Gorgeous Glimpses of Calamity
President Obama’s speech in June, promising action to reduce
greenhouse gas emissions, was welcome, if belated. It may be the best he can do
domestically. But nobody pretends it is adequate to the onrushing disaster.
Having dodged the bullet of cold war nuclear annihilation, we face a new threat
just as global, man-made and potentially lethal. A sense of emergency is what
is urgently needed.
In 1961, Yuri A. Gagarin, the first man to orbit the Earth,
issued his initial impressions from an altitude of more than 100 miles. The sky
was deep black, he said, and the Earth’s horizon crowned with “a beautiful blue
halo.” Between bright white clouds, he enthused, he could make out “snow,
forest, mountains.” It was an Edenic picture. In the subsequent depths of the cold war, with nuclear
weapons racing off the assembly lines of the Soviet Union
and the United States ,
succeeding cosmonauts and astronauts contributed their own observations. Like
Mr. Gagarin, they found their world mesmerizingly beautiful. They also reported
a singularly intriguing fact: no borders or political boundaries could be seen
from space.
Jan. 10, 2013: In this photo from NASA’s Aqua satellite, haze below the Himalayas blankets Northern India and Bangladesh, likely the result of fires, urban and industrial pollution, and a meteorological phenomenon called temperature inversion.
In fact, few signs of humanity were visible, at least on the
sunlit side. Sure, Los Angeles was
visibly smoggy. And irrigated cropland could sometimes be discerned, like
pointillism on Nile Delta sand. But these were exceptions. Under a startlingly
thin layer of atmosphere, vast expanses of desert ceded to forests that gave
way to the oceans that make up 70 percent of Earth’s surface. The planet seemed
largely untouched. Only at night, when jewel-like cities rotated into view, did
clear signs of civilization emerge.There was something profoundly reassuring about this. Even
as the ICBMs slept, it was heartening to know that despite our best efforts, we
had not yet banged up the biosphere enough to make the effects easily visible
from space.
But those were the 1960s and early ’70s; the global
population was half what it is today, and the portion driving cars and leaving
the lights on was far lower. Contrast that with the last decade or so, when astronauts
and Earth-observing satellites have recorded a different, deeply unsettling
picture. While our world remains ravishingly beautiful, it increasingly shows
symptoms of distress. Many of these indicators are the direct result of human
activity. Others are the indirect consequence of using our atmosphere as a
dumping ground for carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.There’s a dispassionate quality to the view from on high. On
Aug. 2, 2005 , the circuitous
trajectory of Messenger, a NASA spacecraft, brought it boomeranging back toward
Earth on its way to explore Mercury. Its steady stream of data offered a rare
chance to watch our world grow larger in space, as a visitor from another star
system might first see it.
Initially, Earth was simply a pearl of milky white and
ultramarine blue, with the white — clouds, ice and snow — being other forms of
life-giving water. Eventually, hues of tawny gold appeared; more than a third
of the visible land area, it seemed, was desert. Only later, when the planet
filled half the picture plane, did a hint of emerald emerge between the clouds.
A verdant, compelling green. The color of photosynthesis.
After this first direct evidence of life on Earth, and with
the spacecraft still a quarter of the distance to the Moon, another hue
emerged. Above the lush equatorial belt of South America ,
lower in altitude and distinct from the clouds, it was a nebulous, smoky,
profoundly unsettling gray-blue. Could this be from fires, perhaps willfully set? Could this
first hint of intelligent life on Earth signify a species evidently busy
creating still more desert?
You already know the answer. August is the driest month in
the Amazon River basin — the best time for subsistence farmers and owners of
large tracts of land to clear acreage for agriculture by burning off forests
that sequester carbon dioxide and replenish oxygen in our overcarbonized
atmosphere. Although the deforestation rate in Brazil
has slowed since 2005, it never stopped entirely and may be rising again.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the globe, much the same is happening
in that other remaining repository of invaluable equatorial forest, Indonesia —
particularly on the island of Sumatra, where similar glimpses show jungle being
burned off annually to clear land for palm oil production.And this was the view from some 65,000 miles away. Far
closer in, NASA maintains a small fleet of Earth-observing satellites.
Unfortunately, their visual record makes it even clearer that something is
going badly wrong in the garden.
Across the world, tremendous wildfires can be seen raging
during the searing summers of the new millennium. As the oceans warm, vast
equatorial hurricanes have smashed North America . In Canada ,
the Northwest Passage has twice become clear of ice
during the last decade. And the smog is no longer localized. A gunmetal exhalation
of coal and fuel smoke blankets China
almost daily, extending out across the sea toward the Korean
Peninsula Japan
and beyond. We are tracking glaciers retreating, and immense polar icebergs
calving into rising waters. Gargantuan sandstorms extend out from expanding
deserts, sometimes traversing the breadth of the Atlantic ... read more:
