27 March 2007
Trilobites
Mount Lemmon is a massive piece of rock that thrusts up out of the Arizona desert toward heaven and almost makes it.
It is so tall that the mountain has a different ecosystem at the top than it does at the bottom. Green and cool, while the desert below is blasted and sere.
My ex started her teaching career in a one-room school up there on Mt. Lemmon's “sky island,” and it is an idyllic place.
I should use the past tense on that, since it appears the fine gradation in temperature is vanishing. The desert is moving up, the snow is melting, and the trees are dying. Tiny mites fly around over the snow, and the people that live up there in the sky are nervous.
If you are reading this, that makes you part of a unique bridge generation that has one foot firmly planted in the used-to-be and the other about to clump down in the oh-my-goodness.
It is like the Navy I was in, once upon a time. The one that knew the Philippine Islands in an earthy way, and the one we have now, which mostly spends it time sealed up in steel boxes.
Although there appears to be general consensus on the matter of climate change, even in the White House, there are still honest disagreements. I have friends who maintain that the geologic record shows wild swings in the earth's climate that have absolutely nothing to do with the appearance, and disappearance of glaciers. I respect the difference of opinion, since I like life just the way it is.
I suspect the trilobites did, too.
The ubiquitous cucumber-shaped trilobite was the ruler of the earth in the Devonian age, and its fossils are found all over the world, where the old sea floor has been thrown up to become dry land. so prevalent along the blue dirt of the Arcona formation in Ontario that you could scoop them out of the earth with a casual pass of the hand.
They once were the smartest beings on the planet in their time, easily on a par with the modern lobster. They can scarcely be blamed for their habitat on the seafloor being destroyed, and their world turned upside down.
I suspect that the end of the Age of Trilobites did not occur with the abruptness that is being measured now. I suspect it was a long, slow decline. They say that it you place a live lobster in a pot of boiling water, it will attempt to scramble out.
If you place it in room temperature water and gradually apply the heat, the tasty crustacean will acquiesce to the process of transformation without a peep.
That is not the way things are with humans, or at least not precisely. There have certainly been abrupt and catastrophic events in the geologic record that plop everything into the boiling pot, and no amount of scrambling will suffice to get away.
The geologic record suggests that a gigantic meteor slammed into the water off the Yucatan Peninsula about sixty-five million years ago. It released the energy equivalent to thousands of nuclear blasts, all at once. It was big enough to put enough ash into the atmosphere to darken the sun, and usher out the dinosaurs, many of which could outthink the tiny shrew-like proto-mammals that scurried around their feet.
What they could not do was adjust their reptilian biology to deal with the onset of the cold, and the age of the giant lizard passed under very cloudy skies.
Of course there is some hype associated with the global warning issue. Parts of Mr. Gore's Oscar-winning slide show are preposterous, and some take cold comfort in the hot air. It is to be expected; Mr. Gore, after all, is not a technical man. He is a politician, and knows intuitively that a sensational image is always the most effective, whether it is strictly true or not.
He is attempting to describe a phenomenon more than a century in the making, and compress the consequences into the span of a human working life.
The best evidence is that the temperature is rising at a remarkable rate, and that the 30% increase in the natural level of greenhouse gases is a direct result of the burning the remains of trilobites and dinosaurs. There are some optimists out there, since that is the nature of the human beast.
They say that the melting of the polar cap will open new trading routes through the previously impassible ice, and that possibly 25% of the remaining reserves of oil and gas under the inaccessible northern latitudes will be opened to exploitation.
So there is definitely hope. There has never been a species like ours in the world. Think of what we can do, and the complex systems we have designed to accommodate our needs. We can drill for gas far underground, route waterlines, forge and distribute cookware, select seasonings, climb into the pot, and then reach out to turn up the heat all by ourselves.
There is a corollary in there someplace. You would think it would be obvious.
Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com