Shayna Punim…

by DK

2 comments

1 suitepotato { 05.16.08 at 5:14 pm }

Sorry, but mankind is doing this. No matter how much you want to believe that little monkeys running around this rock have that kind of power, they just don’t.

These things run in cycles. Cold, warm, cold, warm, cold, over and over. Humans just popped up and advanced in a relatively nice time before the last glacial period. Humans show up about 200,000 years ago. The last glacial period began between 100,000 and 70,000 years ago. There was also one of the largest volcanic events known to humans around 74,000-76,000 years ago that made everything a whole lot worse.

Humans survived it all.

During upticks in the temperature coming out of a glacial, the curve isn’t linear. It shoots up faster as you get closer to the top of it, then the system hits snapback and turns the other way and goes cold at a rate that’s even faster but lasts less long before the warming trend starts off again, slowly, but picking up speed.

What happens is this. As the planet warms, ice retreats, life increases, and that means death too because everything is mortal. It has to decompose and decomposition of organic life releases greenhouse gases including methane and carbon dioxide.

As the world gets warmer, it brings about conditions for life to make it warmer faster. Which makes more life which makes for more warmth. The very fire which warms us enables us to make more of us, more lichen, more moss, more everything alive. And then we make more fire with it. It’s just like fire. Except it’s really really slow but then again very very very widespread in multiplicity.

Nevermind Earth itself outgassing constantly or the increased temperatures increasing water vapor which is another greenhouse gas or greenhouse reflector (albedo increase due to white clouds and white ice).

We could all disappear today, right this second, and the next glacial will still arrive right on schedule. It’ll keep on happening as the Earth’s rotation precesses and the orbit remains elliptical and the sun’s output varies, and the continents keep on moving.

It’s not in your power to do anything about it. Not yet. Not just yet. Question is, if you could, you’d be choosing who lives and dies, entire species might never even evolve because you decided to engineer the environment by choice. What would that make you to decide who and what lives and dies? Sure you do it now by accident, but this would be on purpose.

Are you sure humanity is up to making choices like this? They don’t seem to have a great track record on things like that.

2 suitepotato { 05.16.08 at 5:16 pm }

“Sorry, but mankind is doing this.”

In case anyone doesn’t get me, I meant as part of the overall scheme of biological organisms, not as burning gasoline.

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