Environmental Roulette
All-us be praised, the world is safe from our ever-polluting sin. We be absolved. All that energy we’ve burned — dudn’t matter. The Earth can take it. The atmosphere can take it. The smog, the various carbon oxides — not to worry. Why, scoff-scoff, there have been volcanos that blew more smoke into the atmosphere than man has in a million years, or cars or power plants or whatever. And now, according to a consulting climatologist in a letter to the local paper, the global warming warning is nah. (A climatologist is like a weatherman, except without the pressure. I mean, if they can’t get the forecast right tomorrow, why waste words on the weather they would predict five years from now...who knows?)
All those hydrocarbon emissions...bah. Get absorbed. All those greenhouse gases will dissipate. So what if they create a hole in the ozone layer? No one can actually prove that there will be an increase in skin cancer and eye disease. Besides, it will be years, maybe decades, before we see any evidence we can’t ignore, and we probably won’t be here ourselves anyway.
Er, hem, sir, that nine inch increase in sea level...it’s nothing to be worried about? Of course not. Just the ebb and flow of nature. Happens all the time. Remember, we’ve been around billions of years. What could it possibly matter that we deliberately dumped nuclear waste into the oceans for fifty years, not to mention the billions of tons of garbage from our shoreline cities, and from every ship that’s plied the seas for the last three thousand years.
The oceans are vast, I know, but do you really think that it can’t matter? I mean, what if we are in fact straining the capacity of the atmosphere to absorb pollution right now, so that the melting of the ice at the poles continues, and at an increasingly faster rate? Surely that can’t augur well for the coastal cities around the world.
To read this nonsensical obfuscation in the paper -- often spewed by experts -- or to listen to the mindless bombast on the radio, one would think there will never be consequences to our consuming and burning and dumping. Hey, yo-yo, do the math. The atmosphere is finite. So are the oceans. At some point, we shift the balance. At some point, we destroy their capacities to filter out our trash and toxins. And we’re talking about the air we’re supposed to breath and the water we need to drink and grow crops.
This is one of those examples of the limits of freedom of speech. Kinda like yelling fire in a crowded theater, these people shouldn’t be allowed to say that there is no fire. The point is not the size of the flames, after all, but the potential for damage and the possibility of control. The larger the blaze the more difficult to contain and the more destruction. Some of the people warning of environmental threats are saying that we are approaching the point of no return, that containment may not be possible without tragic losses first.
If they are wrong, it will cost some developers some money. If they are right, and the Earth’s carrying capacity for our species dips precariously, surely mea culpas won’t be enough.
And that’s SetonnoteS...I’m Tony Seton.