Friday, March 7, 2014

Part 3 -- How Humanity Saved the Biosphere. The Decadence of the Pleistocene Biosphere [Second Part]





To My Readers,



Below is the third part of my multi-part re-rendition, in this blog, of a classic text, written by an anonymous collective author, one which -- very early-on, in the 1970s -- '''smelled a rat [smelled the 'Rocke-Nazi' rat, in my opinion, the biggest, rottenest rat in all of human [pre-]history to-date -- the most rabid, the most massively "ambitious" mass torturers, and mass murderers, in all of human history, who make the bloody Vlad The Impaler pale to an infinitesimal in comparison] in the "Global Warming", "People Are Pollution" rap''', and circulated, in <<samizdat>> fashion, a rather comprehensive warning to humanity about this new "eu"-genocidal ploy, until years later, when an updated version of this text became available on the world wide web.


This text is entitled --

Crises by Nature:  How Humanity Saved the Biosphere   



For the Resumption of Humanity's Ascent, and, with it -- and by means of it -- the Regeneration of Our Planetary Biosphere,

M. Milankovitch












Crises by Nature
 How Humanity Saved The Biosphere

by
Capitalist Crisis Studies
[with modifications by M. Milankovitch]
Table of Contents








III - The Decadence of the Pleistocene Biosphere 
                                                                [second part]




Other discoveries tend to corroborate this picture, and its connection to atmospheric CO2 depletion via photosynthesis. 

In response to new evidence, the onset of glaciation has been pushed back behind the late Pliocene originally thought to have been its locus, and into the Miocene. c27 


Data from a Glomar Challenger expedition indicate a previously unsuspected ‘second Carboniferous’ age in the early Cretaceous Period:


“... the Deep Sea Drilling Project’s celebrated drill ship has plumbed  extensive deposits of stinking black shales containing so much carbon that, suggests Dr. William Ryan of Columbia University’s Lamont Doherty Geological Observatory and his colleagues, it could have upset the balance of the Earth’s atmosphere."

"Ensuing climatic changes could then have eliminated the dinosaurs and other Late Cretaceous animals...."

"Under conditions of oxygen lack at the bottoms of poorly aerated basins, the anerobic [ed: anaerobic] decay of vegetable and animal matter leads to the formation of carbon (sometimes as coal) and hydrocarbons, rather than carbon dioxide which, of course, returns to the atmosphere."

"Evidently, such conditions obtained extensively along the line where the Atlantic ocean was eventually to emplace itself."

"What has staggered DSDP researchers is the extent of the carbonaceous shales."

"One estimate places their carbon content as substantially more than that of all of North America’s coal deposits taken together."

"It seems likely that their formation caused a sharp decline in atmospheric carbon dioxide; that in turn, would have permitted much more of the earth’s  heat to radiate into space".

"The resulting climatic downturn could well have been the death knell.” c28
“Because the deposits were laid down in a relatively short time geologically speaking, it has been suggested that they represent a rapid withdrawal of carbon from the environment, sufficient enough to have affected composition of the atmosphere and altered the climate, which would have put heavy stress on many forms of life, particularly the highly specialized reptiles...."

"The black shales not only lie along the African side of the ocean but extend from the continental margin of North America eastward of the Bermuda Rise, according to the drilling results."

"In view of this, Ryan suggests that the “carboniferous period” of the earth’s history occurred 100 million years ago, rather than during the coal-forming 200 million years earlier.” c29



Thus, the same accumulation process that formed the oil and coal deposits upon which contemporary industrial societal self-reproduction is founded, and which brought about, evidently, the downfall of the earlier form of the biosphere, the global rainforest, via the associated tendency for the rate of photosynthesis to fall and for world cooling/drought, culminating in the Desert and Ice Ages, may be at least part of the force which brought down the 'gigantistic' plant and animal organisms of the Mesozoic Era, including the crowning forms of pre-social animals multi-cellular evolution, as well.

But our hypothesis places the onset of the ‘decadence of the biosphere’ much earlier than the dinosauric extinctions, in the prior Ice Age of the Permian Period, some 280 million years BP (Before Present), just after the all-time peak of photosynthetic reproductivity ["biomass primary productivity"], the Mississippian and Pennsylvanian “coal-forming” periods still officially designated the “Carboniferous”, and spoken of at the end of the last quotation. 

Our best information still indicates this Carboniferous Period, as our opening quotation suggests (see I - The Tendency of the Rate of Photosynthesis to Fall) to have been the ‘biotic boom’ crowning the ascendant phase of the photosynthetic biosphere (at least in its land plants aspect); the zenith of photosynthetic prosperity, with the highest rate of biospheric reproduction, or expanded reproduction of biomass, so far achieved on Earth.  

And, the rate of accumulation of biomass may have been mostly negative ever since.


This Carboniferous Age would then also mark the turning point from the ascendant to the descendant phase of the “photosynthetic solution” to the ‘problem’ of the self-reproduction of biotic or biological Nature. 

Since then, except for the interruption of the newly discovered sub-peak in the Cretaceous just cited, we have evidence of one long depression, or at least stagnation, in the global rate of photosynthesis, a depression whose consequences, we hypothesize, included ocean surface waters cooling, hence reduced ocean surface waters evaporation, hence reduced precipitation over the surfaces of the land, hence drought and desertification, massive waves of extinction, ‘balding’ of the biosphere, and glacial devastation. 

This depression was evidently, at least, the underlying tendency, perhaps overwhelmed at intervals by countervailing forces such as spates of volcanic eruption, during which great quantities of CO2 were expelled into the atmosphere from deep within the Earth, thus compensating, to some degree, for the photosynthetic losses.

As we shall see in the section following, the photosynthetic mode of bioshperic self-reproduction was itself the ‘solution’ to a still earlier crisis of the biosphere, the ‘Heterotrophic’ or ‘Fermentation’ crisis [M.M.:  according to the famous "Oparin Hypothesis", which has fallen out of favor in the scientific community in the years since the original text of Crises by Nature was written]. 



But, in the Carboniferous, the photosynthetic solution too came up against its immanent limits, and the Great Carbo-Permean Ice Age, following directly on the heels of the Carboniferous, signaled this awesome turn of events:
“Following the Silurian, high rates of photosynthesis are induced without corresponding quantities of organic materials immediately available ashore for decay and replenishment of CO2."

"This suggests that oxygen may have “overswung” the present level to a somewhat higher value as the lush life of the Carboniferous developed."

"Then, with reduction of CO2, the earth would cool, due to loss of the “greenhouse” effect of CO2, leading to the ice ages of the Permian period."

"As the earth cooled, photosynthesis would sharply fall, leading to a major loss of oxygen.” c30

“During the Carboniferous period, when most of the coal and oil deposits were formed, about 1014 tons of carbon dioxide were withdrawn from the atmosphere-ocean system."

"This staggering loss must have dropped the earth’s temperature to chilly levels indeed; it is not surprising that the gigantic glaciers that moved across the earth after this period were perhaps the most extensive in history.” c31



In summary, we picture the history of the biosphere as one long decrescendo since the Carboniferous, with a ‘turning-point crisis’ in the Early Permian, followed by a ‘terminal crisis’ beginning at the end of the Cretaceous, with the demise of the dinosaurs, and continuing into the glacieral conditions of the Tertiary and Quaternary, potentially fatal conditions for the biosphere which still, ambiguously, persist, and whose outcome is not yet decided.


That outcome must be decided by the outcome of the current crisis in social evolution: the terminal crisis of world capitalism. 

The historical continuum branches ahead of us with essentially two possible trajectories: 

econo-politically democratic, i.e., non-state-capitalist [actual] Socialism, or Fascist, state-capitalist Neo-Barbarism.


The process of a successful transition to a world socialist society -- i.e., to a political-ECONOMIC DEMOCRACY -- involving the rapid burning up of fossil fuel reserves attendant upon the socially-urgent accelerated socialist industrialization of the “Third World”, plus the econo-ecological renovation of the “First” and “Second” Worlds, undertaken on the secure basis of an international crash program to develop and deploy fusion reactors and other post-hydrocarbonaceous energy technologies, coupled with subsequent coastal fusion-desalination plant irrigated 'agriculturalization' and reforestation of Saharan and other desert regions of the planet, would rapidly lower the albedo (reflectivity) of the Earth, while simultaneously raising the atmospheric concentration of CO2. 


This would rapidly ‘heat-up’ the otherwise catastrophically-cooling global climate, and the primary productivity of the biosphere as well, at last putting a definitive end to the long, biosphere-battering chain of the Pleistocene Ice Ages, to their latest interglacial [the last ~11,700 years], and to the geologically-long period of planet-wide ecological decline that we have documented and described above.


Cessation of presently intensifying forms of capitalist ‘looting of Nature’, such as the deforestation of the Amazon under the Fascist state-capitalist regime in Brazil [M.M.:  overthrown since this text was first written], which threatens accelerated global-cooling climatic degradation via increasing the albedo of the Earth in the Amazonian basin, and harmful modification of weather patterns, c32 would also contribute to global climatic improvement. 


Such measures would also, and not incidentally, augment both the volume of production and the productivity of world agriculture; the former, first of all, by bringing present desert/wasteland under cultivation, the latter by increasing the rate of photosynthesis for present and newly opened areas of cropland alike, via the CO2 enrichment of the air.  


Thus, these measures would provide for the urgently needed nutritional upgrading of the standards of living of most of the human race, the present degradation of which represents a central gap in present productive forces, a gap whose closure constitutes a central goal of the first phase of any world socialist society / poltical-ECONOMIC-DEMOCRACY.






 


Failing a worldwide, Economic-Democratic, Socialist Revolution [NOT:  Leninist-Trotsyist, or Stalinist-Maoist, state-capitalist pseudo-revolution], the neo-barbarous collapse of civilization following close upon a short period of intensified natural looting, austerity, and Fascist self-cannibalization of humanity — even somehow assuming the avoidance of thermo-nuclear war — would signal the dénouement of social evolution and, with it, of all life on Earth; the shriveling up of humanity and, therefore, of the rest of the biosphere in the descent into the icy darkness of a final Ice Age:  the return of "Snowball Earth", this time, lasting until the Red Giant dénouement of the Sun swallows the Earth..

 

The hypothesis of global cooling due to CO2 depletion as an explanation for the Ice Ages was attacked by Opik in the 1952 article quoted several times above, in the following terms:


“Variations in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, a favourite topic in former speculations on climatic changes, need not be considered at all: absorption by water vapour practically covers all the absorption bands of carbon dioxide, and, in the presence of but minute quantities of water vapour, the additional absorption by carbon dioxide is nil."

"Variation in the amount of carbon dioxide will not alter the absorbing properties of our atmosphere, and will have no effect whatever on climate."

"If, nevertheless, the “greenhouse effect”, of carbon dioxide is sometimes mentioned, especially in popular books, this is due to lack of information regarding this particular problem of experimental physics."

"Practically all other theories of the ice ages and palaeoclimatic changes, which are based on purely terrestrial causes, are of a similar value and, thus, unfounded.” c33


This statement seems to directly contradict the statement quoted from Plass herein [see quote related to citation 24] according to which “the climatic effects due to carbon dioxide are almost entirely independent” of the amount of water vapor and “throughout most of the atmosphere carbon dioxide is the main factor determining changes in the radiation flux”! 

Opik’s statement also contradicts the absorption spectrum data presented by Plass [see Graphics 12a, 12b, 12c above], which shows very little overlap between water’s and CO2’s absorption bands, especially in what Plass indicates to be the all-important 13 to 17 micron region of the Earth’s most intense infrared emission. 

Plass’s article was published in 1959, seven years after Opik’s, so that perhaps the “information regarding this particular problem of experimental physics” had been revised in the interim. 


However, more recent sources continue to show wavering on this question. 


For example, Carl Sagan changed his view regarding the respective roles of CO2 and H2O in the ‘runaway’ greenhouse effect believed responsible for the super-heated climate of Venus:
“Since CO2 cannot ensure the necessary opacity over the broad range from 2 to 40 µ «microns», it was assumed in the initial variant of the greenhouse model [Kellog & Sagan, 1962] that the Venusian atmosphere contains a fairly large amount of H2O (10 - 100 gm cm-1)...."

"In a later study, Sagan no longer insisted on large amounts of H2O and, furthermore, pointed to the well-known fact that CO2 absorption increases at the relatively high pressures assumed for the surface.” c34


A still more recent study, the book Atmospheres by Goody and Walker, vintage 1972, states that “water vapor is the principal absorbing gas in the Earth’s atmosphere” c35 but it is not clear whether this is due, in their view, to the present scarcity of CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere, relative to water vapor, or to the deficient absorption capabilities of CO2, even if present in the atmosphere in abundance.


Opik’s objection, however, even if partially true, ignores a salient fact about water vapor itself as a climatic heating agent: its strong correlation to the rate of photosynthesis, controlled by CO2 levels, by way of the rate of evapotranspiration.  


“Transpiration” is the process by which plants pull a continuous column of water up through their root-hairs and circulate that water throughout their bodies, by evaporating water through “stomata” and like structures in the under-surfaces of their leaves.


In this process, a kind of “reverse rain”, land plants act as powerful pumps which daily exhale tons of water vapor into the atmosphere.


So strongly correlated is the rate of this process of evapo-transpiration to the rate of photosynthesis, that maps of the photosynthetic “Primary Productivity” of biomass for the globe (a function bounded by the ‘aggregate’ photosynthesis of the biosphere) have recently been constructed by direct calculation from global evapo-transpiration data. c36 

Thus, a high rate of photosynthesis, made possible by a high atmospheric concentration of CO2, should contribute to a warmer global climate, via stimulation of the rate of evapo-transpiration and the H2O “greenhouse effect”, even if only on a more locally-restricted basis, given Plass’s contention [see quote related to citation 24] of the lesser atmospheric diffusability of H2O vapor as against CO2. 


Likewise, any drop in the level of atmospheric CO2 should shortly amplify its direct cooling effect, by depressing the rate of transpiration, indirectly cooling the climate further through the resulting drop in atmospheric water vapor levels.




With regard to the reversal of the trend of diminution in the atmospheric CO2 content which seems to be an inadvertent (so far) consequence of the principal life-support activities of our species, we should mention a facet so far omitted in the typical run of public ddiscussions. 


Not only do the combustion processes integral to the earlier, hunting, and to the later industrial technologies of homo sapiens accelerate the return of terrestrial carbon to a gaseous, atmospherically-diffusable form, but so also do the agricultural activities which came into predominance in-between:
“During the past century a new geological force has begun to exert its effect upon the carbon dioxide equilibrium of the earth."
 
"By burning fossil fuels man dumps approximately six billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year."

"His agricultural activities release two billion tons more."

                    "Grain fields and pastures store much smaller quantities of carbon dioxide than the          
                    forests they replace, and the cultivation of the soil permits the vast quantities of carbon 
                    dioxide produced by bacteria to escape into the air.” c37




In conclusion:  We have arrived at an hypothesis of a general crisis in the biosphere, driven by the  biosphere’s cumulative net withdrawal of a climate-warming carbon dioxide gas from Earth’s global atmosphere, expressed also, therefore, as a geologically long-running fall-off in that biosphere’s life-giving rate of photosynthesis, ever since the great boom of the Carboniferous, accompanied, with some lag, by a gradual refrigeration of the planetary climate, punctuated by violent episodes of glacial devastation, preceded by ocean surface water cooling, leading to drought, and desertification, with restriction of the biotically fecund humid rainforests — veritable ‘vegetable bombs’ by virtue of the rapidity of their photosynthetic and evapo-transpirative processes — to an ever-narrowing equatorial girdle. 


This long, gradual fall was broken by another episode of rapid photosynthesis and net CO2 withdrawal in the Cretaceous, which, however, only intensified the crisis, leading to a “Time of Great Dying” in which the Great Reptiles and many other then-dominant plant and animal species perished; to stepped-up climatic cooling, therefore also to ocean surface waters’ cooling, thus to reduction in ocean surface waters’ rates of evaporation, therefore to reduction in rates of precipitation over land, i.e., to drought, leading on to desertifications, thence on to a new Ice Age, one never yet definitively ended. 

This “Time of Great Dying”, and the subsequent glaciations, put an end to the predominance of those lineages of organisms which represented the flowering of multicellular pre-social evolution, ushering in the reign of the more gregarious mammalian line [M.M.:  evidence of a greater development of animal sociality among many species of dinosaurs, far more so than was known at the time this text was originally written, has accumulated since that time]. 


Thenceforth, only evolution surmounting the merely multicellular plane of organization, and building structure on the next, the social, level of  “aggregation”, could provide potential for a new viable basis for the long-term continuity/“continuability” of the biosphere. 


That potential was to come to fruition, as potential, through an offshoot of the society-forming mammalian line, in the form of humankind. 

That potential has yet to be realized, now, in the closing decades of the twentieth century [M.M.: and since!].

Graphic 17: current world deserts








TO BE CONTINUED.


  

NEXT:

    

Part 4 -- The Crisis-of-the-Biosphere One-Previous to Its Present Crisis. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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