I overheard a conversation about Global Warming and the one Person said, he thinks it is quite surprising, given the minute scale of human beings on this world that we are somehow having a significant effect on this planet . Here is a thought experiment to give it some perspective:
The earth is 8,000 miles in diameter; the oceans are (say) 5 miles deep, at a ratio of 1,600 to 1 imagine a globe 8 feet across; the oceans are 1/16" deep. One sixteenth of an inch!!! Yet to our perspective, the oceans are deep, vast and full of more resources than we could use in a millennium.
Now on that same 8 foot globe, take a pin and make a scratch. Call that the Grand Canyon. Understand that EVERY PERSON ON EARTH COULD FIT INTO THE GRAND CANYON.
Now take that pin and barely touch the planet, don’t make a scratch or even a dent, just the slightest slightest impression. Call that a hole 50 miles x 50 miles x 60 feet deep. Every drop of oil ever taken out of the ground would fit into that tiny little hole. Light it on fire and think about the “impact” such would have on the vast size of the planet and atmosphere.
This got me thinking that this is somehow interesting and i thought what about all the Infrastructures, Buildings, Roads, etc. just everything Humans have transformed from Natural Habitats to Man made, how large an area would that cover on our 8’ Foot Globe?
Also understand that there are more individual humans currently alive than there have ever been individuals of any large animal species ever, of any kind. We are now the herd to end all herds. And each human makes more changes to his or environment than any individual animal ever has.
The Sahara desert, the Iraqi desert, and much of the deserts in the American Southwest are apparently the result of human activity – a much lower level of human activity than we have today. There’s an area of floating trash and plastic bags larger than Texas in the Mid-Pacific Gyre. The area of sea floor that’s dredged each year – killing millions of animals, with unknown impact – is larger than the continental United States.
Human impact is staggering, on a scale largely un-analyzed, and it’s accelerating dramatically.
Oh, and as regards the oceans being full of more resources than we can use in a millennium, tell that to the Great Auk, Stellar’s Sea Cow, the Right Whale, the declining populations of cod and tuna, The Chesapeake Bay oysters and blue crabs, the bleaching coral reefs, the sea turtles, the crashing shark populations, and the Grand Banks fisheries, once the richest in the world, now commercially unviable because of the depopulation of fish.
The OP’s mistake is thinking about the 8 foot ball. Substantially all of the 8 foot ball is inert rock, useful only for providing gravity. We live entirely in the roughly 1/16th inch thick layer of upper ocean & lower atmosphere. And as noted above, we are making a mess in that thin layer at a decent clip.
Also, understand that unlike the relatively inert rock, that layer is a very complex dynamical system. As a simple example, the fact there is any oxygen in it at all is entirely due to life. If a magic wand simply disappeared all life tomorrow, the oxygen would be gone in a few hundred thousand years, probably never to return.
So the punch line is we’re whacking like hell on a complex interlocking system we don’t begin to understand. Years ago, when TVs were repairable, often involving dozens of arcane internal adjustments, there was a standard joke about a dummy using a sledge hammer as a TV adjusting tool.
We’re doing that now, at least a bit. And we seem fair set to do even more of it as the other 80% of the human population enters the equivalent of ther First World’s 20th century of heeavy industry & concomitant pollution, wealth growth, & consumption.
Neither the doomsayers nor the head-in-the-sanders have the complete story, but you do need to ensure you understand the scale & scope of what’s happening. And your 8 foot ball of rock isn’t helping until you learn to ignore all but the coat of paint in which we live.
For the OP: I’m not big on global warming either, but posts like this do not make the case to anyone.
The example of the oil is just silly. Oil is not the only contributor to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere - coal and natural gas are huge factors. Furthermore, the illustration is of a liquid mass of pure oil. When you burn it, octane goes from a liquid to a gas and splits into eight carbon-containing molecules - an increase in volume by about 10,000 times (ignoring the water vapor). So let’s envision a cloud of smoke covering New England up to the stratosphere. Not so tiny anymore.
And the Grand Canyon example? Please. Most Americans feel cramped if they have less than 300 square feet of living space per person. 300 sqft x 6 billion is 65,000 square miles - a square 800 miles on a side. Still small overall, but in my neighborhood, we average one person per 10,000 sq ft when you count our yards. If we were all going to live in suburbia, you’d need 1,400 miles on each side of that square. Oh, and we’re not growing food in our backyards…
Cites, please? I thought the current theory was that the Sahara is a desert due to gradual desertification following the end of the last ice age. If a place doesn’t receive much rain, it cannot help but be a desert, can it? I’m not saying that humans haven’t aggravated the expansion, but to lay the blame entirely at the feet of humanity seems wrong.
I’m also having a little trouble accepting that 2500 square miles of oil 60 feet deep is as small of an amount as you posit. When you think about the fact that most of that oil is burned in tiny sprays in car engines and we’ve really only been doing it for 100 years at most, it seems like a rather substantial amount of oil actually. How does your globe look after you put another pin depression in for every 100 years of human existence?
I’ve definitely read that idea in the past, but off the top of my head can’t come up with a firm citation – most online articles now seem to attribute the Sahara’s formation to a dramatic unexplained climate shift.
I did find a list of citations that that assert that “droughts alone do not cause desertification” but that human population pressure and land-use decisions are to blame, but that’s talking about man-created deserts, which I acknowledge I have to proved the Sahara to be.
That’s correct. It’s about the size of West Virginia.
Another way to think about this amount of oil is that if you spread it over every square inch of land on earth, it’ll form a layer about 1/32 inch thick. That’s not insignificant. (That’s on the real earth, not the 8 ft globe.)
Whenever I hear the “we’re just too small in the great scheme of things to affect something that big,” I always think of how small a lit match is compared to a giant warehouse full of paper.
I’m not disputing that the Grand Canyon is physically able to hold the people if they were packed in mass-grave style. I’m just pointing out that it’s a straw man argument to say that we’re insignificant because we could fit in the Grand Canyon when our actual ecological impact is determined by our houses, streets, yards and farms, not our physical bodies.
Actually, the region of the Sahara Desert contains a number of distinct ecological regions including arid desert, lightly wooded volcanic highlands and xeric shrublands, tropical savannahs, coastal deserts, steppes, and lowland dry seas and salt lakes. Parts of the Sahara get monsoon rains; however, a lack of sustained moisture makes the majority of the Sahara unsuited to intensive agriculture and incapable of supporting sustained resident populations. Because of its location the Sahara is particularly vulnerable to small variations in global climate and goes through regular climate cycle changes that correspond closely to glacial periods. However, Libya has been draining the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer (a paleowater aquifer) for supply for the Great Manmande River project, which is depleting a non-renewable water source and causing aquifer subsidence.
The desertification of the wetlands and grasslands in Tigris-Euprhates Marshland was an intentional effort by Saddam Hussain to punish and drive out the indigenous Arab population. There is no question that this has done substantial damage to that ecosystem which does not have adjacent areas for indigenous species to be displaced. What marshland remains is much higher in salinity than is sustainable for agriculture.
Similarly, the draining of the Aral Sea was an intention effort by the former Soviet Union to reduce independent fishing industry and irrigate Kazakhstan to support agriculture for export. This has resulted in the destruction of the previously fertile regions around and sustainable fishing industry in the sea as well as creating a dustbowl area that distributes alkalis and pesticides into China, the subcontinent, and the Southern Hemisphere.
There is no question that humanity has affected the climate and landscape of the Earth in manifest ways. This is most apparent in the littoral ocean zones where disruption of tidal zones, curtailment or eradication of keystone predators, or insufficient/excessive growth of primary producers can have rapid and profound changes to the ecosystem on all trophic levels. This is also true on land, although the effects are typically slower owing to geographical separation and resulting slower prorogation of effects. How much of current global climate change (and the errors in measurement in model) are still up for debate, but it is clear that the trend correlates to industrial activity of human populations.
Living creatures having an impact on the Earth is certianly nothing new; our oxygen-rich atmosphere didn’t just happen to be created when the planet formed. It was created by the respiration of cyanobacteria. Tiny little microscopic organisms, each giving off the most minute, insignificant amount of oxygen, made our atmosphere what it is today, made almost all terrestrial life possible.
It doesn’t seem much of a stretch to think that the most successful large animal species in the history of the planet could have an impact on it.