NIKIFORUK: The Earth's Battery Is Running Low

[Oscar]

NIKIFORUK: The Earth's Battery Is Running Low

[ http://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2015/08/10/Ea ... nning-Low/ ]

We've drained our planet's stored energy, scientists say, with no rechargeable plug in sight.

By Andrew Nikiforuk, August 10, 2015, TheTyee.ca

'We have a limited amount of biomass energy available on the planet, and once it's exhausted, there is absolutely nothing to replace it.' Earth photo via Shutterstock.

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In the quiet of summer, a couple of U.S. scientists argued in the pages of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that modern civilization has drained the Earth -- an ancient battery of stored chemical energy -- to a dangerous low.

Although the battery metaphor made headlines in leading newspapers in China, India and Russia, the paper didn't garner "much immediate attention in North America," admits lead author John Schramski, a mechanical engineer and an ecologist.

And that's a shame, because the paper [ http://www.pnas.org/content/112/31/9511.abstract ] gives ordinary people an elegant metaphor to understand the globe's stagnating economic and political systems and their close relatives: collapsing ecosystems. It also offers a blunt course of action: "drastic" energy conservation. (See Abstract below . . .Ed.)

It, too, comes with a provocative title: "Human domination of the biosphere: Rapid discharge of the Earth-space battery foretells the future of humankind."

The battery metaphor speaks volumes and then some.

In the paper, Schramski and his colleagues at the University of Georgia and the University of New Mexico compared the energy state of the Earth to "the energy state of a house powered by a once-charged battery supplying all energy for lights, heating, cooling, cooking, power appliances and electronic communication."

It took hundreds of millions of years for photosynthetic plants to trickle charge that battery. Those plants converted low quality sunlight into high-quality chemical energy stored either in living biomass (forests and plankton) or more lastingly in the dead plants and animals that became oil, gas and coal.

But in just a few centuries humans and "the modern industrial-technological informational society" have spent that stored chemical energy and depleted the Earth-space battery.

MORE:

[ http://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2015/08/10/Ea ... nning-Low/ ]

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Human domination of the biosphere: Rapid discharge of the earth-space battery foretells the future of humankind

[ http://www.pnas.org/content/112/31/9511.abstract ]

John R. Schramskia,1, David K. Gattiea, and James H. Brownb,1 Author Affiliations

Edited by B. L. Turner, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, and approved June 8, 2015 (received for review May 4, 2015)

Abstract

Earth is a chemical battery where, over evolutionary time with a trickle-charge of photosynthesis using solar energy, billions of tons of living biomass were stored in forests and other ecosystems and in vast reserves of fossil fuels.
In just the last few hundred years, humans extracted exploitable energy from these living and fossilized biomass fuels to build the modern industrial-technological-informational economy, to grow our population to more than 7 billion, and to transform the biogeochemical cycles and biodiversity of the earth.
This rapid discharge of the earth’s store of organic energy fuels the human domination of the biosphere, including conversion of natural habitats to agricultural fields and the resulting loss of native species, emission of carbon dioxide and the resulting climate and sea level change, and use of supplemental nuclear, hydro, wind, and solar energy sources.
The laws of thermodynamics governing the trickle-charge and rapid discharge of the earth’s battery are universal and absolute; the earth is only temporarily poised a quantifiable distance from the thermodynamic equilibrium of outer space.
Although this distance from equilibrium is comprised of all energy types, most critical for humans is the store of living biomass.
With the rapid depletion of this chemical energy, the earth is shifting back toward the inhospitable equilibrium of outer space with fundamental ramifications for the biosphere and humanity.
Because there is no substitute or replacement energy for living biomass, the remaining distance from equilibrium that will be required to support human life is unknown.

TAGS:energy -evolutionarybiology -earth-spacebattery -sustainability -thermodynamics

Footnotes
1To whom correspondence may be addressed. Email: jschrams@uga.edu or jhbrown@unm.edu .

Author contributions: J.R.S. and D.K.G. designed research; J.R.S. and J.H.B. performed research; J.R.S. and J.H.B. contributed new reagents/analytic tools; J.R.S., D.K.G., and J.H.B. analyzed data; and J.R.S., D.K.G., and J.H.B. wrote the paper. The authors declare no conflict of interest. This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.