Humans as a passing species

Humans as a passing species - a scenario by Reg Morrison

Below are excerpts from an article by Reg Morrison. The parts reproduced here refer to the limited availability of resources and the illusions and beliefs people have.

[page 1] HYDROGEN - Life's Maker and Breaker - Reg Morrison [Copyright notice...]
[...]

[page 2]
[...] Our species' recent population explosion and its massive impact on the planet's biosphere were both fuelled by fossil hydrocarbons, and the environmental and energy crises that we now face will be orchestrated by the vast quantity of hydrocarbons that we have already transferred from the crust to the atmosphere. Oil-dependent and vulnerable to methane-triggered climate change, we are staring down the barrel of Hydrogen's loaded gun.

[page 13]
[...] Aided by a prodigious talent for communication and an obsessive tendency to attach mystical significance to our actions, our populous species has developed a global technoculture that consumes a grossly disproportionate amount of energy for an animal of our size. Each day we capture energy from the Sun and from the body of the planet and use it to live, feed, grow, and reproduce. Directly or indirectly, humans now appropriate almost 40% percent of the solar energy photosynthetically trapped by the world's terrestrial vegetation, and redistribute most of it in waste products and as heat.(13)
Pic.16 Evolution's most voracious consumer, Homo sapiens, extracts more energy from its environment than other animals of its size. This resulted in exponential population growth during the past century, and a current total of 6.45 billion people.
During the past 200 years our global population has exploded with the same exponential fecundity that rodents display during plagues, and if the whole population consumed energy and resources at the same extravagant rate as Americans, Australians, and Western Europeans, our species would need 4 additional (Earth-like) planets to sustain it. (14)
[ecoglobe's comment: This comparison is wrong. The footprint model refers to biological resources only, i.e. predominanetly plants and animals, that are "renewable". But our human impact on the planet also consists of the consumption of non-renewable resources, such as fossil energy and minerals, as well as non-repairable pollution (greenhouse gases - climate change), land erosion, destruction of biodiversity, etc. Only an infinite number of additional planets could theoretically compensate for the depletion of non-renewables. It is not immportant whether growth is exponential or linear. Any growth in unsustainable in an environment with limited resources and space. With linear growth it just takes a bit longer before resources are depleted.]
Even the present rate of consumption, running at a budget deficit of around 35%, (15) has so altered the flow patterns within Earth's energy gradient that it has changed the composition of the atmosphere and triggered a mass extinction of our competitors - other organisms. We must therefore expect to undergo precisely the same culling process that curtails exponential growth in all other species.
[ecoglobe's comment: This deficit is the biological deficit only. We deplete fossil energy sources at a rate than is one million times faster than the rate which these fossil energy stock were depeosited, under completely different biological and climatic conditions.]
White's Law (16)
Human culture flourishes or declines - in a physical sense - in direct proportion to the average per capita energy (including nutrient) extracted from the environment.
A civilization is therefore defined by the gross per capita energy that its members consume in their pursuit of sustenance, reproduction, shelter, possessions, entertainment, and personal and cultural security.

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Pic.17 LEFT: A coal-fired steel mill pours carbon and sulfur based pollutants into the atmosphere near Sydney, Australia.
Pic.18 CENTRE: Formerly cloaked in dense temperate rainforest of great antiquity these mountains in south-western Tasmania were stripped bare, primarily by toxic fumes from the nearby gold, silver and copper mine. This environmental assault was exacerbated by persistent local woodcutting, and finally by commercial logging. As Australia's greatest ecological disaster it epitomises the adage that all energy is expensive.
Pic.19 RIGHT: The fireball from the hydrogen-bomb test 'Dakota', detonated near Bikini Atoll in June 1956, released the energy equivalent of 1.1 million tonnes of TNT. The mushroom head rose more than 25km and attained a diameter of some 320km. (From 100 Suns: 1945-1962. Ed: Michael Light. London: Jonathan Cape, 2003.)

Energy sources must yield more energy than they consume, or they become 'sinks' This is the net-energy principle. To lift 15 kilograms of oil 5 meters out of the ground takes about 735 joules of energy, just to overcome gravity. The higher the lift, the greater the energy requirement. The most concentrated and most accessible oil is extracted first; thereafter, more and more energy is required to find and extract oil. As soon as the energy outlay is greater than the energy yield, the resource becomes an energy sink.
Almost 90% of the energy gobbled each day by our technoculture derives from hydrogen- loaded carbon that extinct species bequeathed to us in the form of coal, oil and natural gas. The more hydrogen a fuel contains, the more energy it yields, and if a team of engineers were to design the most efficient, transportable fuel from scratch, petroleum would be their solution. Luckily for us, the world had large natural reserves, and it has been cheap to extract. But the pump price gives no hint of the real cost of the petroleum products that our civilisation guzzles each day. Each litre of petrol that we burn in our cars is the distilled residue of some 23 tonnes of ancient organisms mostly marine algae, and the oil products consumed by modern civilisation in a single day cost the entire planet some 13 months of continuous photosynthesis to produce and store.(17) Thanks to the Earth's generous reserves of fossil hydrogen, we have had a free ride into the twenty-first century.
But our good fortune is about to run out. Global oil extraction peaked on a per capita basis in 1979, and due to population growth and growing social unrest in productive regions, it has since declined significantly. If the current rate of decline (2.4% p.a.) continues, the per capita energy available to people living in 2030 will be one third of its 1979 peak. This will approximate the per capita energy consumed in 1930 during the depths of the Great Depression. (18) As the global demand for energy grows and global terrorism spreads and intensifies, the decline in per capita oil extraction threatens to become precipitous.
Over the last five years, the world burned 27 billion barrels of oil per year. But during that time, despite intensive exploration using the very latest technology, the industry managed to discover new reserves that contained only 3 billion barrels. During 2005, the global consumption rate was 84.5 million barrels a day (mb/d), and that figure is expected to rise by 2-3 mb/d during 2006. (19) Meanwhile, the average daily extraction during 2005 was

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around 82mb/d, (20) and this has resulted in an average decline in the global oil reservoir of some 4-5mb/d. (21)
DIAG. 7; Oil-Energy (22)
DIAG. 8: Global Oil production

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Peak Oil, or Hubbert's Peak (named after oil geologist Marion King Hubbert), is now upon us. In 1956 Hubbert predicted that US oil extraction in the lower 48 States would peak in the early 1970s. He was criticised by the oil industry but his forecast proved accurate. US extraction has declined ever since 1971. Hubbert also predicted that global oil extraction would peak around the year 2000. He appears to have erred slightly in this case, yet if it were not for the massive disruption to the industry during the eight-year Iran-Iraq war, Hubbert's global prediction would also have been accurate.
Hubbert based his predictions primarily on the declining rate of oil discovery. Despite massive exploration and improved technology the last major oil discoveries were made in the 1970's. All the world's major oilfields are between 50 and 70 years old and oil is now being consumed about four times faster than it can be found.
Despite the development of sophisticated oil-search technology during the past three decades, the rate and volume of new oil finds has significantly declined. In the 1950s each barrel of oil used in exploration, drilling and pumping added about 50 barrels to the world's known reserves. That ratio is now barely 1:1. Accordingly, most independent energy analysts agree that 'Peak Oil' is now upon us, and some believe that the peak has already passed.
Despite promises by the key OPEC nations that they would increase extraction to keep up with demand and also compensate for war and terrorist damage in Iraq and Kuwait, their yields have consistently failed to meet their allotted targets. The explanation is ominous. In the mid 1980s the export quotas for OPEC nations became linked to their stated reserves. Result: between 1985 and 1989 all member States abruptly increased their 'known reserves' - by up to 190% in some cases (e.g. Iraq and Venezuela) - although no new finds were registered in those regions. In other words, the increases were expedient fabrications and exist only on paper. Meanwhile, all major Saudi oil fields now use horizontal 'bottle-brush' extraction techniques and most meet their daily extraction quotas by forcing oil to the surface with massive injections of water. These 'horizontal wells' hide within the thinning oil layer and thereby elude, for as long as possible, both the rising water table beneath and the gas cap above. They involve complex, expensive technology and signify an oil layer that is no longer economically viable via vertical wells.
As the aquifer swells and the oil layer shrinks however, these fields begin to yield an increasing percentage of water mixed with the oil. When this 'water cut' passes 50% the cost of extraction rises exponentially and the oil yield declines on a reciprocal curve.
The giant Ghawar field once held around one seventh of the world's known reserves and it still accounts for 70% of Saudi Arabia's annual extraction. But some seven million gallons of seawater must now be forced into the aquifer each day, just to prop up pump- head pressure. In 1999 the main oil producer, Saudi Aramco, publicly conceded a water cut of 36.5%. The company then installed water-sensitive cut-off valves, and these have since kept the official water cut below 40%. However, a graph of the pre-1999 trend indicates that if the 'censorship' imposed by the cut-off valves were to be removed, the real water cut should now be around 55% - and some of the company's engineers have privately confirmed this figure. (23)

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DIAG. 9: Horizontal oil extraction
The world's second largest oil field, Burgan, in Kuwait, is in similar decline. The peak output of the Burgan field is now around 1.7 million barrels per day, not the two million barrels per day forecast by the operating company.
These and other extraction problems now plague many Middle-East oilfields, most of which are 45-60 years old and nearing the end of their productive lives. And when an oilfield passes its peak the decline is usually swift, since most oil is unrecoverable (extraction would cost more energy than the oil could yield). The global availability of oil will meanwhile depend increasingly on human mysticism. I use the word mysticism here in its broadest sense, meaning the semi-universal tendency to believe that un-natural forces exist, and that these forces can manipulate human and animal behaviour and determine the course of events, both animate and inanimate. (24) [...]

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[...] About 85% of the energy presently consumed by industrial nations provides heat, light, and mechanical motion, while the other 15% powers the C3 functions - communication, computation and control. Electricity is the key. Some 42% of the world's primary energy goes into generating it, and electricity has become the indispensable end-use energy carrier of our time. (26) Much of the electrical energy that maintains the C3 functions depends, either directly or indirectly, on oil. Recent grid collapses in N. America, Italy and Demark show that when the C3 functions are starved of electricity, industrialized society grinds to a halt.
With our oil-dependent civilization balanced on the slippery edge of energy collapse the mystics of both East and West now have the power to pull the hydrogen trigger on one of evolution's most spectacular byproducts, Homo sapiens.
Renewable energy
Modern industrial civilization is wholly dependent on fossil hydrocarbons. No renewable power source - solar, wind, tidal, geothermal or biomass can supply more than a small fraction of the world's fast-growing energy requirements, and this is likely to remain true for the foreseeable future. The combined market share of these technologies is currently about 15%, and each year that percentage declines.
Ethanol for example, is essentially a liquid embodiment of solar energy in grain plants and then distilled out in liquid form. But growing the grain takes more energy than the sun provides. The distilling also consumes more energy, as does transporting the ethanol to gas stations so drivers can put it in their tanks. There's waste at every stage. The same fundamental problem applies to hydrogen fuels, which some tout as the future beyond ethanol. If we could figure out how to make a portable fuel that yielded more energy than was consumed in its production, we'd have a perpetual motion machine. That would be a fine thing, but don't invest your retirement fund in it.
Technologies that extract energy directly from Earth's two primary sources, the sun and the body of the planet, cannot match the economic viability, calorific output and versatility of hydrocarbons. Even solar energy, the least dilute of the renewable sources, involves significant extraction costs. A full energy assessment must include not just the energy required to build and run a solar plant, but also the energy required to build and run all the power grids, factories, trucks, tools, offices, etc. that would not have been produced had the solar plant not been built. In this fashion, solar plants cause more energy to be consumed than they can deliver - their harvest factor is less than 1:1. Neither do renewable sources yield energy in a portable-fuel form that can maintain current transport systems. Manufacture of synthetic hydrocarbon fuels, even pure hydrogen, requires such a high-energy input, via heat, pressure and electricity, that they are likely to remain uneconomic in the foreseeable future. Hydrogen's small atoms and low density as a gas make it expensive to liquefy and very difficult to contain. Global proliferation of the

[page 19]
technology would ensure considerable leakage of hydrogen into the atmosphere. The environmental consequences of this are unknown.
Consequently, as global oil and gas production begins its terminal decline, only coal and nuclear fission will be able to supply the increasing quantities of cheap energy that modern civilisation demands. Coal exacts a massive environmental fee via its carbon and sulfur emissions, and nuclear power stations are expensive, temporary installations with an initial harvest factor of only 1:1. Nuclear power will also require massive investment in improved technology and waste storage, and will entail a high risk of radiation leakage and fallout due to earthquakes, human error, and terrorist activity. Similarly, the extraction and geosequestration of carbon and sulphur emissions from coal-fired power stations significantly reduces their harvest factor. To extract, compress and store the waste underground currently adds roughly 20% to the total energy cost, and the probability of leakage from subterranean storage facilities remains high. Meanwhile, roughly 50% of the energy required to extract the coal currently comes from oil.
In other words, the massive environmental bill from our past profligacy is now due, and while prospective technologies may postpone the looming energy crisis for a few years, all they will really do is add significantly to a global energy budget that is now grossly unsustainable.
It seems that our hydrogen 'happy hour' has come to its natural end.
The Easter Island Syndrome
Declining energy resources, environmental degradation, and mystically based aggression have limited exponential population growth throughout human history. Nowhere was this more apparent than on Easter Island during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when a vigorous, artistic population of some 10,000 islanders plundered their isolated habitat to the point of micro-climate change, soil exhaustion and agricultural collapse. Brought to the brink of starvation they turned on each other in an orgy of mystically driven aggression. By 1877 only 111 emaciated and furtive survivors remained.
DIAG. 10: Easter Island Population, The similarity between this graph and that of any large mammal in plague mode is ominously plain.

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DIAG. 11: Reindeer on St. Paul's Island
Reindeer were introduced to St. Paul Island in 1911. The island's 106 square kilometres (41 square miles) was an undisturbed environment and supported no major predators. The initial herd of 4 males and 21 females grew continuously to about 2,000 animals in 1938. After severely overgrazing their habitat the population collapsed - to just 8 animals in 1950.
The same tragic pattern echoes throughout human history, surfacing most clearly where the population had no means of escape. The pattern first appeared some 4,000 years ago on Malta where a small thriving culture came to a similar end. (27) Farmers removed the trees, erosion accelerated, rainfall declined, and abundance shrivelled to subsistence. As on Easter Island, all that now remains of that culture is the massive evidence of the mysticism that burgeoned as the harvests shrank. Huge stone temples equipped with extensive underground burial chambers and bone repositories were built at this time. They appear to have been devoted entirely to the sanctification of fertility and death, and their construction would have demanded the investment of massive time and energy by the whole populace - investments they could least afford at that crucial time. There are also hints of aggressive competition between the cults, and this too is a central characteristic of the Easter Island Syndrome.
This syndrome already permeates modern civilisation. It is most apparent in former world powers - aggressive societies that were formerly unified and driven by a mystical belief in their own moral and political agendas. Russian communism, for example, has fragmented into a multiplicity of corrupt corporate tribes, criminal gangs, religious cults, and a widespread faith in witchcraft. Meanwhile, Russia's traditional adversary, America, has been swept by a tide of Christian fundamentalism and a rejection of science, especially evolutionary science. A recent CBS poll found that more than 51% of Americans believe that God created humans in their present form, and five States have installed legislation that accepts the hypothesis of Creationism (in the guise of Intelligent Design) as an educational alternative to the theory of genetic evolution.
The recent outbreak of riots, arson attacks, and other civil disturbances that have occurred in many cities around the world in response to the publication of a few badly drawn anti- Islamic cartoons in Denmark suggests that the social gulf between Islam and the world's other major faiths is rapidly widening. Aggressive fundamentalism, both eastern and western, has assumed a scale that was unimaginable just a decade ago. [...]

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[...] Adaptive specialisation in any species is a two edged sword. Disproportionately productive in their birth environment, specialisations become lethal handicaps when conditions change. A peacock's tail is the standard illustration for this crucial evolutionary principle. The peacock-tail of our species is our predisposition to mysticise - to assign peculiar, even supra-natural, significance to people, events, places and things that matter most to us. As the late Carl Sagan wrote: 'We're significance junkies'. (29)
Pic.20 LEFT: Stations of the Cross, Sydney, Australia.
Pic.21 RIGHT: An ANZAC Day dawn service, Australia
The explanation for our addiction is simple enough. Unfettered as it is by inconvenient facts, faith thrives on mystery and 'miracles', thereby generating intense fervour and building powerful bonds between believers. Indeed, the familial and tribal bonds forged by our ancestors were so strong and so altruistic that they more than made up for our species' lack of physical assets - such as strength and speed, fur, claws and fighting teeth. It was this talent for tribal mysticism and altruistic cooperation that catapulted our kind from the brink of extinction to global domination. And since mysticism was our evolutionary Excalibur, our genes now determine that 'spirituality' and 'faith' characterise every aspect of our behaviour: we have become obligate mysticisers.
But with 6.45 billion people now struggling to survive in habitats that once supported no more than 4-5 million hunter-gatherers, our trusty Excalibur has finally revealed its second evolutionary role: it will provide the lethal blade that will disable cultural cooperation when the oil runs out and Gaian evolution rolls out its big guns - global warming, global pandemics, and widespread starvation. (30)
Hydrogen's loaded gun
Hydrocarbon fuels have a dual role in human evolution. Having underwritten the explosive proliferation of our species during the past 200 years, they have become the lifeblood of modern civilization. And with Peak Oil behind us, species' collapse now appears unavoidable.
Yet there is one naturally abundant source of hydrocarbon energy that remains relatively untapped: methane (CH4 ). It is a light, colourless, odourless gas commonly produced by one of Earth's oldest forms of life, archaebacteria. Because these bacteria evolved in a world that was oxygen-free, their enzyme systems have no defences against oxygen and they remain confined to anoxic environments, infesting the crust to a depth of almost four kilometres. The global biomass of these archaic organisms is thought to exceed that of all surface life. Marine sediments nurture vast populations of them and abyssal methanogens

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such as Methanococcoides have been detected up to 400 metres beneath the ocean floor. These marine bacteria alone may constitute up to half the microorganisms on the planet. (31)
Since methane is some 20 times more absorptive of infrared energy than carbon dioxide, bacterial methane production within the lithosphere may well be a primary climate- control mechanism for the whole planet.
More than 60% of the daily methane emissions around the globe are generated by human activity that promotes the growth of these methane producers. The main sources are our vast herds of flatulent cattle and other grazing stock (22%), the bacterial decay of manure and other liquid waste (14%), swamp gas generated by flood irrigation, notably rice and cotton (more than 18%). Meanwhile, some hydroelectricity reservoirs release so much methane that their greenhouse impact is greater than that of a coal-fired power station of comparable output.
Pic.22 LEFT: Long-term methane source: an irrigation reservoir, VIC.
Pic.23 RIGHT: Methane bubbles in a desert waterhole NT.
By contrast, much of the methane produced by crustal methanogens fails to reach the surface. It becomes trapped for long periods in tundra permafrost, and in the icy hydrate crusts that form on sea floors. This submarine reservoir alone is believed to contain roughly 3,000 times the volume of methane presently in the atmosphere. This is hydrogen's loaded gun.
At least 20% of the methane in the atmosphere is not anthropogenic, and much of the methane produced by crustal methanogens fails to reach the surface. It becomes trapped for long periods by tundra permafrost and by icy hydrate crusts that form on sea beds beneath cold abyssal currents. This submarine reservoir alone is believed to contain roughly 3,000 times the volume of methane presently in the atmosphere. It is hydrogen's loaded gun.

[23]
DIAG. 12: Methane hydrates and ocean gyres.
Deep-sea hydrates consist of a lattice of ice crystals packed with bubbles of methane gas. Locked in by cold abyssal currents generated by the sinking of dense saltwater in icy polar seas, they remain frozen and stable. But whenever rising temperatures thaw the polar icecaps to any significant degree, the fresh melt-water pools on the surface, inhibiting the driving mechanism that runs the global circulation system. There is now strong evidence to suggest that on some occasions in the recent past those huge gyres shut down entirely. When this occurred, the hydrates disintegrated, releasing their methane into the atmosphere in a series of gigantic 'burps'. Some of these methane burps appear to have been large enough to raise the global temperature by 5-10°C in just a few decades.

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DIAG. 13: Cold abyssal currents preserve methane hydrates.
DIAG. 14: When gyres die, hydrates collapse and methane explodes.
This appears to have been the case about 55 million years ago at the Palaeocene-Eocene boundary when the release of some 1,200-2,500 gigatons of hydrate methane generated a sea-temperature rise of 4°-5°C, triggering a mass extinction of marine species. The global temperature spike of 8°-10°C that occurred at this time appears to have been vastly greater and more abrupt than could possibly have been generated by the gradual rise in atmospheric CO2 that preceded it. (32)
Life's narrow escape
Something similar also appears to have occurred about 250 million years ago during the massive Permian extinction when some 95% of all known species disappeared from the fossil record. New stratigraphic evidence from Greenland and Russia (33) suggests that a massive cosmic impact combined with associated vulcanism in Siberia to trigger a protracted extinction process around the world. The ensuing biological decay then injected so much CO2 and CH4 into the atmosphere that the planet gradually warmed by 4°-5°C. This appears to have crossed the 'hydrate threshold', triggering a massive release of abyssal methane and forcing the global temperature to rise by a further 5°. The magnitude and speed of this second temperature rise pushed almost all 'higher' life to extinction.
The northern tundra is currently warming faster than most other regions of the planet. Its permafrost is melting and bacterial methane that has been locked away for tens of thousands of years is now beginning to escape. Similarly, many abyssal hydrate beds are riddled with melt-holes and are highly unstable. Hydrogen's loaded gun is now on a hair trigger.
Ice ages consist of a series of glacial episodes separated by brief interludes of warmth. These interglacials begin abruptly and end with a slow descent into a new glacial. The Vostok drill core in Antarctica reveals the pivotal role that methane has played in shaping this temperature roller coaster during the past 400,000 years. Ancient air bubbles trapped

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in the ice show that a major spike in atmospheric methane coincided with the beginning of each of the four interglacials of that period. It indicates that a methane surge provided the hair trigger that sent global temperatures rocketing upwards. This well-documented link between methane and temperature suggests that it hardly matters what causes the initial temperature rise. What matters is that methane emissions explode at some stage during that rise. Ominously, annual methane emissions have more than doubled in the past two centuries, and most of that increase can be blamed on human activities, especially pastoralism, irrigation and energy generation via hydroelectricity. But if the current collapse of methane hydrates continues, our species will be unlikely to survive this century.
DIAG. 15: CH4 /CO2 /°C Methane levels have more than doubled since 1800 CE.
Atmospheric methane concentration is now about 1,745 ppb (parts per billion). That is more than twice the maximum concentration in the Greenland ice core record for the past 420,000 years. Similarly, the latest report (1 Dec. 2005) by the European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica (EPICA) stated that a combined record of CH4 , measured along both the Dome C and Vostok ice cores, showed that methane concentrations over Antarctica have not exceeded 773 ± 15 ppb during the past 650,000 years. (34)
Only one conclusion is available to us. Having dramatically altered a small but crucial element in the composition of the atmosphere we must now expect the mean global temperature to respond chaotically as it has done in the past - at speeds that will dramatically reshape the pattern of energy dissipation throughout the biosphere. Meanwhile, with no precise knowledge of the historic delay factor we cannot predict the speed and magnitude of the temperature response; we will not even recognise the surge until it is well under way; and we cannot prevent it. Climatologist Wallace Broecker, Newberry Professor of Geology at Columbia University, says: 'It's like being blindfolded and walking towards the edge of a cliff.'

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Farming was simply a last- ditch defence against resource depletion due to overpopulation. It would have been adopted with about as much enthusiasm and success as modern hunter-gatherers have had with that transition. Successes would have been few and slow, for the transition to agriculture was a risky business that invariably entailed an immediate shrinkage in stature and a rising incidence of blood, bone and other diseases due to poor diet, water pollution and increasing population density. These factors were countered, however, by increased security from predators, and an ability to ride out harsh years by storing excess grain and domesticating traditional prey, such as goats, pigs, sheep and cattle.
These two advantages enabled the global population to grow from about five million 10,000 years ago to almost a billion 200 years ago.
Ten thousand years is but a blink of the evolutionary eye and the population increase that has occurred during that time primed us for a species' collapse. The exponential growth that followed industrialisation, the spread of global trade and the rise of modern medicine, was the trigger that closed evolution's trap.
No mercy for first offenders
The laws of thermodynamics allow no leniency in the court of cosmic justice. An inflated greenhouse effect due to increased CO2 and CH4 is even now yielding vast pools of buoyant freshwater from the world's shrinking icecaps and these are already beginning to shut down the giant gyres that characterise the world's oceans. Readings from one abyssal arm associated with the Gulf stream currently show a 30% decline in just 50 years. (43)
As this shut-down proceeds, fingers of warmth (artefacts of surface wind currents) will begin to reach down and unpin the hydrates that carpet most continental margins, and the consequent methane eruptions will send global temperatures rocketing upwards. The only uncertainty in this sequence of events seems to reside in its time scale. Once the methane- triggered temperature spike has been launched however, our energy-starved civilisation will implode. Within a century the population will shrink below its 30% point (see graph 17), completing the symmetry of a transitional pulse. The graph of our growth and decline will then display the elegant waveform that typifies all animal plagues.
Meanwhile, those who contend we are not in plague and will not collapse are merely displaying one of our species' most universal (genetic) delusions: anthropocentrism. Since we are but one of 20-100 million extant species and do not differ from the others in any fundamental respect, our anthropocentrism hinges on a bet that has odds of at least 20- million-to-one stacked against it. Although such astronomical odds might seduce the odd deranged gambler, no respectable scientist should fall for it.

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DIAG. 17: The Human Plague
Author's footnote
Thanks to some 2.5 million years of Darwinian selection Homo sapiens is, by genetic definition, a tribalised omnivorous chimpanzee. However, since my own genome seems to lack certain group-bonding imperatives I must conclude that I am a somewhat dysfunctional member of the species. My particular spectrum of opinions is therefore suspect, probably irrelevant, and perhaps even dangerous in a cultural sense.
Consequently, it will be discarded and ignored by all fully functional members of the tribe. Yet even fools are useful in a Shakespearean sense: they say things that wiser voices would not dare to utter.
Human truths, however factual and pertinent, are similarly irrelevant at a cosmic level. Indeed, it is essential that my unspeakable facts be disregarded and disbelieved by most of the tribe so that they make no cultural adjustments that might impede the evolutionary juggernaut during its culling process.
So, we have not one, but two levels of irrelevance in collaboration here: the human and the evolutionary, And mounted on this brilliant partnership is Gaia herself. She will answer evolution's call and rid the Earth of its troublesome mystic, that paragon of animals, Homo sapiens.

Copyright notice: © REG MORRISON 25/7/06 regm at optusnet dot com dot au. We have reproduced an abridged version of this article since the internet is volatile and we believe that it presents a no-nonsense assessment of possible scenarios - if we carry on BAU – Business As Usual.
The full article with pictures, graphs and references can be found here: www.regmorrison.id.au Click on "articles" (PDF), here: PDF - direct and here: HTML version

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