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The forthcoming United Nations Conference
on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro
(Rio+20) on June 2U-22 has brought out the
usual warnings of environmental doom. They
have been greeted with the usual indifference:
after all, there are seven billion of us now, and
we're all still eating. What could possibly go
wrong?
, The UN Environment Program published its
five-year Global Environmental Outlook (GEO-
5) saying that significant progress has been
made on only four of 90 environmental goals
that were adopted at the Rio Earth Summit in
1992. "If current patterns of production and
consumption of natural resources prevail,"
warned UNEP head Achim Steiner, "then gov
ernments will preside over unprecedented lev
els of damage and degradation." Yawn.
Meanwhile, a team of respected scientists
warn that life on Earth may be on the way to
an irreversible "tipping point." Sure. Heard
that one before, too.
Last week, one of the world's two lead
ing scientific journals, Nature, published a
paper, "Approaching a State Shift in Earth's
Biosphere," pointing out that more than 40
percent of the Earth's land is already used for
human needs. With the human population set.
to grow by a further two billion by 2050, that
figure could soon exceed 50 percent
"It really will be a new world, biologically,
at that point," said the paper's lead author,
Prof. Anthony Bamofsky, of the University of
California, Berkeley. But Bamofsky doesn't go
into the details of what kind of new world it
might be. Scientists hardly ever do in pub
lic, for fear of being seen as panic-mongers.
Besides, it's a relatively new hypothesis, but
it's a pretty convincing one, and it should be
more widely understood. Here's how bad it
could get
The scientific consensus is that we are
still on track for 3 degrees C of warming (5.2
degrees F) by 2100, but that's just warming
caused by human greenhouse-gas emissions.
The problem is that +3 degrees is well past
the point where the major feedbacks kick in:
natural phenomena triggered by our warming,
like melting permafrost and the loss of Arctic
sea-ice cover, that will add to the heating and
that we cannot turn off.
The trigger is actually around 2 degrees
C (3.5 degrees F) higher average global
temperature. After that, we lose control of
the process: ending our own carbon-dioxide
emissions would no longer be enough to stop
. .
the warming. We may end up trapped on an
escalator heading up to +6 degrees C (+10.5
degrees F), with no way of getting off. And +6
degrees C gives you the mass extinction.
There have been five mass extinctions in
the past 500 million years, when 50 percent or
more of the species then existing on the Earth
vanished, but until recently the only people
taking any interest in this were paleontolo
gists, not climate scientists. They did wonder
what had caused the extinctions, but the best
answer they could come up with was "climate
change." It wasn't a very good answer.
Why would a warmer or colder planet kill
off all those species? The warming was caused
by massive volcanic eruptions dumping huge
quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmo
sphere for tens of thousands of years. But it
was very gradual, and
the animals and plants
had plenty of time to
migrate to climatic zones
that still suited them.
(That's exactly what hap
pened more recently in
the Ice Age, as the gla
ciers repeatedly covered
whole continents and
then retreated again.)
There had to be a
more convincing kill
mechanism than that,
and the paleontolo
gists found one when
they discovered that a
giant asteroid struck the
planet 65 million years
ago, just at the time
when the dinosaurs died
out in the most recent of
the great extinctions. So
they went looking for evidence of huge aster
oid strikes at the time of the other extinction
events. They found none.
What they discovered was that there was
indeed major warming at the time of all the
other extinctions—and that the warming had
radically changed the oceans. The currents
that carry oxygen-rich cold water down to the
depths shifted, so that they were bringing
down oxygen-poor warm water instead, and
gradually the depths of the oceans became
anoxic: the deep waters no longer had any
oxygen.
When that happens, the sulfur bacteria
that normally live in the silt (because oxygen
is poison to them) come out of hiding and
begin to multiply. Eventually, they rise all the
way to the surface over the whole ocean, kill
ing all the oxygen-breathing life. The ocean
also starts emitting enormous amounts of
lethal hydrogen sulfide gas that destroys the
ozone layer and directly poisons land-dwelling
species. This has happened many times in the
Earth's history.
Don't let it worry you. Well aU be safely
dead long before it could happen again: the
earliest possible date for a mass extinction,
assuming that the theory is right and that we
continue down our present track with emis
sions, would be well into the next century.
The only problem is that things like this
tend to become inevitable long before they
actually happen. Tick, tock.
GwynneDyer
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journal
ist whose articles are published in 45 countries.
Ray Bradbury has died after what the
papers have called "an extended illness." He
was 91 years old. The death of a 91-year-
old man is not particularly astonishing, and
among the expressions of grief and remem
brance that flooded the Internet as the news
of Bradbury's passing broke was a strong
thread of surprise that the man had still been
alive.
Alive he was, and although a stroke in
2009 had slowed him down, Bradbury was
still working, the habits of a lifetime still
driving him, the perpetual-motion machine
of his imagination still barreling along. It is
his imagination and his incomparable skill at
breathing his dreams into life that make the
occasion sad. Ray Bradbury was, without ques
tion, one of the greatest American authors of
the last century, and history would do well to
be kind to him.
Given my particular vocation, you'd think
the Bradbury work closest to
my heart would be Fahrenheit
451, his dystopian masterpiece
about a future where books and
their nasty old ideas have been
outlawed and an underground
resistance dedicated to preserv
ing the Words. It's a brilliant
novel with many potent mes
sages and, thank God, it has
become a standard novel to
teach in high schools.
My favorite work of
Bradbury's, however, is
Something Wicked This Way
Comes, about two Midwestern
small-town boys caught up in a
fight for their very souls when
a dark and seductive carnival
rolls in on a midnight train
from Nowhere. While Bradbury
was mislabeled, and unjustly
pigeonholed, as a science-
fiction writer on the basis of
Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian
Chronicles among others, he
considered himself a writer of
fantasy, and Something Wicked
lives square in the middle of
Bradbury's turf, the "October
Country" where the bucolic
meets the sinister.
. Bradbury spent his child
hood in the small town of
Waukegan, IL, and though he ended up in Los
Angeles as his family moved around seeking
work during the Depression, he remained a
rural boy at heart throughout his life. Unable
to go to college, Bradbury educated himself in
the classic manner of the autodidact, practi
cally living in libraries and devouring books.
Although his favorite and most pervasive
influences were the horror stories of Poe and
the adventure tales of Jules Verne and Edgar
Rice Burroughs, Bradbury internalized every
thing. He always claimed to have total recall,
but certainly the breadth of his acquired
knowledge ran through his stories and novels,
which he wrote with the same mania with
which he read. Bradbury wrote a minimum of a
thousand words a day, without exception, from
his teens until his stroke at the age of 89.
During the course of his remarkable writ
ing life, Bradbury wrote in several genres, not
just science fiction and fantasy but horror and
mystery as welL He was an accomplished poet
playwright and screenwriter, not only adapt
ing his own works but famously writing the
screenplay for John Huston's epic version of
Moby Dick with Gregory Peck. He was prolific
as hell, and "The Ray Bradbury Theater," an
anthology TV show devoted to his works, had
much from which to draw, with many episodes
adapted by Bradbury himself.
That much writing honed Bradbury's skills
to mastery of virtually every form to which he
put his hand, but it was the relentless force
of his imagination that made him great. What
is truly incredible about Bradbury, however,
was that he never took his fertile mind for
granted. Ideas thrilled and delighted him,
even his own, and he approached every story
with a sense of wonder, as if it were being
channeled through him rather than being the
creation of his own mind.
One of my favorite quotes from Bradbury,
and an apt illustration of his perpetual sense
of gosh-wow, comes from an interview he did
late in life:
force and mat
ter making itself ovt into imagination and
will. Incredible. The Life Force experimenting
with forms. You for one. Me for another. The
Universe has shouted itself alive. We are one
of the shouts."
For Ray Bradbury, the science-fictioneer,
the fantasist, the dealer in dreams, there
was never a hint of cynicism. He bought and
used his own product with the faith of a true
believer. At his most fantastic, every word he
wrote was the absolute truth as he knew it,
and that enthusiasm and joy for living and
willingness to give himself over, body and
soul, to wonder is what made him one of the
finest and most important writers of our life
time. His visions of small-town life, of rockets
to the stars, of black carnivals, of the reality
of Good and Evil in the hearts of his fellow
men—they speak to us in the primal language
of our hearts, in ways that cannot be ignored.
He will be sorely missed.
John G. Nettles
JUNE 13,2012 FlAGPOLE.COM 7