Biosphere 2: The Tech-Fix

“Scientists once tried to build a sealed living world – nicknamed biosphere 2 – from scratch in a big greenhouse in the Arizona desert. They failed. As carbon dioxide levels rose within the sealed greenhouses, Biosphere 2’s human inhabitants must have reflected on the lessons they were learning as they gasped for air. Functioning ecosystems cannot be created artificially. Life keeps us alive, and we lay waste to it at our peril.” — Mark Lynas, Six Degrees: Out Future on a Hotter Planet, pg 106.

I don’t want to pick on Biosphere 2 specifically. I want more to focus on the idea that technologies are going to save us. Biosphere 2 is simply a good example of how limited our knowledge of the world around us is. We believe we are masters of all we survey, that we are special and steer our own destiny, that we are apart from other life on this planet and can therefore do with other life as we please.

We can’t use other life as we please. We don’t know the impacts of what we are doing. We often don’t accept that what we are seeing is an impact from an action we have taken. For too long there was a debate in the mass media which didn’t exist in scientific circles. As Al Gore says on the DVD, Inconvienient Truth, there were no questions against the conclusions of the scientific papers linking global climate change with human activity. Over the same time period around 50% of the articles published in mass media news stated that the findings were inconclusive or that there was a debate over the findings of these scientific reports. In other words, the mass media lied. Nothing new there.

There will not be a technological fix for the problems we are creating. For many of the problems, the really, really big problems, which we are creating, we aren’t even looking for solutions.

“Today, we are sort of in the middle of a mass experiment,” says Bralower. “With the oceans warming, we do not really know what the end result will be, but we can look to the fossil record to see how they were affected in the past. It appears that abrupt climate change affects plankton with selectivity and most of the organisms bounce right back after the change.” — Source: ScienceDaily

The article does tell us the climatic change range that the research considered: 11 degrees over 1,000 years, which is very, very fast in geological time frames. It translates into 1.1 degree every 100 years. In other words 0.11 degreed every 10 years. Mark Lynas believes we are looking at 0.4 degrees of climate change every 10 year, 4 degrees every 100 years or 40 degrees over 1,000 years. Comparable? No. Especially as one of the changes which was studied wasn’t geologically rapid climate change due to increased levels of carbon dioxide, it was the K/T boundry, the extinction of the dinosaurs due to ‘nuclear winter’ effect, or masses of dust and crap up in the atmosphere blocking out the sun.

Why is the lack of carbon dioxide related climate change important? Surely a rapid shift in climate temperature is as bad as the next? Well, no. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is taken out of the atmosphere in a large number of ways, one of which is disolving into the ocean. This raises the acidity of the ocean because the carbon dioxide forms carbonic acid when combined with water (H2O + CO2 = H2CO3). Acidification of the ocean makes it a more hostile environment for shell forming organisms, such as plankton.

If man-made carbon dioxide emissions cause the ocean to become too hostile for plankton then we may be looking at the total collapse of oceanic ecosystems – everything in the ocean needs these little guys for their existence, from the largest whales to smallest fish. This may not be very likely to happen, as water doesn’t disolve that much carbon dioxide and thus doesn’t become very acidic. However, the amount it disolves increases with temperature, hotter water disolves more than cold water. Also the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide influences how much is disolved in the ocean. As I have said previously, we are entering unprecidented levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, so it’s impossible to say what will happen.