Richard Zurawski

Today I sit atop the world, the most privileged of the privileged of the almost seven billion people who inhabit this tiny, speck of dust that happens to be the only place in the universe we know of with life. Our planet, the Goldilock’s Planet, is truly a marvel.

It orbits a golden stable main sequence star, not too hot or energetic, yet amazingly long lived, long enough for life on the Earth to develop into an incredible interwoven tapestry the some call Gaia, far enough away from the centre of our galaxy to escape the searing gamma and x-rays emitted by a giant black hole and the detonating supernovae of the hyper energetic core.

Its a perfect planet and has been in the life zone for an incredible four billion years. The list of “perfects” associated with our planet is astounding. We rotate neither too slowly nor too quickly. This the keeps the planet toasty, but not too hot, cool but not frigid, so that water can exist as a solid, liquid and gas. It is this water that gives us weather, again perfect for life. If the rotation were much faster, the weather would dominated by storms that would dwarf a category five typhoon and the ecosystem would be ravaged and lashed by wind, waves and rain without end. Giant, never ending storms would pound and scour the environment and relegate whatever life that could cling to this planet to simple organisms.  And if the orbit was slower the sun side would cook the oceans to boiling and the far side would freeze carbon dioxide solid and weather as we know it would be impossible, as would life.

Then there is the issue of our moon. A freak collision about 500-million years after the Earth’s birth created the moon and absorbed a huge amount of our angular, slowed down the torrid rotation to what it is today.

And our home planet is just the right size. Any bigger and the atmosphere would be dense and choking and the greenhouse effect would cook everything. A little smaller and the gases of the atmosphere would all seep away into outer space.

We have a tilt that gives us seasons so that all part of the planet receive warmth and no part of the Earth is perpetually locked in dark.

Out past the orbit of Mars we have the super gas giant, Jupiter, that acts as a planetary vacuum cleaner, hoovering up almost all the solar system’s debris that would otherwise fall in towards the sun and inevitably strike the Earth with catastrophic consequences.

Our position in the fringe arms of the Milky Way with the celestial dust that obscures the brilliant, yet deadly galactic core, ensures that very little cosmic radiation ever reaches the surface of our planet.

What a perfect place. What a marvel of circumstances, that if changed even in the slightest, would have dire and tragic consequences for life on our Gaia.

Now imagine a time in the distant future, not tomorrow, but a million tomorrows from now, when finally, some other gifted species from a planet every bit as unique and precious as our own has crafted its own society and created a technology that has allowed them to listen to the incredible majesty of the universe, parsing all the electromagnetic spectra into their constituent parts and in the process coming across this amazing signal, from a pale blue planet orbiting a small, non-descript yellow, main sequence star on the edges of the Milky Way.

At first the noise and brilliance of the star has them baffled. Is it some great cosmic explosion emitting all this long wave radiation? It can’t be coming from the small yellow star, its spectral signature is normal other than the incredible surge in the long wave regions. Is there a black hole lurking closer by or collision of some sort or is it something even more fantastic? Now where else is this amazing phenomenon seen. And it is bright. In the long wave region of the electromagnetic spectrum, where TV and Radio waves exist, this source is brighter than the entire Milky Way Galaxy. To have a natural, tradition source from let’s say a star, the energy output would have to be enormous, almost beyond comprehension. Year after year they watch and try to understand what it is they are seeing. And year after year the mystery deepens.

Slowly their technology marches on and then a threshold is reached. The advent of quantum computers and nano technology unleashes a torrent of information and they begin to understand the truth of what they have for years been watching and wondering about. Theory after theory has been raised and subsequently fallen under the brute force power of scientific method. But now they have one which fits.

It is not the star sending out this spectrum. It comes from a source just outside the star. This star is host to a handful of planets that orbit it. At first they see only the gas giants of Jupiter and Saturn, but their technology leaps ahead and brings the rest of what we call the solar system into view. And there is their source.

What they are listening to is another civilization. They are not alone! Racing at trillions of calculations per second their quantum computers begin to uncover patterns, patterns that make pictures and sound, that have travelled for more than ten thousand years to reach their massive, yet unbelievably sensitive instruments. And what will they find, these interstellar travelers, who have survived the thousands upon thousands of years and light years? That is the question indeed. What will they find?

Today I sit atop the world, the most privileged of the privileged of the almost seven billion people who inhabit this tiny, speck of dust that happens to be the only place in the universe we know of with life. Our planet, the Goldilock’s Planet, is truly a marvel.

It orbits a golden stable main sequence star, not too hot or energetic, yet amazingly long lived, long enough for life on the Earth to develop into an incredible interwoven tapestry the some call Gaia, far enough away from the centre of our galaxy to escape the searing gamma and x-rays emitted by a giant black hole and the detonating supernovae of the hyper energetic core.

Its a perfect planet and has been in the life zone for an incredible 4-billion years. The list of “perfects” associated with our planet is astounding. We rotate neither too slowly nor too quickly. This the keeps the planet toasty, but not too hot, cool but not frigid, so that water can exist as a solid, liquid and gas. It is this water that gives us weather, again perfect for life. If the rotation were much faster, the weather would dominated by storms that would dwarf a category five typhoon and the ecosystem would be ravaged and lashed by wind, waves and rain without end. Giant, never ending storms would pound and scour the environment and relegate whatever life that could cling to this planet to simple organisms.  And if the orbit was slower the sun side would cook the oceans to boiling and the far side would freeze carbon dioxide solid and weather as we know it would be impossible, as would life.

Then there is the issue of our moon. A freak collision about 500 million years after the Earth’s birth created the moon and absorbed a huge amount of our angular, slowed down the torrid rotation to what it is today.

And our home planet is just the right size. Any bigger and the atmosphere would be dense and choking and the greenhouse effect would cook everything. A little smaller and the gases of the atmosphere would all seep away into outer space.

We have a tilt that gives us seasons so that all part of the planet receive warmth and no part of the Earth is perpetually locked in dark.

Out past the orbit of Mars we have the super gas giant, Jupiter, that acts as a planetary vacuum cleaner, hoovering up almost all the solar system’s debris that would otherwise fall in towards the sun and inevitably strike the Earth with catastrophic consequences.

Our position in the fringe arms of the Milky Way with the celestial dust that obscures the brilliant, yet deadly galactic core, ensures that very little cosmic radiation ever reaches the surface of our planet.

What a perfect place. What a marvel of circumstances, that if changed even in the slightest, would have dire and tragic consequences for life on our Gaia.

Monday Sept 8, 2008

In just a bit more than a month we are going to the polls for federal and a municipal elections. And with the Nova Scotia provincial government at minority status it could be three in a hurry.

What better time to begin to process of forcing all three levels of government to take the environment seriously. Because the truth of the matter is that none of them get it where the climate is concerned and until forced won’t even consider the issue. In spite of the fact that it is now 99% certain that people and their industrial output into the atmosphere is shifting the climate at an alarming rate that is even worse than the IPCC has forecast. And considering it’s report is only a year old, that is a huge inditement of the folly of the current governments. All three levels of government are in the politics as usual stage and consider the economy, the budget, tax cuts and health care to the issues. Well folks, its time to knock some governmental heads and begin to get our priorities back on track. There will be no economy, tax cuts et al if we don’t do something soon to change the way we do things!

The first thing we have to do is stop the politics of the environment and get the Greens into the debates. The claptrap and positioning of the Conservatives and the NDP to exclude Elizabeth May from the debates should meet with a resounding call in and email campaign to all the participating media from us. If the Greens are not included its not a debate and we are tuning you out. Neither the media or the politicians care what is right or whether it is right for us. It is all about them and their chances of pulling the wool over our eyes so that we don’t get the true picture. If we let them do that then we only have ourselves to blame.

The solution is to immediately tax carbon dioxide output. We must shut it down. Then that money has to go right back into the development of a numerous alternatives to fossil fuels from reducing to sequestering to designing of new systems, ways of thought, actions and planning. The environmental problem is too serious to be left to the politicos and the posturing that stalls action and literally sucks the life out of us all.

Choose your government wisely folks. This may be our last, last chance to put in effect a solution that will rescue our planet for our children and our children’s children. The economy, health care and our society’s infrastructure are all dependent on how we vote, the governments we put in power and empower. Put back what we have had in the past couple of years and get set for more studies, obfuscation, confusion and outright lies.

Already the Arctic has seen changes that stagger the imagination. Temperatures, sea levels, CO2 levels and political rhetoric are all threatening to push us past the tipping point and once that happens, if it hasn’t already, we are going to rue the day we put our blinders on and whistled past the graveyard.

Its almost September and again the Atlantic Ocean is serving up it’s plate of stormy weather of this 2008 late summer season. Gus is barreling down on the Gulf of Mexico and the oil rigs are seeking shelter from the wrath of the storm, while we mortals in our cars, chained to the liquified sunshine, focus on the oil speculators and are blinded by the ever increasing costs of maintaining this ludicrous, mobile lifestyle.

I watch the projected path of the soon to be Hurricane Gus and wonder whether we don’t deserve every little bit that mother nature has to dish out because of the protracted folly of our continued dance with fossil fuels.

The Arctic again has melted to record levels, massive methane outgassing has now been detected as a result of the melting of the permafrost, polar bears are sited swimming for their lives one hundred kilometres from shore, the warmest Maritime coastal waters ever pop up around Canadian waters and the Caribbean is a super heated caldron with water temperatures in the mid thirties Celsius. And still we dance the dance of the oblivious, reveling blithely on, talking of election this and election that, as though we could separate ourselves from the gaseous effluent that is seeping and creeping into everything around us.

Like the froggy of nursery lore we are, swimming in seas of ever warming water not noticing, that slowly but surely, we are cooking ourselves to death. All around we have the evidence, concrete and immutable. Our paleo-climate specialists who unearth the evidence of distant yesteryears find that climate changes happen catastrophically and cataclysmically in a matter of years and not decades and centuries, like switches thrown. Time after time it has happened and recorded in the long forgotten past. And still we ignore and marginalize the evidence. For some reason we think this is different.

And while we dither, behind Gus, Hanna is growing and feeding, waiting to churn into the eastern US. In behind Hanna are the brewing, the nascent Ike, Josephine and Kyle, waiting their turn to bite into the warming continent.

We talk a good talk. Tax the emitters, cap the polluters, debate one scheme after another, but not right now, by 2020 or 2030 perhaps. Make the fight to reduce CO2 an economic one and forget the fact that we still, on all levels, are doing nothing to reduce the poison, the gaseous stew of turbulent effluent that cooks our ecosystem. Set dates far off in the future, confuse the issue with irrelevant issues, and bluster and obfuscate. Yet still we cook, storm after storm.

What will it take? Who will say enough?