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We are all village idiots in nature’s eyes

The character in the book is talking about our 4.5 billion year old planet and how even a nuclear war would not be able to destroy it.

“You think man can destroy the planet? What intoxicating vanity.” — Charlton Heston reading from the book Jurassic Park

The character in the book is talking about our 4.5 billion year old planet and how even a nuclear war would not be able to destroy it. My, isn’t that a comforting thought.

But those two sentences are all over the Internet. Heston read it and a few more on Rush Limbaugh’s show to show that any concerns we might have about climate change are misplaced. Mother Nature will do what she wants to do and no amount of pollution from 6.7 billion humans will change the equation the slightest bit. So why worry? Party on, dude!

We hear about the “Medieval Warm Period” when the Vikings colonized Greenland and when southern Norway produced fine wines. We also hear about the “Little Ice Age” when the rivers and canals of England and Holland routinely froze over in the much colder winters. So if Mother Nature can flip the thermostat so easily, it would be supreme folly for us to worry our silly little heads over the one-half trillion tonnes of carbon dioxide we’ve thus far spewed into the atmosphere. Party on, dude!

Fortunately though, science is able to provide a bit of perspective on the matter. With respect to the Little Ice Age, we know a few different factors were at play. Several prolonged dips in the sun’s output was certainly a major factor and ash clouds from erupting volcanoes blocking the sun was another.

But can they fully explain the global cooling? The combined solar events were only in effect during about half of the Little Ice Age. And any big volcanic events usually only dim the lights for a couple of years each.

Another significant unknown relates to why atmospheric carbon dioxide declined significantly around the year 1400. According to global warming mechanisms, this would have helped to cool things down as well. But until recently, climate scientists were unable to account for the missing CO2.

But then, for an environmental scientist by the name of William Ruddiman, it clicked. In 1347, Europe was introduced to the bubonic plague (or Black Death), which mowed down about half of the entire population. And what happens when an agricultural society gets wiped out? Shrubs and trees take over what were formerly fields of grain. They take over and start sucking up vast quantities of CO2 that then get fixed into the fibres of their wood. Various estimates put the re-colonization of agricultural fields by forests at up to half of the total acreage.

Then, in 1492, Christopher Columbus initiated another big population die-off via the smallpox and influenza viruses. As many as 60 million native Americans who had formerly practiced agriculture and the periodic prescribed burning of woodlands succumbed to European diseases.

And so forests in the Americas also spread much further than they had previously.

It wasn’t until the 18th century that human populations started to recover and began cutting down the forests again. The CO2 that was fixed in the wood mass then got liberated into the atmosphere.

So it is now clear that a few hundred million people using nothing more than hand tools were able to noticeably alter the climate.

And before that, a few billion rats and fleas and plague bacilli were able to alter it also.

But now we’re using the big guns. The burning of coal and oil that have remained trapped for millions of years will show Mother Nature who is boss. Or more likely, it will show her who the village idiots are.

Will one of them be Charlton Heston? He may have been right about the resiliency of a rock circling the sun for a few billion years, but what about that fragile web of ecological relationships on its surface?

The supreme irony is that Chuckie, for all of his hubris and bombast, had a real moment of humility earlier in his career.

Remember Planet of the Apes? It was Heston’s character, after all, who raged at all of the village idiots who had destroyed civilization before him. Gazing in torment at the remnants of the Statue of Liberty, he summed it up:

“You maniacs! You blew it up! God damn you! God damn you all to hell!”

Evan Bedford is a local environmentalist. Direct comments, questions and suggestions to wyddfa23@telus.net