Nature and Balance

SPOCK: War created an imbalance and nature counterbalanced it.

Star Trek, “The Omega Glory” (s2ep23), Stardate unknown

In some form or another, Climate Change has been with us since the beginning of Time. If you look at geologic time, gradual changes to climate happen, moving toward a hotter Earth or a colder one, and in the past once these changes lead to a tipping point, this leads to mass-extinction events. These changes in climate are often driven by natural forces: plate tectonics, accumulation of CO₂ (carbon dioxide) in the atmosphere, shifts in the ocean currents and so on. Eventually, the pendulum swings back and the climate shifts toward the other direction. Meanwhile, life gradually recovers, diversifies again and so on.

But it’s important to understand that these changes happen very gradually over tens of thousands of years, or even hundreds of thousands of years.

Climate Change in the modern context refers to human-driven changes. The buildup of CO₂ gas in the atmosphere is nothing new, but the output of that gas in the last 100 years is far higher than natural forces can account for. We know that this extra buildup is due to fossil fuels. Burning fossil fuels is literally like throwing gasoline on a fire.

Fossil fuels are not a sustainable energy source anyway, and they are condensing a process that should take a hundred thousand years into only tens of years. It’s small wonder we see such dramatic weather now: mass wildfires, mass rainfalls, mass drought and so on.

As Spock says, if we create an imbalance, nature will balance it out. But may not happen the way we want it to. The greater the imbalance, the greater the correction.

But just as 8-billion humans have, across generations, contributed to the problem, those same humans can contribute to fixing the imbalance (before Nature does it for us):

• Reduce energy consumption at home. Even switching off lights at home helps.
• Plant local, native plants in your neighborhood
• Eat more vegetables (which I am trying to do anyway)
• Cut back on fossil fuels: the less you use, the less accumulates in the atmosphere
• and so on…

Find something you can reasonably do, and don’t hesitate to do some small good in the world.