Media tycoons can be just as dimwitted, disingenuous — or downright dishonest — as the next person.

I have posted already about the frightfully stupid column by a media tycoon weeks back in a national newspaper in Canada, and its audience-grabbing headers, Thirty years of climate hysterics being proven wrong over and over again, and, There is no justification for the self-punitive nonsense of the Paris climate accord, and — yes! there’s more! — Most of our political and academic leaders are so far over-invested in defending against something that is not happening, they continue to call for the sacrifice of others.

You see, because if media tycoons are known for anything, it’s their selflessness and finely tuned sense of sacrifice, honed over many decades, centuries even, of looking out for their fellow human being.

Economic suicide — i.e. shutting down oil fields and getting off fossil fuels once and for all — is only tempting to those who have forgotten what pre-industrial life was like, it ended.

Why stop at the pre-industrial age, though? If we’re dealing with the semantics of history, why not rewind all the way back to the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction period, the so-called K-T event, some 65.5 million years ago. For many years, palaeontologists believed this event was caused by climate change that disrupted the dinosaurs’ food chain.

Scientific discoveries in the mid-1980s, based on geological findings of the rare element of iridium in rock samples taken from that time, suggest the most likely culprit was a meteor or asteroid that kicked up so much dust it effectively triggered a global blackout, ushering a new ice age. The theories are many; the proof in short supply. What evidence there is shows that the planet did slowly became cooler during that time, the late Mesozoic Era, during which the dinosaurs died out, after surviving some 160 million years in a hot, humid, tropical climate. Dinosaurs, like today’s reptiles, you see, were cold-blooded; they obtained body heat from the sun, and so would not have been able to survive a considerably colder climate.

Mammals are warm-blooded, and while it’s a stretch to say all mammals are ill-suited to adapt to a suddenly hotter climate, “economic suicide” is clearly a matter of degree. As environmental activist and marine wildlife conservationist Paul Watson once told me — though you don’t need an activist to tell you this — there’s not much point in worrying about what you do for a living if the entire planet is unliveable.

In the time between my last post and this post, this has happened:

More than 50 forest fires have broken out in Sweden, a nation more known for its cold and snow than fires which — and this is true — are now breaking out inside the Arctic Circle.

But wait, there’s more. Following catastrophic floods across Japan, temperatures there have now reached north of 40°C, and thousands have been hospitalized for heat-related reasons.

Toronto, a city known more for its obsession with ice-hockey than anything else, has recorded temperatures that exceeded 30°C on 18 days so far this year, well ahead of the 10 such days all last last summer.

Oh, and scorching weather across the UK has melted panels on the roof of the Science Centre in Glasgow, Scotland, as well blistering agricultural fields throughout a verdant land more known for its craggy highlands and rolling sea mists than once-in-a-generation heatwaves.

As an article in the Sunday Observer this past weekend by science editor Robin McKie noted, climate scientists point to a number of factors, not just climate change and global warming but also the jet stream, which is uncommonly weak right now. A weak jet stream causes weather patterns like high-pressure ridges in the northern hemisphere to stall, which in turn leads to substantial increases in sea-surface temperature across the North Atlantic, which in turn cause more drought on dry land. One factor feeds on the other. The more heat there is, the hotter it gets. Everything is connected, as David Attenborough keeps reminding us in his nature programs.

©Reanalyzer/Climate Change Institute/University of Maine

Again, you don’t need a science degree to understand this, but constantly rising global carbon emissions — man-made or not, regardless of whether you think they’re the whole cause or only part of the cause — DO. NOT. HELP.

As events of the past week and the summer so far suggest, heatwaves are becoming more frequent and more intense, and, as one marine scientist (with the Scottish Marine Institute, Oban) told the Observer: “That is something . . . we should be very worried about.”

You know, on second thought, any economic fallout from the Paris Agreement may be a small price to pay.

https://www.dw.com/en/the-global-heat-wave-thats-been-killing-us/a-44699601

Humankind’s footprint on planet Earth is now so deep that scientists argue we need to have our own epoch named after us: the Anthropocene.

Epochs are traditionally measured in terms of millions of years — longer than an age, but shorter than a period. Since humankind has been living on the planet for little more than a blink-of-an-eye in geologic time, that’s saying a lot. According to the Cosmic Calendar, an eye-opening chart that distills the 13.8 billion year history of the universe down to a single year, humankind’s early ancestors first walked upright at 10:30pm on the final day of December. Modern humans evolved at 11:52pm; the early human migrations out of Africa happened some time between 11:56pm and 11:59pm.

Everything we know and have achieved — from the early cave paintings to the beginnings of agriculture, permanent settlements and so on, to reading, writing, art, music, the Industrial Revolution and the age of the Internet, has happened in the final minute of the last day of the 12th month of the Cosmic Calendar year.

That’s a pretty sobering thought when you consider that roughly 1.2 seconds ago in geologic time, Columbus arrived in America; everything from overpopulation and human-influenced climate change to the despoiling of the rain forest, fouling of the oceans and mass extinctions has unfolded since then.

Geologists don’t just identify epochs out of thin air. An epoch has to leave a geological imprint in solid rock — in sediments buried below the ground, in ice glaciers (now melting) or on canyon walls, if you like. The Anthropocene epoch, many of these geologists now argue, is an actual thing because evidence of human activity is now being imprinted in geological formations. “We are mining the planet’s surface, acidifying our oceans, creating new rock layers laced with plastic, and exterminating many species,” science editor Robin McKie wrote this past weekend in London’s Sunday Observer. “The consequences of these actions will be detectable in rocks for millions of years.”

A new study by University College of London researchers Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin identifies colonialism — the way guns, germs and steel shaped the New World — as the prime mover behind the tectonic shift on the geologic timescale; other scientists cite the detonation of the first atomic bomb as the moment when the Anthropocene epoch dawned (their argument being that the earliest atomic bombs left a radioactive record in Earth’s rocks), while still others point to the proliferation of plastics, which are forming their own geological layers by becoming embedded in rocks.

The real question, of course — and the great unanswerable — is how the Anthropocene epoch will shape and change planet Earth, and whether our home world can survive it, or whether, as geological time has shown over the ages, epochs and periods, nothing is forever and all life changes eventually, even life itself.

“We have become a new force of nature, dictating what lives and what goes extinct,” Maslin told the Sunday Observer. “Although, in one crucial respect, we are unlike any other force of nature: Our power, unlike plate tectonics or volcanic eruptions, is reflexive. It can be used, modified or even withdrawn.”

“It would be wise,” Maslin and Lewis wrote later on the BBC’s website, “to use this immense power to give the best chance for people, and the rest of life, all to flourish.”

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-44389413

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/jun/10/colonialism-changed-earth-geology-claim-scientists

Journal

“Man is modifying the world so fast and so drastically that most animals cannot adapt to the new conditions. In the Himalaya as elsewhere there is a great dying, one infinitely sadder than the Pleistocene extinctions, for man now has the knowledge and the need to save the remnants of his past.”

— Peter Matthiessen