Here are two questions that the Institute for Environmental Research and Education (IERE) attempts to answer: How many more years can our planet exist and how many of those years can Earth support human habitation? According to its website, the IERE studies and reports “science-based solutions for a sustainable future.” Studies by the institute’s scientists conclude that the planet will continue circling the sun for many years (which is called The Long Game), but it will be able to sustain life for a relative few years (which is called The Short Game).
The long game
Writing for the institute, James Murray claims that Earth’s existence hinges on the life cycle of the sun, which is in a stable stage at present, fusing hydrogen into helium at its core. However, this stage won’t last forever. He says, “In approximately five billion years, the sun will exhaust its hydrogen fuel.” That will cause the sun’s core to collapse while its outer layers expand. At that point, it will become a red giant.
“As a red giant,” he continues, “the sun will engulf Mercury and Venus.” That seems to be a certainty, but our planet’s future is not as clear. Murray posits that earth will certainly be uninhabitable. “The oceans will boil away, and the atmosphere will be stripped from the planet.” Not a very pleasant prospect.
So, the short answer to the long game is that Earth, as we know it, has a few billion years left. “The future Earth will bear little resemblance to the vibrant blue planet we know today.” It will not be habitable by any life form that we can imagine.
The short game
Murray claims that, in the opinion of the Institute’s scientists, Earth “as a habitable zone for humans is far less optimistic.” He compares “stellar evolution” with “human impact.” While stellar evolution will take billions of years before the sun is exhausted, human impact of the Earth’s ability to support life is limited to “centuries or less” because of environmental degradation. He says, “The crucial difference is that the stellar timeline is immutable — a natural process beyond our control. The human-induced timeline, however, is entirely within our power to alter.” And, we know the conditions that are hastening the end of the planet’s habitability.
Climate change. We continue to burn fossil fuels, releasing greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide. These gases form a dome within our atmosphere and have caused global warming. As ice melts on the tops of our mountains, icebergs dissolve into the oceans, and ice shelves in places like Antarctica and Greenland collapse, sea levels rise and extreme weather conditions disrupt ecosystems.
I worry that people may think that these extreme conditions will simply appear some day in the future, as they do in horror movies. But as I watch the evening news about tornadoes that devastate cities across middle America; storms that ravage the northeast coast, causing major floods in states where they have not occurred previously; and record heat waves that are experienced throughout the world, I wonder if we are not witnessing a very gradual process that may hasten the “short game.”
Deforestation. Murray says that the clearing of forests “reduces the Earth’s capacity to absorb carbon dioxide, further exacerbating climate change and leading to habitat loss and biodiversity.” According to the World Wide Fund, about 15 billion trees are cut down each year, dramatically increasing the pressure that we place on forests for timber, agriculture, and urban development. Trees play a crucial role in stabilizing the ecosystem. They filter the air that we breathe and stabilize the soil beneath our feet. The World Wide Fund further specifies that trees “act as carbon sinks, absorbing carbon dioxide and mitigating climate-change impacts.”
Pollution. Year by year, pollutants are added to the world’s air, water, and soil. We continue to rely heavily on petroleum, and even coal, both of which pollute the upper atmosphere. At the same time, we rid ourselves of domestic trash, urban sewage, and industrial waste, spewing the sludge into coastal estuaries. Pesticides and biocides make their ways into water systems, affecting water quality and the animals that consume it. When vital resources are contaminated, they have a deleterious effect on ecosystems as well as human habitation.
Resource depletion. Our natural resources, like water, minerals, and fossil fuels are not infinite. Water, per se, is not an immediate problem. But potable water is. Many parts of the world have a severe shortage of drinkable water. And even in the most prosperous country, the U.S.A., many of the dams in our western states are at historic lows. Furthermore, as we lunge headfirst into artificial intelligence and other high-tech pursuits, we depend on rare earth products that are already quite limited.
What can we do?
To be honest, I don’t think that there is much that we can do to affect the eventual outcome of the short game. For decades, environmentalists have warned us about the negative effects we human beings have had on the Earth. The major damage has occurred since the Industrial Revolution which started about 250 years ago in Europe.
What we call human progress generally means ecological disaster for the earth’s balance of nature. Our living space moved from village to town to city to metropolitan area to megalopolis, requiring greater agricultural production from decreasing water availability for our farms.
Each day there are between 100,000 and 130,000 airplanes in the air, spewing carbon dioxide and other pollutants. Daily, there are 1.5 billion cars on the road, and WifiTalents estimates that 87 percent of them will remain non-electric in 2030. According to the U.S. Bureau of the Census, world population is now 8.2 billion. It will be 9 billion by 2039.
Many people are counting on artificial intelligence (AI) to solve the problem. But AI most likely operates according to Occam’s Razor, that is, given a choice of alternatives, the simplest is probably the best. And the simplest solution is to eliminate the cause. And we are the cause.
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Jim Glynn is Professor Emeritus of Sociology. He may be contacted at j_glynn@att.net.