Dwain Northey (Gen X)

Wildfire smoke is blanketing the U.S. East Coast. It won’t be the last time

The horrifying fire in Canada are just the lasted ridiculous almost comical event that is screaming at humanity that we are fucking up the global climate. Still there are nay sayers that continue to push the narrative that MAN with our incessant burning of fossil fuels has nothing to due with the continual threat. They say that the earth constantly goes through periods of warning and cooling and there is little evidence that the burning of carbon for the past 150 years has had an insignificant impact on the planet’s climate. While it is true that historically earth has gone through periods of warming and cooling, based on scientific evidence not as rapid a change has been displayed in the historical record.

The Huronian glaciation is the oldest ice age we know about. The Earth was just over 2 billion years old, and home only to unicellular life-forms. The early stages of the Huronian, from 2.4 to 2.3 billion years ago, seem to have been particularly severe, with the entire planet frozen over in the first “snowball Earth”. New University of Melbourne research has revealed that ice ages over the last million years ended when the tilt angle of the Earth’s axis was approaching higher values. So, what has gotten the earth out of periods where glaciers covered the entire planet is just a slight change in the slant of the of the poles allowing more of our stars rays to warm the oceans.

Dinosaurs went extinct about 65 million years ago (at the end of the Cretaceous Period), after living on Earth for about 165 million years. Surely there was some climate change during that period. I am sure there was but form my limited knowledge of dinosaurs they were primarily cold blooded so the temperature changes couldn’t have been that extreme for 165 million years for them to survive that long. The prevailing data says that the dinosaurs were knocked off their pedestal by a meteorite that’s impact clouded the sun and killing all the vegetation and presumably starting another ice age although not as dramatis as the Hurorian glaciation period.

Holy crap it took millions of years, giant animals walking the earth as well as volcanos and tectonic plate movement, but it took an intergalactic rock hitting the planet to take out the dinosaurs.

While our ancestors have been around for about six million years, the modern form of humans only evolved about 200,000 years ago. Civilization as we know it is only about 6,000 years old, and industrialization started in earnest only in the 1800s. The first big energy transition was from wood and charcoal to coal, beginning in the iron industry in the early 1700s. By 1900, coal was the primary industrial fuel, taking over from biomass to make up half the world’s fuel use. Growth in emissions was still relatively slow until the mid-20th century. We have been burning fossil fuels on a continual basis all thought the 3 centuries to power our homes and cities pushing tons of CO2 as well as other greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere. In 1950 the world emitted 6 billion tons of CO₂.  After the mid-20^th century this had almost quadrupled, reaching more than 22 billion tons. Emissions have continued to grow rapidly; we now emit over 34 billion tons each year. The present atmospheric concentration of CO ₂ is the highest for 14 million years. Concentrations of CO ₂ in the atmosphere were as high as 4,000 ppm during the Cambrian period about 500 million years ago, and as low as 180 ppm during the Quaternary glaciation of the last two million years.

Even with this information there are still those that deny that mans burning of fossil fuels has nothing to do with the global climate predicament that we are facing. I know we are the cause of our own damnation. I do not say that we are killing the planet, we are killing ourselves. The dinosaurs walked the earth for 165 million years, modern humans have resided on the small blue rock for 6-10,000 years. At the rate we consume resources and kill each other our time will be a fraction of that. Future inhabitants if they are intelligent will say we were the weaker life form.   

Thanks for suffering through my depressing diatribe.