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| Andrew Man with an outside the box reflection on climate change and COP21. Photo credit: DonkeyHotey via Flickr. |
By Andrew Man
Two years ago I read a book Scatter, Adapt, and Remember by Annalee Newitz about the Apocalypse and how our species on this planet have faced extinctions in the past. I mentioned some of her ideas in my latest book “Beyond the Rest of Us” to be published in November.
I’m not a scientist, but an author who writes fiction books about science and thinks outside the box. I follow the latest ideas on Unified Physics – still a work in progress and our current ‘disconnected world view,’ that prevails over us all. It looks unlikely that the 2015 Climate Change Conference (COP 21/CMP 11) in Paris will find a solution. The UN’s Climate Chief tells us that all countries are pledging to do what is in their self-interest. The Paris Protocol will be the zero-ambition protocol, she says. Carbon reduction may be important but is not the only solution. From recent research, there may be unlimited clean energy in the empty vacuum of space. Maglev generators which mainline science thinks are impossible could provide unlimited clean power for us all, with more research. Perhaps climate change conferences are now a political game, trying to delay the reduction of carbon emissions until a new clean energy is available, but that may already be too late.
Climate change is of course very important; mass extinctions in the past were often the result of catastrophic events – meteor strikes, mega-volcanoes, that set off the change. Has anyone noticed that these events have been far outside human control in the past and probably will be in the future? The planet’s biosphere is an intensely changeable thing constantly swinging between wild extremes for millions of years. The two times Homo Sapiens have survived extinction in the last millions of years was mainly luck; there was nothing they could do about it and that appears to be where we are now. Despite the on-going political horse-trading over emissions targets, each piece of new scientific research offers further evidence that no feasible reduction in the emissions can now effectively mitigate the carbon crisis. With limited time for action, an increasingly influential minority of climate scientists are exploring proposals for planned human intervention in the biosphere, so desperation is finally setting in!
Let’s stop a minute and see where we really are. We live on a very small planet rotating around the sun which drags our solar system around our galaxy; by something know as spiral dynamics. So while the delegates at the Paris conference sit down to discuss climate change they will be moving 2.5 million miles a day through empty space. Our Earth-Sun system has always been moving in an orbit at 450,000 miles/hour, which in turn is travelling through space at 1.3 million miles/hour for millions of years. This velocity is important as rocks large and small pass through our heliosphere and caused untold damage in the past to planets and moons. Because of gravity we appear to be sitting at rest, but we are far from safe or secure from the climate change a direct meteor strike would cause. NOAA – the US National Climate Data Center, has found an abrupt climate change 14,000 years ago when the Northern Hemisphere climate suddenly warmed, at the time of the Younger Dryas. Evidence of the transition from the last glacial period, when the continental ice sheets were rapidly melting can be seen, but what caused that to happen is less clear.
To find scientific reports on the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis is easy, but finding agreement by geological societies has been a lot more difficult. The confusion has left the way for self-styled archaeologists like Graham Hancock, to provide evidence in his books that there was a lost civilisation dating back to a time before the last ice age. I don’t want to spoil his story, but he believes the planet was hit by fragments of a huge rock that helped melt the North American and European ice-caps and changed our climate to the present interglacial period. The fact that rapid climate change also brought about the extinction of North American animals and fauna at that time has been found, but did an extra-terrestrial impact start the climate change we see today. If this hypothesis is correct, the 2015 Paris Climate Conference would be about 10,000 years too late!
Every year at about this time, our planet travels through the Taurid stream and amateur astronomers look to the night sky to watch the harmless ‘Halloween firework’ display as Earth’s orbit passes through the meteor stream. This year however NASA scientists will be watching the Halloween flyby of asteroid 2015 TB145. This will pass the Earth at a safe distance of about 1.3 times the distance to our moon. The real problem is that it was only discovered on October 10 from a telescope in Hawaii. We may not be the first humans to experience an asteroid strike, but we may be the first to watch it happen from space.
“Beyond the Rest of Us” will be published on 24 November 2015 and available at Amazon, Barnes& Noble, and selected bookstores.
Related news:
Andrew Simms: There are reasons for optimism
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Categories: climate change, emission targets, mass extinctions, Planet Earth, science, solar system. NASA
A greener life, a greener world 
Better later like never.
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