn't this all quite amazing?

First, it's amazing that humans have been able to figure all this out and see which way the wind is blowing. Hats off to generations of dedicated scientists. What an incredible art form that in many ways exceeds our the humble paintings and sculptures of we traditional artists. It may be bad news, but at least it helps us plan, that's for sure, like maybe start buying equatorial real estate? (To plan well, I might add, it seems advisable that we all examine and  let go of some of our fixed ideas and limiting dogmas are are the downside of our cognitive abilities, an evolutionary process that seems to be well underway, thankfully.)

Second, it's amazing in that, for all we know, our tendency to produce greenhouse gases is Nature's way of using us to moderate this Glacial Age and save some very nicely-evolved ecosystems that She is quite fond of... Now, wouldn't that be ironic? I've even thought about writing a novel with that as a twist.

Don't get me wrong. Fossil fuels are running out, whatever harm or benefit their release into the atmosphere may ultimately cause. So we all need to conserve resources, cut pollution and generate renewable energy like mad. Personally, we are installing a photovoltaic system on our roof as I write this, to capture but a small fraction of the Sun's vast stores of free energy available all over the planet. Our Sun sends us far more energy than we can ever use if we will but get serious about tapping it.

For us, it will supply all our needs, shared back and forth with the grid. It will turn on our energy-saving LED lights, run this computer so I can communicate with you, cook our food (along with our beloved  Tulsi Solar Oven), run our air conditioner and charge our electric car. It's also cost-effective and a great investment at a time when little else is. How cool is that?

Well, maybe not quite as cool as a Glacial Age! But that, as we have seen, is another story.

______________ • ______________

* FOR MORE INFO, check out these books, nicely written for the average Homo Sapiens:

 "After the Ice Age: The Return of Life to Glaciated North America," by E.C. Pielou

"Cro-Magnon: How the Ice Age Gave Birth to the First Modern Humans," by Brian Fagan.

Also, see these intriguing  science documentaries about global natural and societal issues facing us.