The Promise of Global Warming
I am a supporter of global warming.
Before you jump to judgement, please understand that I am Canadian. It’s cold up there. But otherwise it’s a wonderful country with famously nice people and enviable quality of life.
Alas, for some reason the factors they use to measure quality of life don’t seem to include the weather. We Canadians are doomed to look to the whole mass of humanity south of us and sigh as we secretly begrudge the blessings of warmth that heavens bestowed upon the others but not us.
April is the worst of months in Canada, but not in the ironic sense of T.S. Elliot. It is the worst of months because we watch on TV other nations transition into short sleeves and slippers, while we are held back in the mucked sludge of old snow and stubborn northern winds. We lounge in the parking lots of Tim Hortons drive-throughs with pale, sun deprived faces and bags under our eyes, smoking cigarettes and making cynical jokes to assuage our frustration with lingering winter.
Canada is so cold, it has warped Quebecois French into a hideous accent that scares the wits out of Parisians and other indigenes of that language on the tame European continent.
It’s not fair, we say. Why can’t there be more equality in the distribution of nice weather among the nations of this earth? If only this could change somehow.
Enter global warming. The first thing that comes to my mind is, “Hey, wouldn’t Canada become warmer? Wouldn’t Americans then have nothing on us in terms of weather jokes?” But if I were to say that to my Canadian compatriots, I would run the risk of ostracism. From Halifax to Toronto to the sub-polar human colony called Edmonton, educated and intelligent Canadians see global warming as the defining menace of our era, just like it is seen by their counterparts in any other enlightened country. But I have done some research and I am seriously starting to believe that they are all mistaken. Global warming looks to me like a great blessing that every human should embrace, and not only Canadians, for if it happened it would solve some of humanity’s great ills.
Hear me out.
When I was in middle and high schools, the textbooks referred to global warming as the greenhouse effect. They don’t use that term any more, and I don’t know why - it made a lot of sense. Greenhouse gases trap heat from the sun rather than reflect it, just like a greenhouse does. Now, when you come to think of it, what are greenhouses used for? They are used to house beautiful, lush gardens in places where the weather is too dreary. It follows that if the entire planet turned into a giant greenhouse, it should turn into a giant lush garden. This recalls to my mind the state before the Fall, the Garden of Eden.
But there are so many things wrong with that! you say. You start listing objections and perhaps you start with how we are exhausting the non-renewable fossil fuels and driving ourselves towards an energy cliff.
For one thing, we ought to ask the question, where did the fossil fuels come from? All the coal and natural gas and crude oil now buried deep under the surface of the earth were once carbon within bodies of living organisms walking the surface. And before that, before life exploded upon the face of our planet and breathed in that very same carbon into their stems and leaves and their flesh and bones, that carbon was floating in the air in the form of carbon dioxide gas. So, if you think about it, by burning the fossil fuels we are merely putting all that carbon back to its original place - into the atmosphere. We are restoring the original balance of Mother Earth.
And what did that ancient balance look like? The geological record reveals that it was indeed a lush garden on the global scale. We are told that forests covered Sahara and Antarctica. The balmy climate supported ferns the size of houses. Majestic cold-blooded dinosaurs thrived even in Alaska, whose tectonic plate had already shifted far north 100 million years ago. Hippopotami swam in Thames and the Rhine. There were no deserts either dry or frozen, but life flourished everywhere equitably. No corner of this earth was resigned unto death. The nourishing power of nature not only sustained life but propelled it to multiply and diversify in miraculous evolutionary explosions. Nowhere was too cold and nowhere was too hot either, for the nature of the greenhouse effect is progressive in the economic sense: it evens out differences. It erases the harsh gradients of climate such as we see today and bestows all corners of earth with equal blessings of temperance and fecundity.
Why are we so concerned about restraining the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere? We selfishly prefer oxygen, because we breathe it, and we don’t think of our brothers the trees, who today are starved and chocking in oxygen-poisoned air. Unimaginable populations of trees have been wiped off the face of the Earth. Think of the desolation of Sahara and the Gobi, of kangaroos licking their burning forearms in the fiery noon of Central Australia, think of the elephants today dying of thirst in parched Kalahari. If we humans, the only sentient animals, would only have the morals to restore to the flora what was theirs at first, both animals and plants would flourish to their once grand potential.
The global warming that we could gift to the planet would not only furnish the plants with the carbon dioxide for photosynthesis, the teat of all life, but the heat it would bring would massively increase the rate of evaporations of the oceans, bringing a plethora of fresh water as rain upon the long-dead deserts of the world. The massive increase in fresh water would produce a green boom spreading back to cover all the yellow sands on the global map. Sahara and Gobi would become another pair of oxygen lungs of the planet. Arabs would need not fear the end of the fossil age. Their vast peninsula would be on equal footing with the triple rice harvests of Thailand or the idyllic bliss of rural France.
But then you say, the global warming, also known as the climate change, is causing fires in California and Australia and apocalyptic weather in India.
As for the forest fires, think of the end game. The greenhouse Earth would be a garden all over, moist and warm like a fertile womb. How can such climate be conductive to fires, which require dry weather and mean winds? The misty fog in the air would not only keep our wrinkles at bay, it would also extinguish any fire with frequent rains such as we see in the tropics today. Mother Nature, restored to her ancient fertility, would again be able to end any large-scale mischief with the moisture of her bountiful rain. Fire, that wrath of a toxically masculine God, would have no place in her pleasant garden.
As for the floods and hot weather in India, that too would probably cease to exist. The extremes of weather are the cause of hard temperature gradients caused by the agitations of winds ultimately originating from the polar ice caps. As these would no longer exist, neither would the weather gradients, and the weather of India would be not much different than that of Canada. And if it is, the Indians can move to Canada. They have already began that exodus in our times, anyhow.
Some are on the other hand concerned with the rising sea levels and the resultant loss of precious real estate. They say that certain islands may sink under rising ocean levels. Most of oceanic islands are volcano islands, which means they feature mountains rising out of the ocean. Against their steep gradient, even a meter of water elevation would not translate to great loss of territory.
As for the flat ones, let’s be frank. Humans colonised those remote islands only recently, and when they did so they could not have possibly felt like they reached some primeval home. The islanders always must have felt like they indeed are far from the heart of humanity. Having this spirit of colonisers, it should not be too traumatising if they relocated again to some other islands. Seeing that vast areas of dry and snow deserts would become open to human habitation, we would have more space for everyone, and in that great opening of space I feel confident that we could find a satisfactory solution for the couple of thousands of refugees from the Maldives.
What about so many of the great cities of the world becoming submerged because such cities are generally on or near the seacoast? We are a species that has gone to the moon, mastered the elements, and uncovered profundities of the universe, and yet we should find it too difficult to build dikes? Are you going to be the one to tell me that we should terraform Mars and Venus, but that water creeping at us 3 millimetres per year will ruin our civilisation? Granted even that we cannot fence off the sea at enough critical points, it must be remembered that the rise of sea levels is a gradual process. Our great cities will have to be rebuilt anyways, seeing how environmentally inefficient our architecture has been, and how unfit it is for emerging technologies. We have plenty of time to develop new centres of population somewhat more inland, and while doing that we can boost development, employment, and innovation. Overall, the gradual and limited human migration caused by disappearance of a few critical coastlines would be a child’s play in comparison with countless bloody migrations we already went through in ages past. It would be a small egg to crack for the magnificent omelette of a new Greenhouse Earth.
Another complaint, scientifically more complex, has to do with the disappearance of the polar ice caps as atmospheric regulators. Today, these vast coolers play the epoch-defining role of stirring the oceans. As warm waters circulate towards the northern extremes, they are said to be cooled by the polar ice. As a result, they gain in density and sink to ocean bottoms, lifting up the muck from below and bringing it to the surface. This muck is loaded with the carbon of the dead organisms that had sunk to the bottom, and that carbon is recycled back into the atmosphere. This ensures that carbon is not lost forever but brought back into the air to feed the photosynthesis and from there, to be put back into the bodies of all kinds of living organism. If the process is to end, carbon fixated to sea organisms would sink to the bottom and stay there permanently, gradually reducing the amount of carbon dioxide in the air. The drop in atmospheric carbon would in turn cause a massive global cooling, which would bring back the polar ice caps, and kick-start the mixing of the oceans once again. I think the argument is that we should avoid initiating this half-a-billion-years long cycle, which has happened before and may have caused mass extinctions.
Giant lizards enjoying the northern lights in the Yukon
If we carefully follow that train of thought though, we would arrive at the conclusion that too much emission of carbon dioxide by us humans would ultimately cause a sharp drop in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It sounds awfully to me like Mother Nature has a wonderful negative feedback mechanism that can easily handle our energy profligacy.
You may say that in the vast time period during which the oceans cease to be mixed, many of today’s marine species may become extinct. But even at the peak of oceanic stagnation there would still be cold waters in the very far north, so that cold-water species of fish could still survive within a limited range. And in return for a lot of dead fish, we may get a lot of other fish who prefer warm water, and many more land life populating the lush jungles of the Sahara and other present deserts. When such mass shifts occurred in the past, sure they caused mass extinctions of dinosaurs for example. But the same event that caused the extinction of dinosaurs also caused the evolution of mammals, which ultimately led to us humans.
Then again you say, but if we run out of fossil fuels, our civilisation as we know it would come to an end. Well, could that not be a good thing? We can no longer drive cars through sprawled suburbs or take airplanes to different continents. Great! Instead of lonely suburbs we will have close communities as of old, as the human animal is supposed to have. And the end of long-distance travel will put an end to globalisation, that evil force that exploits the workers everywhere and unites the exploiting elites into one, hellishly powerful cabal from which there is no escape. The capitalist oppressor will no longer be able to attend Bilderberg conferences; he will be forced to mingle with peasants in his own parish.
Yet, if you really insist on fossil fuel, we could use the vast plains of newly greened global deserts to grow corn and make enough gasoline and kerosene and diesel out of it. We would have the robots to do all the farm work, too. The biofuels would keep the carbon in the carbon cycle rather than letting it sink under the Earth’s crust to cure and pickle for hundreds of millions of years.
Through our ingenuity we will be able to create just enough energy to keep the level of civilisation that we already built up through to the fossil fuel age. There will be not enough fuel for extravagant globalism, but we can surely generate enough renewable energy to run computers for education and learning, or to run local public transport. Greenhouse Earth will force us to achieve the organic local community of libertarian dreams.
Finally, and perhaps as a relative detail, you may say: but what about the beauties of snow landscapes and winter wonderlands? What about White Christmases? Yes, these will be less accessible, but they will still exist. You may not be able to go on a ski vacation in the Canadian Rockies. After global warming, Whistler and Banff will resemble the lush bush of the mountains of Congo. That has its own charms. We could perhaps colonise these locations with the endangered specimens of the magnificent silverback gorilla, or we could enjoy the Rockies as we now enjoy the rainforests of the Andes. But even at the peak of Greenhouse Earth, there will still be ski resorts available in the extreme latitudes. You would still be able to go skiing on the Baffin Island and Greenland, or on the Peninsula of Antarctica. And unlike today, after skiing in those locations you could get a nice lager on a mountain patio and soak up the sun that doesn’t set. Our fuel energy output would not be lavish, but surely, we could process some of the endless carbon of abundant plants, or harness sunshine or water or wind, to produce enough fuel for planes to transport snow tourists to these destinations. And we could do so on the cheap.
A major drawback to global warming that I see is that it happens on extremely slow time scales. It is ridiculous to think that anyone could feel significant changes within their lifetime. Such changes are on the scale of thousands, if not millions of years. But we are allowed to be forward thinking, no? Of course, we wouldn’t want them to happen within lifetimes. Such a fast rate of change would cause great suffering. But if it could happen on the scale of say centuries rather than eons, one can have hope that Canada as we know it today may one day in the near future rank in the top of lifestyle ratings that do take into consideration the weather as well.