This just in, regarding global warming: an article in Aeon/Psyche’s newsletter, edited by Cameron Allen McKean, details the work of Mark Buchanan, a physicist and science writer who formerly, was an editor at “Nature” and “New Scientist”.
Dr. Buchanan’s article on global warming is extremely well written, erudite and cogent.
He reminds us that all energy expended on earth, whether in terms of wind, waves, forest fires, electricity, chemical reactions like cement production from limestone, animal (including human) activity and especially energy expended in unnecessary war, is expressed eventually in greater or lesser production of heat.
He reminds us that our world has a continuous net energy gain, simply from our star’s radiation.
He observes that without our interference, the earth would have gotten into a “global warming” scenario within another million years or so anyway, but that the Anthropocene, an era of both excessive waste-heat production and destruction of Earth’s heat-storage mechanisms, has accelerated global warming exponentially.
I would like to suggest that everyone should read Mr. McKean‘s article, online, at
https://aeon.co/essays/theres-a-deeper-problem-hiding-beneath-global-warming .
Dr. Buchanan’s excellent article however, while emphasizing the importance of reducing waste heat production, has omitted a single factor which protected us from global warming before we began to delete it – vegetation does not simply store carbon: it literally stores energy and thereby, removes/sequesters heat in our environment.
I would hazard a guess that without massive energy storing by our green friends in the forests, this planet would have been uniformly “desertified”, like Mars, many million years ago.
Our land would have been like this:
Our fauna might all have been like these:
Our landscapes would have been devoid of these:
and these
and this scenario would not have existed, even in our dreams!
I will keep this brief:
Let every human plant a tree!
Let no human destroy a tree!
Let us reduce our meat consumption: let us return our “grazing” land to the trees
which we all depend on for beauty, for food, for oxygen, for our lives!
Please pass this on!
Gervais.
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