Global Terraforming
The thought has recently occurred to me that there seems to be a rather considerable logical disconnect in the thought processes of deniers of global climate change (i.e. global warming), especially the anthropogenic (“man-made”) variety.
It has long been a pretty mainstream idea that the easiest way to terraform a planet like Mars into one which is habitable by humans is to set up a bunch of carbon-belching factories all across the planet’s surface and run them 24/7 for a couple of centuries to increase the density of the atmosphere and trap more solar radiation, warming the planet in the process.
So why is the idea that doing the same thing on Earth for over 400 years will cause a similar effect so unfathomably controversial? Science and reality rarely deal in special cases. If dumping mountains of CO2 into the atmosphere of Mars would make it habitable by warming the planet and increasing the density of the atmosphere, doing the same thing on a planet like Earth would logically cause the already habitable temperature to increase, perhaps to a point where the planet is no longer habitable.
People are constantly arguing that the Earth is too massive and too self-correcting to be affected by anything that we comparatively tiny human beings are doing. However, these same people seem to have no issues with the thought that mankind could terraform other worlds equally as massive as Earth by doing to them exactly what we are already doing here. Either terraforming a planet is impossible for mankind, or our ability to impact the environment of our home planet is far more substantial than people seem to commonly accept. We can’t have it both ways.
There are over 6 billion people on this planet. We are producing 29 billion of tons of carbon dioxide exhaust every year… even considering that the Earth’s atmosphere has a total mass of over 5 quadrillion tons, and that plant life on the planet can parse at least a portion of the CO2 we dump into the air back into oxygen, over the 400 years since the Renaissance and the ensuing industrial revolution, that’s a lot of CO2 to be dumping into a finite amount of space. It’s a proven scientific fact (the Mythbusters even tested it!) that CO2 traps radiant heat in a given space, and we only have to look next door at Venus to see just how far from habitable a runaway CO2 greenhouse effect can push a planet’s environment (for those unaware, Venus’s atmospheric pressure is 90 times greater than Earth’s, and the surface temperature is over 900ºF). Realistically, Venus is an extreme example, but the extreme outcome is nowhere near what it would take to turn the Earth into a lifeless cinder as well.
People argue against the science of global climate change because 20 years ago there was a concern among scientists that the planet might be cooling off. Scientifically, there was a good reason to suspect this may happen: on a global scale, destroying things like forests to build roads, cities, and fields creates a brighter overall surface reflectivity for the Earth. More reflectivity means less light is absorbed by the planet as radiant heat, and thus the planet would cool. However, it just so happens that the result of burning millions of years worth of trapped carbon, releasing it as CO2, over the course of only a few centuries has greatly offset any change in reflectivity, creating a larger greenhouse effect and ultimately warming the planet at a considerably faster rate than is scientifically considered to be “normal” for this planet, based on the analysis of tens of thousands of years worth of geological data.
Say what you will about science sometimes being wrong, but science, like nature, is self-correcting; if evidence changes, so does the scientific consensus. If it weren’t for the self-corrective nature of science and its encouragement of free and open inquiry, we would never have landed on the Moon, or flown space probes to Jupiter and Saturn, or defeated countless ravaging diseases, or even have developed the technology with which I am writing this perhaps somewhat irksome treatise. Science, like life, must be taken as a whole, and as a whole science is right (or at least on the right track) far more often than it is wrong. You can’t pick and choose which scientific facts or evidence you want to adhere to, and ignore what doesn’t fit your preconceived worldview. Well, I guess you can, but you probably won’t get very far in the real world, which really doesn’t give a damn about your preconceived worldview. The Earth doesn’t stop being 4.6 billion years old just because you say it’s not, any more than saying that it’s flat, or at the center of the solar system, or the center of the universe make such things true (which they demonstrably aren’t).
Anything about Terraforming is a “mainstream” idea? Climate-change deniers have and express opinions about terraforming? Seriously?
Comment by Lanny Heidbreder on December 18, 2009 at 5:31 pm
Allow me to clarify.
Yes, the idea of terraforming, that conceptually (not necessarily as something we’d actually go and DO) we could go to a planet like Mars and turn it into a habitable world with our current technology, does seems to be fairly mainstream. It’s not relegated to the same dark corners of science fiction as warp drives and phasers and androids and universal translators. Scientists who discuss the notion seriously are not laughed out of the scientific community for presuming that people are able to impact a planet’s habitability on a global scale. What’s missing, ultimately, is time and available resources on the planet in question. Namely, we’d have to truck all of our carbon-belchers and the carbon they’d ultimately be belching off to Mars ourselves, which is an expensive proposition for something which won’t pay dividends for a few centuries.
Outside of the politically and ideologically charged arena of the Global Warming debate, there seems to be little resistance to the notion that we could, if we had the time and resources, turn Mars blue, without needing to invent much more than the ships needed to get there. Yet if you take the same theoretical plan that has been proposed for terraforming Mars for at least the last 20 years and apply it to Earth, replacing all mentions of “terraforming” with “global warming” and omitting any unnecessary references to space travel, people are suddenly totally up in arms about it being a global scientific conspiracy to raise taxes (???) or turn over control of the country to the UN (also ???).
It seems to me that beyond the constraint of this planet, the idea that mankind can transform a world environment in a matter of centuries (or even less) is rather generally accepted, in part thanks to its use in science fiction, and in part because plans for actually doing so using today’s technology have been drafted for quite some time; again, all that’s missing is the cash to send a few billion tons of carbon, the factories to burn it, and the plants to convert it into oxygen for us to breathe across the considerable interplanetary distance to Mars, and the motivation to do so.
Put more bluntly, why is terraforming something that people seem to be more accepting of, conceptually, than global warming? If we can do one with our current technology, we can obviously do the other when that same technology has been running for the past 400 years or so. The primary objections to the science of global warming seem to be political or conspiracy-laden in nature far more than scientific in their origin, or are based on such bunk science (sunspots, really? why isn’t Mars warmer then? or Venus?) that the people putting them forward have at best not done their homework, or at worst are personally motivated to be intellectually dishonest about the facts.
Comment by Alahmnat on December 18, 2009 at 6:13 pm
I dispute the science of terraforming of any random asteroid into Earth-like conditions. I dispute even turning Mars into a habitable planet. The likelihood of there being naturally-occurring minerals required for successful terraforming is exceedingly low. Without initial life to have created fossil fuel reserves or water/ice already there you’d have to transport it in. Even using lesser-energy-intensive means like a space elevator, the energy required for transportation of the raw materials is astronomically high. You’d end up expelling so much energy that Earth wouldn’t be worth living on any more and you’d *have* to go to this new planet.
A rock into Earth? Not likely. Something with algae/ice already on it? That’s a different ball game. You’ll have to be picky in which planets you terraform
Comment by RIUM+ on December 20, 2009 at 9:10 am
Alahmnat, almost everyone, and certainly every climate-change denier, has no clue what the word “terraforming” even means. The reason you don’t hear them protesting the idea or complaining about it is that they don’t know what it is, have never heard of it, have no idea what it theoretically entails, and have no opinion about it. They’re not “more accepting of” it just because they’re silent on it; it’s just something they have never given a single thought to in their entire lives.
Indeed, I’ll bet money that if you were to explain it to them the way you’ve explained it here, the few of them that understood the words you used would probably say that it’s a liberal fantasy created to trick people into believing in global warming.
Of all the myriad of ways to accuse Republicans of being hypocrites, this seems to be to be among the least valid.
Comment by Lanny Heidbreder on December 20, 2009 at 1:28 pm
“…this seems to me to be among the least valid.”
Comment by Lanny Heidbreder on December 20, 2009 at 1:29 pm