Tag: consumerism

Antarctica and Climate Change

Camp at Mt Raymond, Transantarctic Mountains. Credits: Barbara Cohen. NASA Website

 

Climate change is. Nothing is static. Change is the only constant.

We all know, if we think about it, that at some point in our future the sun will go supernova and planet earth will be vaporized. Poof. This pale blue dot will be no more. And if humans happen to be around, we too will go poof.

Doing nothing. Or even going back to a low-tech Native American lifestyle, we will still vanish from existence as a species, along with every other life form on this planet, as well as this little ball of dirt and water that we call home.

We can’t stop our own extinction — because we can’t do anything about the sun.

I suppose that is why we dream of colonizing other planets. It’s our survival instinct at play.

Ever since human beings showed up, we’ve been altering the environment more than any other species. We are our own blessing and curse.

But when it comes to climate change, that existed long before we showed up on the scene, which was perhaps around 2 to 3 million years ago.

The Eocene epoch (56 to 33.9 million years ago) saw significant climate change.

The early Eocene was very warm, much warmer than it is today. There were very high levels of CO2 and methane in the atmosphere. And methane, by the way, is the more significant culprit when it comes to global warming. Some guesses go as high as several thousand ppm. However, the middle to late Eocene was marked by decreasing levels of CO2 and a switch from global warming to global cooling. Of note, during the period of cooling there was a temporary warming period of 600,000 years. We don’t really know why. Just as we don’t really know why the cooling trend began to begin with.

Global cooling accelerated dramatically after the Eocene-Oligocene Extinction Event, as CO2 levels rapidly fell.

The icing of Antarctica begin in the middle Eocene, and escalated during the Eocene-Oligocene Extinction Event — especially after CO2 levels dropped below the tipping point of 600 ppm.

Now notice, all of this climate change happened by the actions of Mother Nature alone. There were no human beings in existence at this time. And the kicker is, we don’t really have any idea as to what Mother Nature did or didn’t do to cause it. We’ve made a few guesses, but we know nothing concrete.

We currently live in an ice age. Surprised? You shouldn’t be. Our ice age began about 3 million years ago. Yep, that’s just about the time we humans got started too. About 11,000 years ago began the warm interglacial in which our modern world developed.

The Utah Geographical Society website has this bit of interesting info:

Do ice ages come and go slowly or rapidly?

Records show that ice ages typically develop slowly, whereas they end more abruptly. Glacials and interglacials within an ice age display this same trend.

On a shorter time scale, global temperatures fluctuate often and rapidly. Various records reveal numerous large, widespread, abrupt climate changes over the past 100,000 years. One of the more recent intriguing findings is the remarkable speed of these changes. Within the incredibly short time span (by geologic standards) of only a few decades or even a few years, global temperatures have fluctuated by as much as 15°F (8°C) or more.

For example, as Earth was emerging out of the last glacial cycle, the warming trend was interrupted 12,800 years ago when temperatures dropped dramatically in only several decades. A mere 1,300 years later, temperatures locally spiked as much as 20°F (11°C) within just several years. Sudden changes like this occurred at least 24 times during the past 100,000 years. In a relative sense, we are in a time of unusually stable temperatures today—how long will it last?

Glacials and interglacials occur in fairly regular repeated cycles. The timing is governed to a large degree by predictable cyclic changes in Earth’s orbit, which affect the amount of sunlight reaching different parts of Earth’s surface. The three orbital variations are: (1) changes in Earth’s orbit around the Sun (eccentricity), (2) shifts in the tilt of Earth’s axis (obliquity), and (3) the wobbling motion of Earth’s axis (precession).

Notice, ice ages happen because of the planet. Not because of what humans do.

During the Middle Ages, there was a warming period in Europe which enabled greater food production and population growth. Then we entered the Little Ice Age, which began in about the 1400s and ended in the late 1800s.

The causes of the Little Ice Age are guessed to be:

  • cyclical lows in solar radiation
  • heightened volcanic activity
  • changes in ocean circulation
  • variations in Earth’s orbit and axial tilt
  • inherent variability in global climate
  • decreases in human population

I find the last speculation of interest: large decreases in human population, particularly due to the Black Death and the colonization of the Americas, in which large numbers of native peoples died because of new diseases.

Perhaps the way to end global warming is to implement a large-scale version of Jonathan Swift’s Modest Proposal.

There is much concern over the warming of Antarctica. Land ice is decreasing in Western Antarctica, while sea ice is increasing in both East and West.

One of the guesses as to the trigger for the Little Ice Age was increased pack ice. Such as we are seeing today.

Another interesting factoid is the 2016-2018 Big Chill. NASA data shows global temperatures dropped by .56°C during that period. And the folks of the northern US can certainly attest to the brutal 2018-2019 winter. Is the Big Chill continuing?

So what is to be made of the warming and ice melt in western Antarctica, the relative stability of the East Antarctic ice sheet, and the general increase of sea ice?

It’s of significance that this same dynamic was in operation some 5 to 3 million years ago when there was a warm-up in the early Pliocene epoch, before we were once again plunged into the Big Chill.

There is climate change. No doubt about that. Is it largely caused by human activity? I think that point is debatable, when we look at the big picture. After all, one suggestion as to the cause of the Little Ice Age was the large and rapid decrease in human population essentially due to disease. No one has speculated it was due to falling CO2 content. Nor do we really know why we came out of the Little Ice Age. Greenhouse gases seemingly had nothing to do with it.

What I think is obvious is that climate change happened before people existed. And people do indeed alter their environment, often for the worse. In fact, we might garbage ourselves to death before global warming ever affects us.

The biggest problem we face, in my opinion, is not global warming but global consumerism. Consumerism uses up resources, generates pollution, and produces vast amounts of waste — much of it toxic, if not to us then to other life forms.

Perhaps we ought to worry more about our buying and spending habits and the junking up of the planet, then ice melting on Antarctica. But we’d rather look anywhere than our own backyards.

Comments are always welcome! And until next time, happy reading.

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The Wonderful Machine Age: Mass Marketing/Consumerism

Then I saw in my dream, that when they were got out of the wilderness, they presently saw a town before them, and the name of that town is Vanity; and at the town there is a fair kept, called Vanity Fair. It is kept all the year long. It beareth the name of Vanity Fair … because all that is there sold, or that cometh thither, is vanity… One chanced … to say unto them, ‘What will ye buy?’

John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress was published in 1678. His description of Vanity Fair predates the Industrial Revolution by eight decades and the Machine Age by two centuries. And yet nothing characterizes the Machine Age and the Modern Era so much as the question, “What will ye buy?”

Mass marketing and the accompanying Consumerism began in The Machine Age. And as it began, so did the hue and cry arise for us to return to a simpler life and eschew the call to “Buy! Buy! Buy!” Writers such as John Burroughs, David Greyson, Edward Bok, Ralph Borsodi, and Theodore Roosevelt wrote books and articles and gave speeches extolling the virtues of a life without “stuff”. And all the while the Ad Men appealed to our sense of need.

I know for myself there is life before iPad and life with iPad. I confess, I prefer life with iPad. Although I could live without the iPad, it would be much more difficult to dispense with the world wide web altogether. I’ve become used to having volumes of information at my fingertips that would have been difficult for even my local research librarian to glean a mere 40 years ago.

The Stoic philosopher Seneca, very much a voice for our age, counseled his friend that wealth was not in and of itself bad. What was bad was thinking we can’t live without it or that we should have it.

With stuff comes anxiety and the modern age is filled with anxiety. Thoreau’s image of the man pulling a massive barn-sized wagon down the road with all of his worldly possessions piled high in it comes to mind. There is something a whole lot simpler about a backpack.

How then did Mass Marketing and Consumerism arise? They arose out of the scale of production and the means to produce tens of thousands of an item, whereas previously only a hundred or two had been produced. They arose out of the dreams of our Victorian ancestors of what constituted progress and plenty.

Prior to the Industrial Revolution, goods were generally produced at home or in small shops. What today we call cottage industries. Local artisans and craftsmen produced goods to order in addition to what they produced for themselves. The extra money helped to supplement what was produced on the farm.

For example, in the American Revolution muskets and rifles were produced by hand. The British government contracted with gunsmiths to produce a certain number of weapons in a given period of time. An agent then went to the gunsmith’s place of business, collected the weapons, and paid the smith. The same was done for uniforms before the big textile mills were built.

The process was slow and costly. Production of goods was often secondary to the main livelihood of the producer, which was usually farming. With the advent of steam power and the invention of machines to manufacture goods, the scale of production went up. Instead of maybe ten or twenty pairs of socks a cottage industry could produce by hand, the mills could produce ten or twenty thousand in the same period of time or less.

This, however, caused a problem for the manufacturer. He simply had too many items on his hands. The cost to him to produce a thousand was often greater per item than to produce ten thousand. The economics of scale gives us a lower cost per item the more we produce because it is cheaper to buy in bulk than singly. So what was a manufacturer to do with the extra goods? Enter the Ad Man and the Salesman and the call, “What will ye buy?”

An interesting article is “The Commercial Christmas”, which gives a quick look at how the Victorians commercialized the holiday. And by 1890 editorials were appearing in The Ladies Home Journal complaining of Christmas being too commercial.

Today we have, through the world wide web, everything at our fingertips and ad agencies convince us we just can’t live without _________ (you fill in the blank). The amount of consumer debt is frightening. In the US, as of 31 March 2015, household debt was $11.85 trillion. Of that credit card debt was $684 billion. And as of the end of 2013 28% of Americans had more credit card debt than savings and only 51% had more emergency savings than credit card debt. And this doesn’t include other debt, such as school loans, car loans, and mortgages.

Consumerism is alive and well. Every government in the Western World worries when consumers stop spending and every developing country’s government  tries to figure out how to get its people to buy. The modern world is built on consumerism.

So why don’t we see more of this in our retro-future novels? Clearly the Steampunk and Dieselpunk real life worlds saw the beginning of mass marketing and consumerism and were in large part formed by them.

Is it a case, perhaps as with television, they are so much with us we see no fictional value in them?

I think of the short-lived, late ‘80s sci-fi TV show Max Headroom. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the show, it was a satirical and cyberpunk look at ourselves “20 minutes into the future”. The first episode, entitled “Blipverts”, explored mass marketing. [Spoiler alert here.] People were mysteriously exploding. It was discovered that Network 23 was using high-intensity commercials which had the ability to overload people’s nervous systems, causing them to explode.

Of interest is that the atmosphere of Max Headroom was about as depressingly noir as one can get. I think it was cyberpunk at its finest.

Surely there is something in this the steampunk or dieselpunk writer can use. After all both steampunk and dieselpunk are children of cyberpunk. I see both subgenres ignoring major expanses of territory which need to be explored. Where is the inventiveness of Jules Verne and H G Wells? Or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Fritz Lang (the movie Metropolis from 1927).

Both subgenres are science fiction and from my observation (of my own work too), both have degenerated into using highly selective tropes to produce works which are simply mysteries or romances or adventure yarns set in an alternative historical universe. There is nothing wrong with this. I just think there is so much more. Something like “Blipverts”.

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