Reflections on the Future of Mankind – Part I

Where we’ll end up – the very long view.

by

Muck About

Part I

I am of the opinion – born of what I feel is a long, productive existence and a life that has been one extended study-hall of immense satisfaction – that unless the developed countries of this world and those people who live therein rapidly modify their actions and priorities, we humans are doomed to be yet another Earth dweller that will sooner than later vanish in a like manner of the Neanderthals, dinosaurs, dodos and the multiple thousands of other species that have dominated or lived upon and disappeared from the face of this Earth.  I also feel this modification of the current “Growth, Growth, Growth Forever” attitude and actions will and can never happen and the fate of the human race is not in doubt; we will be extinct (or hugely reduced in numbers) far sooner than anyone today believes or even considers.  We have already exceeded the sustainable rate of extraction and usage of resources of our small blue planet – including water, mineral and agricultural and further expansion of such resources will be at a very high price of not just money, but environmental cost as well – much higher than local populations can afford.

Not a cheerful way to start an thought exercise article, is it?

We will very likely be extinct or existing at significantly reduced numbers in a much shorter time frame than the dinosaurs (after all, they lasted millions of years) because of our own extraordinary technical skills, questionable intelligence  and the equally extraordinary stupidity of our beliefs, behavior and inability to really accept the limits of growth, cooperative problem solving across nations, the human beings central drive of “I’ and ”me” and the simple fact that there are too many rats in the box. That is, too many bodies worldwide to support, having exceeded resources and to get along with each other.

Dinosaurs topped the food chain on earth for many millions of years before they just happened to be riding this big blue and brown rock that was in the way of a not-so-big asteroid that put them all out of business along with about 90% of all other life on Earth and in its seas. Small mammals escaped this holocaust in some areas through fortuitous location and pure luck which allowed further evolution to eventually lead to us.

I feel it will not be long, by any measure of time, much less cosmically speaking, before the last poisoned and diseased band of nomadic humans fall, one at a time; until the last man, woman or child dies.

Mother Earth will get along without us just fine and in a few hundred thousand years, an alien visitor might not be able to find more than a few concrete (no pun here) remnants of the race that once ruled the world..

That lonely, painful and pitiful ending of the human race will occur on this Earth relatively soon and it is very likely,  no matter what we do. How sad it is.

As long as mankind relies more on maximized economic growth, superstition, wishful thinking and short term selfish personal gain than fact and science and an awareness of species survival, we, as humans are simply dead and don’t know it yet. Unfortunately, capitalism as an economic system is far too successful at generating wealth and growth and scientific progress than it is at focusing on the long term survival requirements of future generations and the human race in general.  Capitalism is the philosophy of profit right now, growth, capture of natural resources and never thinks for a moment of tomorrow – much less the long view of species survival.

I think that John Maynard Keynes statement, “In the long term we are all dead.”, should be interpreted in a much stricter manner than he intended. No doubt, shorter term too.

There are several areas where general modification of human behavior is required sooner than later merely to slow down the extinction  of the human race. Not to keep us alive here on Earth, you understand, but to slow down the process of killing ourselves while we can take action to prevent racial extinction.

First on the list of things to try and deal with is that infamous bugaboo “global warming”.

The subject of global warming is guaranteed to either bring yawns from those who have heard the arguments before and are bored to tears by the mention of it or screams from those who are passionate in their desire to have us all ride horses (which produce methane – another greenhouse gas) or walk everywhere we go and burn supper over a renewable energy source. It seems that the subject is too big for consensus by those knowledgeable enough to study and understand the data,  much less achieve any understanding by the great masses of people in the world who are not at all scientifically literate nor think with any critical ability and rely on “allah”, “god”, “government” or their so called “elected” (which is a joke all in itself) representatives to do their thinking for them and to determine their fate.

Scientists have proven without doubt that global climate change is a reality. The fact that anthropogenic heating of our atmosphere and oceans is not in question. Why it is happening is being debated (to death) and is, in fact, of no consequence whatsoever..

From temperature records recovered from Arctic and Antarctic ice cores, tree rings, ocean bottom cores, permafrost, ice sheet boreholes in Greenland the Antarctic along with other sources, science has proved beyond any doubt whatsoever that the current warming trend we are experiencing is not unique in our Earth’s history. Earth has heated up and cooled off relatively rapidly many times before, the last ice age terminating a mere 11,000 years ago – less than a blink of the eye as far as geological time is concerned. Barely time, in fact, for the ice to melt from between the toes of the last Neanderthal (which happened to be another failed experiment on the branching tree of evolution) and permit modern man to waltz onto the scene.  In fact, there are some facts that more than suggest that modern homo sapiens had a little hanky-panky going for them with Neanderthals on the way by!  We share DNA with Neanderthals and that can happen only one way!  We were likely smarter than our predecessors and just bred them out of existence. We’ll never know for sure but science is making great strides to try and find out.

Science has also proven that the major reason why our atmosphere and oceans are heating up this time is because humanity is burning fossil fuels at a furious rate while eliminating carbon sinks (such as rain forest) at the same time.

In fact, a close look at the temperature records hint that we may have been starting to slide into another mini-ice age way back in 17th century or so and the industrial revolution in the 19th century stopped the trend cold (pun intended) and reversed it.

Existing and efficient carbon sinks such as the oceans are becoming warmer, they are expanding as they warm and they are becoming more acidic from CO2 absorption much faster than predicted.  This, in turn, kills corals world wide, modifies mating capabilities of fish and is killing even the krill in Antarctica which ends up destroying the basis of our own food chain. Such destruction is causing an unholy mess in the Arctic as the ice melts, polar bears starve and all the Nations with Arctic Ocean frontage are fighting over who gets to drill and plow up the now open Arctic Ocean floor firstest and mostest!

Those fossil fuels lurking hither and thither under the Arctic seabeds, Canadian tar sands and elsewhere have accumulated in the Earth’s crust over millions of years. It took hundreds of millions of years for natural evolution, climate change, decay and huge pressures to form and store the hydrocarbon deposits and the deposits of chill, semi-stable methane hydrates now laying about on the Arctic seafloor. We are burning the oily portions of these hydrocarbons up billions of times faster that it took to create and store them in the first place. And another thing:  It doesn’t make a damn bit of difference whether we burn coal, oil in either its’ “natural form” or refined as gasoline or “natural” gas.  They all end up emitting CO2 and assorted pollutants such as soot when burned.  Period.  Further and even more serious, when the oceans warm sufficiently, those frozen methane hydrates will begin to evaporate, bubbling methane up and into the atmosphere.  A Summer occurence in the Canadian North every year! Methane is a much worse greenhouse gas than CO2 and will, in turn, accelerate greenhouse effects.

Fossil fuels are literally giant storehouses of carbon which is a component of hydrocarbon fuels that results in carbon dioxides, soot and monoxides when it’s burned. These hydrocarbons are locked into safe forms such as carbonates in rock and soil and sea bottom, oil and natural gas, methane in solid deposits on the floor of the oceans (the previously mentioned methane hydrates) in the Arctic and elsewhere and they were all placed there by natural processes that happens to lock up the carbon far from Earth’ atmosphere in such a way that it can’t cause trouble. Too much carbon dioxide or methane in the atmosphere (along with other more esoteric gasses both naturally occurring and of human creation) and we get the overused and abused “greenhouse effect”. More solar energy is absorbed by the atmosphere, ground and sea than can be radiated back into space, or otherwise dissipated.

It is also a demonstrable fact that in the past, rising temperatures of the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans are very capable of suddenly tipping Earth’ climate into a cooling phase that will eventually end up as an ice age. This transition into a cold phase can happen in as small a span of time as a decade.  When and how fast are unanswered questions, we only know of rapid oscillations in the geological past.

The observable fact that Earths’ atmosphere and ecology is a dynamic one versus something static, makes it very probable, barring the poisoning of those organisms that transform carbon dioxide into oxygen that we will never attain or even closely approach the status now existing on Venus. Venus is an example of a static environment and the “greenhouse” effect taken to extremes but it is very likely that Venus also never had the ecological opportunities of a closed oxygen/carbon cycle or even possibly plate tectonics and vulcanism in the first place. This last statement is still subject to some scientific argument but the arguments “for” are too weak to convince me.  The planet is too close to the Sun and too hot to start with.  A trip to the planet will be required to determine if plate tectonics ever had a chance to modify the surface features of the planet or not.

Mars likely had such a carbon/water (and even oxygen) cycle millions of years ago. We know there are vast quantities of water ice merely inches below the surface of Mars and it once flowed as liquid on the surface. Recent instrumentation mining on Mars has proven that drinkable water was, at one time, plentiful on the surface of Mars and I suspect that sooner or later, hard evidence of extraterrestrial life will be discovered.  Our robot explorers have found pretty absolute proof that liquid water once flowed on the surface in large quantities and that in numerous locations, contitions were favorable for life formation.

Methane has been detected in Mars’ atmosphere – and methane must be renewed in some fashion or it oxidizes and  vanishes over time. Most likely Mars’ water ice came from comet impacts and other infall from space over time as it did on Earth and was possibly, though not proven, maintained by an oxygen/water/carbon cycle such as we have today. Over time, due to lesser gravity, weaker magnetic field (more on this later) and less solar heating, the cycle was gradually broken and the atmosphere leaked away into space, leaving frozen water behind as a clue to what used to be.  Whether life had time to evolve on Mars has yet to be answered — but I’d bet yes.

However, on Earth, should those organisms that convert carbon dioxide to oxygen fail in their job, the ever greater buildup of carbon dioxide would indeed eventually turn the Earth into a static, blistering no-life world as more and more solar heat is captured, unable to radiate back into space and sooner (astronomically) than later, alter the very basics of the physics of our planet’s ecosystem.  We will be long gone before that happens.

How do I know personally that global warming and ocean expansion is alive and well? I went to Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands back in 1973, and worked for five years at the Biggest Bullseye in the world which was the terminus of the Pacific Missile Range that was located there. Twice a month (lesser) and twice a year (major) depending on the sun and the moon’s relative positions with regards to earth, there would be extraordinary low tides – just perfect to walk the reefs between islands searching for shells and to observe the wondrous sea life that inhabits the reef. Twice a year, during these extra low tides, the sea would actually recede to the extent that the reef surface was bare – no water at all – and the salt water would flow beneath the surface of the reef so one could stand quietly and listen to the reef “talk”, bubble, moan and gurgle as water made its way into and out of secret and normally flooded passages.

It was a magic place to live in more ways than one.

I returned to Kwajalein a second time in 1995, some 16 years later. No more does the reef “talk”. No more is the surface of the reef laid bare during these twice-monthly or twice yearly low tides. Now, at the lowest tides of the year, 12 inches or more sea water flow across its surface, drowning the magic singing of the reef. The Pacific ocean is rising as are all the oceans of the world. In the mid-1990s, on Kwajalein and other Marshall Island atolls, barriers had to be built along the windward side of these low islands. Storms waves that normally broke against the protective barrier reefs now sometimes flow clear across these low islands from the ocean into lagoons, uprooting trees and making permanent habitation impossible.

In another 30 years or so, these low islands will likely be gone forever, completely submerged or at the least uninhabitable because of storm surges that put the islands completely awash.

On average, the seas have risen 7-10 inches since accurate sea level measurements have been available (since radar bearing satellites refined the data).  That’s a lot of water, all of it from melting ice in Greenland, the Arctic, the Antarctic and glaciers.  Floating seas ice doesn’t count as it displaces as much water as is contained in the ice itself so sea ice melt is a null factor.

Further, last week (2/9/2013) a report was issued by climate  scientists and oceanographers that there will be further two foot rise in general sea levels within the next 30 years.  The particular study was a risk analysis of sewage treatment plants in Souther Florida and showed that within 30 years, most of Southern Florida and the three major sewage treatment plants will be isolated on little islands as the water rises.

Seas are rising roughly three times as rapidly as initial scientific estimates.  Get that?  THREE TIMES AS FAST!!

Of course, it won’t take 30-40 years for sea level rise to make itself apparent as storm surges and tidal action will disable these sewage plants, ports and much of populated Southern Florida.  there will be large tracks of land from the Gulf Coast through New England that will also be made uninhabitable (including NYC), as this general rise in ocean level progresses with as much impact, over time, as ice sheets durning an ice age.

Katerina, Hurricane Sandy, Staten Island and Long Island are excellent examples of storm surges couples with rising sea waters and how storm surges will eat us alive as time passes whether we “believe” in global warming or not!

This is all not to say that periodic changes in the Sun’s intensity, Earth’s orbital variations and a natural warming period of our Earth is not a contributor to the problem but we’re doing the most damage faster than natural changes in nature can do it.

If you take the trouble to study the a graphic of CO2 and methane concentration in the atmosphere over time, the ever rising levels of greenhouse gas is directly coupled to the Industrial Revolution starting in the mid-19th Century, with exponentially rising populations and the burning of fossil fuels. The effect is too obvious to be disputed.  We may be experiencing a normal solar cycle of earth heating and cooling but many scientists, myself included, feel that without human input to atmospheric heating, we’d already be 150 years into the next ice age.

These rising oceans will slowly make themselves felt along all continental coastlines world wide with Katerina, the destruction of New Orleans and the recent destruction along the New Jersey and New York shores from Sandy as dramatic examples.  Believe me when I say that New Orleans was only the first mega-distruction of an urban center.   New York and New Jersey followed and more will happen based on the luck of steering winds and Hurricanes and storms.  Next will come Miami (as explained above) or Corpus Christi, Jacksonville or Charleston, Houston or other coastal cities along the Gulf and Eastern Seaboard all depending on the capriciousness of rising sea levels and nature.

It will not be wind and tornados that do the damage but storm surges riding atop the tides that will provide the mother of all destruction of ocean front properties and the death of millions who cannot or don’t flee these storm surges in time.

Whole countries most likely to die first are the low, marvelously beautiful islands of Bahamas, Pacific and Indian Oceans that reside on both sides of the equator. They are mostly poor, sparsely populated and easy to overlook and ignore. Some of these island nations are now in negotiation to move their entire population to a mainland country.  Do you truly think this would happen if seas were not rising?

The biggest country at risk is impoverished Bangladesh. This hapless country, carved from India first as Eastern Pakistan and then as an independent nation is geographically situated on the delta of the Ganges River. Almost the entire country is only a few feet above mean high ocean tide. The Bay of Bengal into which the Ganges flows, is the home of the nastiest tropical cyclones you’d ever not want to see.

This country is doomed and so are the people in it that do not migrate.

When I was a boy, raised in Mississippi and Northern Florida, there was a poem about hurricanes we knew by heart:

June- too soon

July – stand by

August – it must

September – remember

October – all, over

Not so 65 years later. Now hurricane “season” starts the first day of June and ends the last day of November. Soon hurricane season will start in May and end in December. This poem, as originally composed, is no longer applicable.

So is global warming a doomsday threat? I doubt it. We will never do anything  to slow it down. We will experience flooded coastal cities and huge loss of life and economic disaster long before we’ve admitted and contained the ramifications of what we have done and Mother Nature has done in response.  What we desperately need to do on a global basis is to stop arguing over “whether global warming is real”, regardless of what caused it and start figuring out what we are going to do as a race to deal with what’s coming. We must not continue to argue and fuss over whether or not it is coming because it is.

So instead of arguing about whether “global warming” and all its ramifications is a fact, we simply need to start working on how we are going to deal with it.  Period.

The next thing on the list of doomsday subjects we need to recognize is population expansion.

The problem of too many people has been beaten to death in debates and is generally now ignored. It is a calculable fact that if one conservatively projects current world population growth for another 150 years, all things being equal in logistical support, food and such, the people at that time would be literally shoulder to shoulder covering all the exposed land masses on Earth. Way too many rats in a box.

Of course, this won’t happen. Paul Ehrlick and others predicted catastrophe years ago from population growth due to the lack of our ability to feed all those hungry mouths. That hypothesis that gathered rust in the junk heap of failed extrapolated predictive theories and a bad timing call is not being resurrected as better communication and surveys show that poverty and hunger are not expanding in lesser developed areas of the world. For some interesting exceptions : see Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond.

I personally think Mr. Ehrlick was simply too early in his predictions as was Mr. Malthus.  (Timing is a bitch!)

We are not exempt from resource exhaustion, hunger and poverty as our population continues to increase – first and not the  least in the so-called developing world.  Most of the developed world, The United States, Japan, Europe, Russia and China have entered demographic Hell and are losing productive population much faster than natural birth rates are renewing them.  The developing nations of the world – at the top of the heap –  are doomed to be populated by smaller, younger, stupider and less educated populations and much larger non-productive aging populations as time goes by – and it will happen faster than anyone realizes.   Unfortunately, the undeveloped (3rd World) countries and even as few mid-developing countries have populations that are expanding far faster than their abilities to house, feed and support them.

Technology, yet again to the rescue, is continually providing the means of higher agricultural production with lower costs with genetically modified bread and beans and there is no reason to believe this increase in agricultural productivity will slow down in the foreseeable future. (Barring tragic mistakes – but we’ll address that later).  It will also place these countries at the mercy of Monsanto and other hybrid seed producers, forcing farmers in the those country to use genetically modified seed every years instead of harvesting their own seed crops for the following years.  This will not end well.

Today, there would not be a hungry child or adult on the planet if the infrastructure was in place to enable delivery of food staples to the general populations of those hungry countries. In those countries where starvation is a real problem, the political barriers of civil wars, ruthless warlords, tribal leaders, religious genocide and greedy, immoral politicians are a much bigger barrier to distribution than lack of roads, bridges and other infrastructure.

Because of our (so far and failing) ability to feed more and more people, starvation has turned into a political problem, not one of food production.  At least for the next decade or two.  One severe world wide crop failure due to changes in climate and rainfall (not only likely but probable) can overturn things in a single growing season. So far, we are growing agricultural products in a distributed fashion to sufficiently buffer such changes but that is likely not to last as planetary climate change modifies atmospheric jet streams, storm patterns and wet/dry seasons all over the Earth.  Not to mention political use of food as a weapon as time goes on to wage war against those populations deemed a “bother” or perhaps considered to be hindering the continued expansion of developed nationality of advanced countries.

The higher productivity of agriculture is the reason why population density and growth has fallen off the table as a popular subject to debate (temporarily), even though it is still a vitally important subject of discussion and study. Additionally, religion that espouses moral opposition to birth control in any fashion (including abortion) is spreading throughout religiosity in both developed and developing areas of the world even as the USA swings to evangelical prominence.   Muslim populations are exploding.  At the same time, women’s rights are swinging to the fore and will probably win in developing countries, given the endurance and really tough female humans’ determination for self-direction.  In Muslim directed Islamic countries, no so much and we war may come in the long run pressured by population growth within less educated, highly religious and much poorer developing countries.  It appears that developed and more educated countries will simply commit suicide by birth rates so low as to limit their ability to hold their own against both legal and illegal immigration.  At that point, the original settlor’s of such developed countries will simply be overwhelmed by new comers, poorer, more ignorant but in over whelming numbers.

“Por español, oprimo numero uno.”

Worse luck, that, and our great-grandchildren will live to regret it as one result will be the lack of new workers to finance their old age.  And they will recognize the fact, slowly but surely.

On the other hand, one plus to the equation of population control lies in the developed countries better treatment of women including education.  The more educated a woman is, the fewer children she will likely have, which contributes to both the good and the bad of it all.  That is one reason that, in my humble opinion,  Fundamentalist Islam in any number of its’ incarnations is quite evil and immoral for they forbid females any control over their own bodies and forbid any education at all for females if they can manage it.  That is also why they will eventually fail ideologically as they are wasting one half of their population’s brainpower, creativity and soothing effects of feminine thinking and abilities by suppressing female education.  Islam is, sadly, at its’ base, a religion of death and world conquest, driven by selfish and ignorant men, bent on forcing the world to think and act as they do.  Islam has been fighting this war for several thousands of years and there is no end in sight. The EU is the latest to experience Islamic immigration and will rue the day they began pandering to this fundamentalist surge.  I await the outcome of that situation with non-baited breath..

What is far more likely the result of continued developing (as opposed to developed) national population expansion is war. Wars are fought over possession and control of land and resources, one of which is fixed and the other being used up and declining. There are, of course, other excuses for fighting a war, such as wars based upon tribal or religious differences or the simple urge to rape and pillage, but throughout the history of human conflict, the need for control of land and the resources thereon is the basis for war.

Need I illustrate? The Iraq “wars” were over oil and ego and failed thinking. We now have no presense in Iraq and it is now slowly slipping back into savagery as Shiite/Sunni warfare is increasing there daily and soon the Shiite majority in Iraq may join with the Shiite majority in Iran to form a new basis for Islamic expansion (i.e. Iraq/Iran = New Persia) with a large die off in Sunni Muslims in the process.  Not conducive to production of wealth or knowledge (or oil) in any way or form for either country. (besides, China is buying all the Iraqi oil they can lay their hands on – at our expense. Is that stupid or what!!).

WWII was over oil and mineral resources – Germany wanted them and had no way to pay for them after the ridiculous repatriation and “pay back” conditions placed upon it post-WWI.

WWI? Again, over resources that were unevenly divided in the then politically defined Europe. Vietnam and Korea? Artificial wars created by political stupidity in splitting up spoils of WWII. Vietnam and Korea were similar to the Middle East conflicts as after WWII the Middle East was carved up (mostly by the British, Stalin and FDR) into “countries” and no heed was paid to tribal differences, logical borders or past history.

In the Mid-East, this had to lead to the pain and agony that we are witnessing today as Islam fights to bring these tribal differences to heel under a crushing 1600th Century set of rules in a 21st Century World.

End Part 1

To be continued.

Author: MuckAbout

Retired Engineer and Scientist (electronic, optics, mechanical) lives in a pleasant retirement community in Central Florida. He is interested in almost everything and comments on most of it. A pragmatic libertarian at heart he welcomes comments on all that he writes. View all posts by MuckAbout