You know, climate change is a problem. I once heard an argument against the burning of fossil fuels on the grounds that Earth would become like Venus. And we all know what sort of place Venus is. It’s interesting to think that Mars and Venus are completely opposite in terms of climate and atmospheric conditions, though an article in this month’s Scientific American points out that it’s possible that Mars’s rarefied atmosphere and Venus’s CO₂ insulated greenhouse might have been created by some very similar processes. At the very least, they are both the result of a net loss of gases from their respective atmospheres. The crazy thing the article points out is that eventually Earth is more likely to end up like Venus than Mars. A scorching desert with rivers of molten lead.

Did you know that our atmosphere leaks three kilograms of hydrogen each second? It’s the lightest gas and so it concentrates in the upper atmosphere and just sort of evaporates off, disappearing into space. I did some further research and discovered that all atmospheres are constantly evaporating. Even the Sun is losing mass constantly. Ever consider what the solar wind might consist of? It’s material that’s being ejected off the surface of the sun. Our sun will lose probably .01 percent of its mass from evaporation throughout its main sequence, but there are larger suns that slough off some forty percent of their mass just from generating solar wind.

What I mean to say is, the universe is always in a constant state of flux. Everything is changing constantly. It’s the only thing that’s constant. In accordance with the second law of thermodynamics, that flux always tends towards a greater state of disorder or less potential energy.

Let’s say we stopped belching greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. What would happen? Slowly, over time–about a billion years–the sun is going to get brighter as its main sequence continues. This means that water vapor will not condense and rain back to the Earth’s surface as readily. This will allow that water vapor to decay into hydrogen and oxygen under the force of a brighter sun’s ultraviolet radiation. After another billion years, our oceans will have all dried up and our atmosphere will have a much higher concentration carbon dioxide as hydrogen and oxygen leach off into the ether. Earth becomes another Venus. And that’s it. Earth is finished. Two billion years.

This came as something of a shock to me. I’ve always thought that life on Earth was dependent on the sun continuing to give off energy, feeding our biological economy. I never considered the possibility that the sun itself might be our undoing. I had never thought about our own atmosphere backfiring on us. The sun’s main sequence will last another seven billion years. That’s a lot of time. But if Earth is only habitable for another two, we’ve essentially got a third of that to…what?

I always thought it would be possible that humans might still exist on Earth in three billion years when the Milky Way crashes into Andromeda. I always thought there was a remote possibility (depending, of course, on our own ability to wise up). But there is no such possibility. Two billion years is a very small amount of time, cosmically speaking. But even beyond that event, what is there? Perhaps we find other habitable planets and generate the necessary technology to colonize them?

If the universe is expanding–which may or may not be the case–the second law of thermodynamics means that eventually the entire universe will be cold, lifeless, and dark. When? In a trillion years, our local galaxy cluster will have merged into one huge galaxy. Another trillion years later (again, continuing to assume the existence of dark energy), all other galaxies will have red shifted to the such an extent that they will no longer be detectable.

Star formation ceases at around 100 trillion years.

Slowly, all matter in the universe will be absorbed into black holes. But even black holes do not last forever. Slowly they decay. 10¹⁰⁰ years from now, the last of the black holes will have evaporated to nothing, the tiny particles that they kicked off having dispersed throughout the eternity of space. Then comes the Dark Era.

And this is the thing that gets me. There is going to be crazy shit happening in the universe so long after our two billion years is up, and Earth won’t be here. At least, there won’t be anything worth calling life on Earth to experience it. All we have is these two billion years. So what do we do? It would be nice if we could do as much in that two billion years as possible.

I could turn this into a stump speech for renewable resources, etc. But you’ve heard it all before. I just wanted to put some shit into perspective.

Further reading: Humans Hell Bent on Mass Suicide

Discuss.

The purpose of the above image is not necessarily to draw attention to any specific comments by the eminent republican. In fact, I wanted an image of just some average dude purchasing some carbon offsets and then being confused about their purpose. But when I spotted this image, it was just begging to be further photoshopped. C’est la vie.

I live in Minnesota. We have beautiful summers and hellish winters. But that’s not all. We also happen to have perhaps the best public radio station in the country. Minnesota Public Radio is about all I listen to. This is due to two reasons:

1. Every other radio station in my town is terrible.
2. MPR is actually very, very good.

So it’s not usually a complicated process to find anything to listen to. That said, they are currently running their member drive. I don’t know how much you know about PBS or NPR or any other public service like this, but since they are not commercial, but are instead a sort of consumer co-operative, the vast majority of their funding comes from donations. And twice a year, they spend a week begging for money. It’s pretty obnoxious, but it’s just something you have to get through. The plus side, of course, is that if you do decide to donate money they often send you some pretty neat stuff. Books, mugs, duffel bags, that sort of thing. Sometimes CDs of past quality programming.

Tonight as I was listening to the radio, they offered a free gift with a donation that I hadn’t expected. They are offering a carbon offset with every donation. This immediately struck me as weird because I had assumed that carbon offsets were stupid. I’m still not convinced that they’re not, but since MPR was endorsing them, I decided to do some further research. The folks begging for money were telling me that one of these offsets was the same (as in equal to or identical to) as not driving your car for ninety miles or not throwing away six hundred aluminum cans.

This is what always struck me as strange about carbon offsets because wouldn’t it be easier to just not drive for ninety miles? In my experience, it’s always easier to not do something than to do it. Entire corporations have managed to be supposedly carbon neutral through the practice of purchasing these carbon offsets.

My understanding of how this works is that when you purchase carbon offsets, that money goes into a pool of cash that goes towards the planting of trees, retrofitting power plants, and a whole slew of other things that reduce carbon emissions. The idea is that despite the fact that a huge corporation that is not actually carbon neutral can pretend to be carbon neutral because they are funding a bunch of carbon-sequestering activities that would not have been performed otherwise. Supposedly, this earns them the right to belch out more greenhouse gases.

Perhaps it’s better than nothing, but it presupposes the notion that there’s already a ton of CO₂ in the atmosphere. What I mean is, they are not being penalized for all the CO₂ that’s already there. That’s nobody’s fault because we didn’t know better forty years ago (that’s a lie, but let’s roll with it). So by selling these carbon offsets (by planting a few trees) these companies or people–in the case of members of MPR–get to burn petro-chemicals and drive their cars guilt free for a period of time. Does this strike you as odd?

Wouldn’t it be better to buy these offsets and drive your car less?

It’s hard to be carbon-neutral. We all realize that. But the real challenge and the thing that we actually ought to do is be carbon-negative. You think that’s crazy? Well, at least I tried. Now it’s on your head.

Discuss.