By Envision Magazine on April 28, 2016
By Mara Welty Photo by Will Saunders
Eugene, Ore.-According to Dennis Dimick, climate change isn’t a story of controversy or lost hope, but a story of time travelers.
Silhouetted in the hazy projector glow of the University of Oregon’s Lawrence Hall, Dimick discussed climate change as a compelling narrative in his lecture, The Big View: Climate Change in the Human Age, one of many lectures sponsored by the UO Student Sustainability Center for Earth Week.
Earth has experienced a shift. Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have risen from 280 ppm to 400 ppm since the 1980s. Glaciers that once sprawled their frozen borders for thousands of miles have transformed into small pockets of ice, retreating in upon themselves. Sea levels are rising. Scalding summers and torrent rainfalls are becoming more prevalent. Our planet’s climate is fluctuating at greater rates than ever recorded in its history.
But what allows scientists to see the past? That’s where time travel comes in.
According to Dimick, former Executive Editor of the Environment at National Geographic, the Earth’s geological record is chronicled within the planet. Techniques like extracting ice cores, or ice samples extracted from polar ice caps, help scientists observe the composition of Earth’s atmosphere from millions of years ago. From this data, scientists are able to reconstruct a climatic record of the past, including fluctuations in temperature, carbon dioxide levels and sediment abundance within the atmosphere. Like tree rings, each layer represents a year. The deeper scientists dig, the further into the past they travel.
From the study of past climates, or paleoclimatology, scientists are able to confirm that recent climate change dramatically differs from the usual moderate ebb and flow of climate in the past. Coal, oil, and natural gas are simultaneously creating energy and increasing amounts of carbon emissions into the atmosphere, contributing to this rapid change.
On the wall behind Dimick, an image of an intense red flame appears; coal is being burned. But Dimick has a different explanation: It’s the burning of the fossils of million-year-old plants and animals, it’s “bottled sunlight” from the past.
Coal is the product of sunlight. Plants, typically living in swamp-like habitats, absorbed this sunlight for photosynthesis millions of years ago. When these plants died, their debris accumulated at the bottom of watery swamps. With time, heat, and pressure, coal was formed. Without sunlight, there would be no coal. “Every year by burning coal, we release a million years of stored sunshine,” says Dimick.
This is where time travel becomes controversial. Why is there a need to use sunlight of the past, a technique that contributes to climate change by emitting gases like carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, when the sun still shines today, asks Dimick.
The Borneo Forest, once luscious and green, is now carved and scraped for tar sands, creating patches of dusty tracks. Runoff from energy production is contaminating oceans, fostering algae blooms that generate dead zones among habitats like coral reefs. Mountaintops are being destroyed to mine coal. “There’s an urgency with how we’re going to respond,” warns Dimick, now shadowed by a startling image of the planet in the near future, speckled in red zones that indicated extreme temperatures in areas like the midwest United States, Northern Africa, the Middle East, and parts of Asia, among others.
Nations throughout the world favor what Dimick describes as “fossil sunshine” over “current sunshine.” Coal, oil, and natural gas are being extracted from the Earth. Yet, according to research, solar energy provides 5400 x 1021 joules of energy a year. To put that into perspective, coal is limited to producing only 250 x 1021 joules of energy in its entirety.
Stewardship and sustainability provide our roadmap into the future, says Dimick. We need to make mindful choices and return to an economy based on “current sunshine” that will support solutions that include mass transit, energy-efficient buildings, algae-derived biodiesel fuel, and reforestation. Sustainable energy sources like wind, solar, geothermal and even nuclear power, will aid this journey towards a brighter future.
Perhaps the story is not one of climate change, proposes Dimick, but rather a narration of how humans transform the planet.
“I want to reframe the discussion to something we can actually confront. If we have a societal will, we can make this transformation,” says Dimick. “But if you want change, you have to be relentless.”