Dismantling Spaceship Earth's Life Support Systems

We're not adjusting the thermostat of Spaceship Earth; we're dismantling our ship's life-support systems.

October 15th is Blog Action Day and this year’s topic is climate change. I study climate change as part of my Interdisciplinary (Environmental) Engineering Ph.D. program at UAB. I have no doubt that global warming is real. Here's why:

Imagine the weight of an SUV (2.5 tons) in coal. Now imagine burning 1,350,000 "coal SUVs" every day. That is the amount of coal we turn into CO2 (and even worse pollutants) every day. That doesn't even count all the oil, natural gas, and other fossil fuels that we burn every day. How can releasing millions of years worth of stored solar energy over a couple of centuries not have side effects?

What kinds of side effects? For starters, around 20% to 30% of plant and animal species are likely to be at increased risk of extinction if global average temperatures exceed 1.5 degree C to 2.5 degree C over late 20th century levels. So why worry about species loss? Each species lost is a loss of genetic information akin to burning the Library of Alexandria. Each species lost not only takes with it a possible cure for cancer and other medical miracles, but also a loss of ecosystem services whose collective value far outweighs the combined value of all human economies. Without the many "free" ecosystem services provided by nature, humans have no clean air, no clean water, and no unspoiled land/capital upon which to live, let alone produce economic goods and services.

Even if the most knowledgeable scientific minds in the world haven't convinced you that global warming is real, there is no doubt about what is happening now in terms of global warming's equally-evil twin, ocean acidifcation. According to the Scientific Committee on Oceanic Research (SCOR) and the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO (UNESCO-IOC),

The ocean absorbs approximately one-fourth of the CO2 added to the atmosphere from human activities each year, greatly reducing the impact of this greenhouse gas on climate. When CO2 dissolves in seawater, carbonic acid is formed. This phenomenon, called ocean acidification, is decreasing the ability of many marine organisms to build their shells and skeletal structure. Field studies suggest that impacts of acidification on some major marine calcifiers may already be detectable, and naturally high-CO2 marine environments exhibit major shifts in marine ecosystems following trends expected from laboratory experiments. Yet the full impact of ocean acidification and how these impacts may propagate through marine ecosystems and affect fisheries remains largely unknown.

One example of global warming/ocean acidification that is happening now and not in some theoretical future is the massive and widespread bleaching and loss of coral reefs, the most diverse marine ecosystem. Things are bad now, but according to professor Hoegh-Guldberg of The University of Queensland, under increasing ocean acidification "Coral reefs are likely to dwindle into insignificance; they'll be reduced to rubble, threatening the fate of those tens of millions of people whose livelihoods depend upon them."

Global warming costs human lives directly, as well. World Health Organization researchers believe that global warming is already responsible for some 150,000 deaths each year around the world, and fear that the number may well double by 2030 even if we start getting serious about emissions reductions today. Additionally, nearly 634 million people—one tenth of the global population—live in at-risk coastal areas just a few meters above existing sea levels where they are endangered by the worldwide melting of land-based glaciers.

Global warming costs us in real dollars, too. One of the best guesses at the potential economic costs of climate change came from the Stern Review, commissioned by the UK government. Lord Stern found that climate change could end up costing between 5% and 20% of global GDP per year. But Stern said it would only cost about 2% of global GDP to avoid.

The average CO2 released per human today is 7 tons. The average needed by 2100 to (hopefully) avoid the worst effects of global warming? 1 ton. But it's not just our addiction to fossil fuels that we need to kick. Tropical deforestation accounts for 20 percent of the world’s global warming emissions—more than the total emissions from every car, truck, plane, ship, and train on earth.

We must change our ways, and soon; for we are not simply adjusting the thermostat of Spaceship Earth, we are foolishly dismantling our ship's life-support system.

Return to Green

What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. (Ecclesiastes 1:9)

Earlier this week I attended the "Workshop on Advanced Green Composites" at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). With distinguished speakers such as Dr. Anil Netravali from Cornell University and tongue-tangling topics such as "Ionic Liquid in Processing Multifunctional Cellulose Fiber and Biocomposites" you might think that this workshop promoted new, cutting edge technologies. In one sense, it did; but at the same time I was struck by how many speakers reminded us that we are rediscovering old – in some cases, very old – technologies. As one speaker quipped, the first green composite building materials utilized by humans probably were straw-and-mud adobe bricks around 3,500 BC.

Another speaker showed a dramatic old picture of Henry Ford literally taking an axe to one of his famous automobiles. The photo showed the axe rebounding from the sleek, black trunk panel. But didn’t they make cars out of much heavier and sturdier metals in those days? Turns out the sleek, black panel that proved impervious to axe blows was a biocomposite, and Ford was an early advocate of such materials. Indeed, Ford made a whole car out of such green materials. This event is described by David Morris in a newsletter of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance:

On August 14, 1941, at the 15th Annual Dearborn Michigan Homecoming Day celebration, Henry Ford unveiled his biological car. Seventy percent of the body of the cream-colored automobile consisted of a mat of long and short fibers from field straw, cotton linters, hemp, flax, ramie and slash pine. The other 30 percent consisted of a filler of soymeal and a liquid bioresin.

The timing gears, horn buttons, gearshift knobs, door handles and accelerator pedals were derived from soybeans. The tires were made from goldenrods bred by Ford’s close friend Thomas Edison. The gas tank contained a blend: about 85 percent gasoline and about 15 percent corn-derived ethanol.

Unfortunately, World War II derailed this early sustainable green movement and helped ensure that the "modern" automobile would be solidly metal- and petrochemical-based. Here and now, as speaker after speaker at the conference reminded us, it is often a struggle to re-integrate individual components made of biocomposites into our unsustainable, energy-intensive buildings and machines.

However, as the slides of Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED)-certified buildings and topics such as "Beans to Machines" revealed, there are many positive trends indicating a return to green. New federal legislation calling for increased fuel and energy efficiency, as well as rising oil prices, are spurring much-needed (re-)developments in green composites. In the words of wise old Solomon: "There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven" (Ecclesiastes 3:1).

Dream Job

Kyle’s Dream Job
And other philosophical ramblings

My personal mission statement reads: “To Learn, To Create, To Teach, To Empower in Art, Science, & Stewardship.” That’s not a job description, but it does provide me with a guiding framework for choosing a job. My dream job must encompass the following elements:

Learning
I am a knowledge addict. Lifelong learning is a passion. I am a Knowledge Capitalist. Give me knowledge that is both broad and deep. Only interdisciplinary knowledge can solve major problems in an increasingly-connected, tangled, complex, exponentially-growing world of people and information.

Creating
Knowledge, to dispute a common aphorism, is not power. Knowledge is simply a tool, and it must be wielded in the correct manner if goals are to be achieved. We may know that, given a sufficient lever, we may indeed move the world, but resources, procurement, staging and assembly/testing are other matters entirely. I see creating as a divine process; I arose from stardust, and it is my duty to continue this process of assembly and emergence, to make the whole indeed greater than the sum of its parts.

Teaching
Personal learning is investing in a public future only if that knowledge can be shared successfully. A creation sitting in a closet, literally or figuratively, is an evolutionary dead-end. No information will be transmitted; no further mutations (changes) will occur. Only in sharing knowledge is knowledge challenged, honed, proven, and applied to significant problems. Plus the teacher always learns more than the students (q.v., Learning). Critical thinking skills are essential in both the learning and transmission of knowledge.

Empowering
Knowledge may be value-less but its application is not. Value-driven personal leadership, planning and goals are essential to know if we are answering the right questions in the right way. I believe that we have many moral and ethical obligations to each other and to our planet. We must not deprive one another (or future generations) of the ability to live, love, learn, and create. One important goal of this whole learn-create-teach cycle is to not just impart knowledge but to bequeath power – here defined as the ability to apply knowledge in correct ways to achieve beneficial change.

My personal “funky business” might include, but not be limited to, the following broad categories of interest arranged alphabetically from the increasingly convoluted mind-map that is me: animals, art, blogs, books, castles, catastrophe theory, caves, caving, chaos theory, complexity theory, computers, conservation, DBMS, desktop publishing, dragons, ecology, economics, education, emergence, environmental science, fantasy, folklore, fractals, game theory, games, gardening, gargoyles, GIS, ghosts, graphics, green investing, hauntings, hiking, history, horror, horseback riding, information theory, IT, leadership, micro loans, mind maps, monsters, movies, music, mythology, philosophy, plants, policy analysis, project management, public administration, racquetball, religion, remote sensing, saving the planet, sci-fi, science, statistics, urban planning, and writing.