Three Trillion Tons

By Steve Trash - Illusionist, Eco-Educator, and Rockin' Eco Hero

Three trillion tons…. Bear with me a moment…please.  I’m thinking out loud and want you to consider an idea.  Please don’t respond to this blog post with a rebuttal, just think about it.  Considerate it.  Let it soak in.  If you disagree… fine.  You disagree.  I’m cool with that.  But hear me out, because I’m thinking out loud here.  Connections in the natural world are so abundant that scientists can say, definitively “Everything Is Connected”, and it’s NOT an overstatement.  It’s not hyperbole.  It’s a fact.  It’s a fact that’s provable by science (biologically, chemically, atomically).  The Earth is an interconnected system.  The system is connected to systems of the universe.  It’s weird to think about but it’s true.

Here are just a few simple examples of those connections… You and I (our bodies) are made mostly of water (60%... babies even have higher percentages) and that water comes to us from waters, lakes, streams, groundwater, and rivers around us… in the natural world.  We are connected to the water around us.  The fact that bees all over the world accidentally pollinate HUGE HUGE amounts of the fruits and veggies that we humans eat (no pollinators means no food like apples, blueberries, broccoli, watermelons, squash, peanuts, carrots, almonds, strawberries, and honey).  We are connected to the bees.  The fact that following a typhoon in Japan a multi-ton concrete and steel pier washed up on the Oregon coast (a several thousand mile journey across the entire Pacific ocean), means that the salty waters of the ocean are connected, even at super long long long distances.  The east is physically connected to the west.  During the dust-bowl of the 1930’s, dust showed up in New York City (literally dust from Oklahoma landed on people and plants and buildings in NYC).  City Slickers and Sooners are connected to each other physically.  Examples of the connections in nature are simply everywhere.  Each day, scientists dig deeper and discover more and more and more connections in our natural world. 

With those connections in mind, please consider the idea that we humans have been dumping CO2 into the atmosphere (by burning fossil fuels – coal, gasoline, oil, to converting it into energy) for at least 134 years.   This is kind of a long time in human years, but a very short time in geologic Earth years.   We’ve added a VERY LARGE AMOUNT of CO2 into the environment.  For me, it starts to beg the question… “Does it make sense that an estimated three trillion tons of additional CO2 in the atmosphere would have an effect?”   Folks that study this stuff say… yes.   Generally speaking, I’m a skeptical guy, but I tend to trust doctors diagnosis of disease, the engineers choice of lunar module heat shield materials, the mathematicians theoretical ideas about black holes).   If we’ve added a BOAT LOAD of CO2 to the environment in a VERY short period of time, do I believe this will have an effect?  The answer for me is yes… yes… it makes sense to me that it would.  I’m not sure WHAT effect it would have, but it TOTALLY makes sense to me that adding THAT MUCH of something to the atmosphere would have some effect.  So projections from climatologists about the outcomes of this added CO2 might be incorrect, but the fact still remains, that in an interconnected environment, we are significantly changing ONE ASPECT of the environment and it certainly seems reasonable to me that it would cause changes and/or have an effect.  I’m NOT saying that all the models and predictions made by climate scientists are accurate.  They are models.  I AM saying that it makes sense to me that… it’s likely all this extra CO2 will have (or is having) an effect and if we can do something to STOP adding (what is essentially large amounts of pollution) to the environment, that’s a very good idea.  We have alternatives to burning stuff to make energy.  In fact, there are lots of interesting alternatives available to us right now.  It makes sense to me that we should turn our compass away from pollution making energy generation and towards no pollution energy production.   We KNOW that everything in the environment is connected… everything.  Humility would dictate to me that we choose a path that does less harm to an environment that we live in but did not create.  We are passengers on the space ship… Earth.   It seems to me that we can choose a path that reduces or eliminates our pollution and this would be a good thing.  We can measure the amount of CO2 we’re adding to the environment and from that we can make an assumption that it will have some effect, we should consider, pointing the compass away from adding large amounts of pollution to the environment and towards a way of providing for all humans energy needs in ways that have less or no impact.   This is possible.  This makes sense.   ### #climatestrike #environment #makessensetome #everythingisconnected