Scary Stuff for Earth Day

April 19, 2006

There have been some scary movies out lately: Slither is about an invasion of alien worms set on eating everything and ever’body on earth -- most unpleasant. And The Hills Have Eyes is about mutant cannibal hillbillies. There are some scary books out too: Stephen King just wrote one about people turning into zombies after using their cellphones.
But this is pale stuff compared to what’s really out there.
If you want something that’ll really curl your toes -- something that’s 1,000 times scarier than an imaginary extraterrestrial bloodsucker in your bathtub -- check out the April 3 issue of Time magazine and its special report on global warming, entitled “Be Worried. Be Very Worried.”
It doesn’t get any scarier than this.
Lord, I got a shiver just thinking about it.
Time, and a battalion of upcoming new books and documentaries -- including one by former Vice President Al Gore -- put Earth at the “tipping point” on global warming decades earlier than anyone thought was possible.
What’s a tipping point? It’s the point of no return. A good example is that of water boiling at 212 degrees. The 212th degree is the tipping point at which placid water begins a rolling boil.
In a kitchen, you can just turn off the stove. But the writers at Time imply that there may be no “off” switch for pulling the Earth back from its tipping point of extinction.
The tipping point problem is mentioned elsewhere in this issue of the Express in our Technology column. Science writer R. Malcolm Dickson notes in “The Day the Earth Burped” that if the Earth’s oceans warm by a mere 5 degrees Centrigrade over the next century, then “literally quadrillions of tons of frozen methane” will be released as gas from the oceans’ floor.
So you might want to start buying thousands of tanks of oxygen right now. Maybe you’ll last a couple of years after all life on earth is gassed to death by our own stink.
But that’s just a teeny bit of it. Time notes that between 200 gigatons and 800 gigatons of carbon is sealed in the permafrost soils of Alaska, Canada and Siberia. That permafrost is melting as never before, and when it does, all of that carbon will turn into methane and CO2.
By contrast, human polluters only spew out 7 gigatons of carbon per year, Time reports.
Complicating all of this is the fact that there are environmental “feedback loops” that create even more global warming. Time notes that polar ice reflects 90% of sunlight back into space. But the more ice we melt due to global warming, the less sunlight is reflected, resulting in hotter temperatures on Earth, growing at a faster rate.
The glaciers of Greenland melting, raising sea levels by 200 feet or more... a more violent hurricane season expected on the Gulf Coast this year... polar bears facing extinction by drowning in the Arctic... the consequences of global warming are enough to make your head swim.
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Speaking of scary movies, remember that moment in Independence Day when President Turner does a mind-meld with the captured beastie and asks the aliens what they want from us?
“Die,” the alien responds. “Die.”
We’re on that same track with the feverish planet that provides us with life. A few “burps“ from Mother Nature will deliver the same message.
But unlike Independence Day, there‘s no frantic, worldwide response of people of all nations and cultures -- Hindus, Muslims, Arabs, Jews, Americans, Chinese -- locking arms to face the threat of our annihilation. We‘re too busy beating each-others‘ brains out.