I mentioned that after the last mass extinction here 65 million years ago, the mammals took off. So, we count these – one, two, three, four, five. Now, there is a sixth mass extinction occurring. It’s taking place as we speak, and we don’t have much problem in understanding why that one is on.
Here is our species, homo sapiens, colonising the globe. About 200,000 [years ago], maybe it’s been going back even a little further now – the emergence in Africa, moving out across the world, with these as the rough dates. Some of them have been pushed back a bit now, but notice that humans got – homo sapiens got to Australia 10,000 years before it got to Europe. It was easier to go east and do some island hopping than to get up here. Maybe it was very cold part at that time. And then getting across the new world – and the dates here are quite wrong. I’m sure it’s earlier than that that humans got to the new world. There’s a lot of new work in archaeology and paleoarchaeology going on there.
Now, remember, this is just homo sapiens, because other species of homo had got out of Africa long before this. Homo erectus, for instance, had got out of, and was in Georgia here about 1.8 million years ago, and got to Peking – Peking Man down here and Java Man here much earlier. And we know, we’ve got remains of homo relatives in East Anglia from 850,000 years ago – but that’s homo heidelbergensis, the common ancestor of Neanderthals and ourselves. Here, we’re just speaking of homo sapiens and we’re the only ones here. But as little as 50,000 years ago, there may have been four species of homo co‑existing on the planet. I say co‑existing – I don’t think they met one another much. They may have done, that’s a wonderful, tantalising issue. But, anyway, we’re alone now.
a. Land forming and disappearing
The sixth mass extinction. And this is where one of those things that’s going wrong that the Archbishop and I agree on. And I want to talk a bit about this in the second part here. Now, here’s International Year of Planet Earth and here are the 10 themes around which the research and the outreach, the publicity is going to be organised. I don’t have possibly time or competence to deal with all of them, but I’m going to deal with one or two of these issues. And let’s, first of all, deal with hazards that we have to accept. Living on this planet, we just have to accept that the planet works in particular ways and sometimes there’s absolutely nothing we can do about it.
Now, sometimes this doesn’t matter. Here is the planet being worked. It’s an interaction between life and the planet. These mountains, which I think are on the west coast of Soviet Central Asia –Russian Central Asia – on the Pacific coast, not Central Asia at all, I’m sorry. Here is a great – mountains are being worn down by water and land. A huge delta here, an alluvial fan is building up. This is a process which has gone on ever since the Earth’s crust existed. And it will continue to go on, and there’s nothing we can do about it – and maybe it doesn’t matter very much. It depends.
Similarly, here’s the reverse process, if you like. This is the land actually crumbling away before the sea. This is on the east coast of Britain, a chalk cliff. Extraordinary. There’s a huge amount of iron in the early time that this was deposited, making this wonderful red colour. But here’s a great chunk of the cliff which has fallen off. In 10 years’ time, you won’t even know that was there. It’ll have all washed away. And there are bits of the east coast of Britain where, as you walk along the shore, you can see not what fell a year ago, what fell that morning. It’s really eroding fast.
And, again, well, we can live with it. It’s OK, so long as you don’t own a house, which is just up there. There’s nothing you can do about it. You can buy a house in parts of Norfolk for 10p, which would be €12, something like that. But it won’t last you very long. We have to accept that.
b. Volcanic eruptions and earthquakes
But there are other hazards that we have more difficulty with. I mentioned gigantic volcanic eruptions in the past. They are going to happen again. We know that it’s not a matter of if; it’s a matter of when.
And here is a pretty major one, in the Philippines, 10 or 15 years ago, which was enormous. It killed a lot of people and it cooled the climate by about half a degree centigrade for about two years afterwards, because of the amount of sulphur dioxide, carbon dioxide and ash which was put into the atmosphere, affecting the ozone layer. It was an extraordinary effect. A relatively minor explosion – at least it is minor if you don’t live in the Philippines. But it’s very terrifying.
Similarly, Popocatépetl, a magnificent 17,000‑foot volcano near Mexico in Mexico, near Mexico City. It’s going to blow its top. A sister volcano – it would be about here on this slide – did so about 100,000 years ago and covered a vast area in a metre or two metres of ash. Popocatepétl will do the same. Very difficult – there are probably 50 million people living within 100 kilometres of Popocatépetl.
We have to accept this. We have to accept earthquakes – they’re the other side, if you like, of volcanic activity. This is a plate shifting, and as the plate shifts volcanic activity may be initiated. Well, the Anatolian faults running through northern Turkey have had many earthquakes recently – a bad one in 1999. Istanbul is certainly on a danger line.
We’re getting better, earth science is getting better at predicting earthquakes, but it’s still not very good. But we know there will be major earthquakes. We just have to accept that – that’s part of living on Planet Earth. Nothing we can do about it in a physical sense – is there anything we can do about it in a social sense? Not very easy, but still we should be thinking about it.
a. Ground water and soil
Now, two other themes of International Year of Planet Earth – ground water and soils. Now, here are problems which are largely human generated – we can do something about these. This is one of the things that’s going wrong. And I can’t resist giving you this illustration. The Aral Sea – or it was the Aral Sea – back in the late 1960s, this would be.
Krushchev wanted to irrigate for growing cotton in Soviet Central Asia, Pakistan and the areas round there. There was the Aral Sea, so the Soviet Union went into a five‑year plan to develop this. No biological advice taken at all ‑ they just got going on it. They’re pumping the Aral Sea’s water into the cotton fields. The Aral Sea is an island drainage area. It couldn’t keep up and began drying out. There was a big fishing industry in the Aral Sea and they were becoming desperate because they were running out of sea. And so, at the last moment, they tried to dig a trench so that they could sail out into one of the feeder rivers, but they left it a bit late. And so we had this extraordinary sight of big trawlers just lying there in the middle of what’s a desert now. And furthermore, a very dangerous desert, because during the cotton‑growing period they pumped gigantic, thoughtless quantities of herbicide and pesticide. The dust is now blowing around, and it’s pretty lethal stuff. And so, although some other bits of the Aral Sea are now recovering, because of course I don’t think a thread of cotton came out of this area, the Aral Sea will slowly recover. But it’s very difficult to get rid of these persistent chemicals. This is human folly, due to biological ignorance and the general feeling of human arrogance. There is not enough humility in our species about the way we are living on the planet.
Here’s another way. Clear the forests, burn them. That’s the result. And you grow soya beans or, if it’s in Southeast Asia, you grow palm oil. And you use this for making any kinds, masses of our food, feeding it to animals and it’s all part of our western way of life. Some of it makes biodiesel and in doing so, of course, probably consumes more energy than the biodiesel will generate. It destroys habitat, it destroys soils, and it generally is an ecological disaster. The British Government, trying to be green, decreed that from, I think, it was earlier this year, 5% of all fuel sold in Britain should be biodiesel, should be of biological origin. They’re frantically trying to back‑pedal now.
Nobody asked biologists. Nobody did the thinking through. It seemed economically sensible. It seemed like a good green idea. It would indicate that we’re doing something about climate change. Ignorance.
b. Climate
Climate – at least we all, or the great majority of people accept that climate is going to be a problem. I call it ‘a tap on the shoulder’. It may be becoming a kick on the shins. Wait a minute. You can’t go on like this.
I put this slide up because it’s really a tribute to Charles Keeling who, back in the 1950s, thought it might be a good idea to see what’s happening to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. There’s been a lot of burning of fossil fuel already, because the industrial revolution, after all, was a century before this. So he picked an area where the air was really clean – as clean as it could be – on the top of an extinct volcano in Hawaii, and began measuring systematically, year by year. And it’s been kept up. Well – no surprises in the trend of the line. But, look, isn’t that interesting? It’s a zigzag, because of course most carbon fixation goes on in the Northern Hemisphere. That’s where most of the plants are – all that great swathe of arboreal forest, all the huge rich cold oceans, which are better for plankton than the warm oceans because they’ve got more oxygen in. That’s where the photosynthesis goes on. So in the northern summer, a lot of carbon gets fixed and goes down; in the northern winter, it goes up again.
It’s gone on for a very long time. This is records back nearly half a million years, and it’s temperature in blue and it’s – I think it’s temperature in blue. Yes, that’s right. And the green is carbon dioxide. And what you can see here brilliantly is what makes the climate deniers, who will say, ‘Oh, but cycles like this have always happened during the ice ages and it’s got warmer again. And that’s all been before any human activity.’ But, look, it’s this graph here. Carbon dioxide is rising now at a rate which is unparalleled for, in fact we know, 30 million years. So the rate of rise is absolutely gigantic. And we know, and I think there is no other explanation but that this is human activity – the burning of fossil fuels – we don’t have to look very far.
Now, I think we should operate the precautionary principle. If you think it may be going to rain, you take an umbrella out with you. This is Wally Brooker, who knows a great deal about climate and paleoclimate, suggesting that we are cautious. He worked out the conveyor belt whereby a great deal of warmth from the equatorial regions is transferred by the conveyor belt on the surface of the Atlantic up to Western Europe. Therefore, Ireland, which is on the same latitude as Labrador, has a warm west coast, whereas, on Labrador, the sea is frozen for four months of the year. This conveyor belt has broken in the past when too much water – fresh water – has emerged onto the surface from the Greenland and Arctic. That’s happening at the moment. And so global warming may mean something other than being just getting warmer. Sorry.
What global warming will… there are many uncertainties. It’s an enormously complicated subject. Climatologists have got some of the biggest computational power on earth, but it’s still very, very difficult. The one certainty, it seems to me as an outsider, is that there are going to be more violent events. There’s more energy in the system and though some places are going to get hotter, some will get colder, some will get wetter, some will get drier. There’ll be more storms. You’ll have six tornados in the Gulf of Mexico in a month instead of one in a month. Plenty of signs of that sort of thing happening.
And for me, and for many people in Britain, this is an iconic image now. That’s a cliché, but it means something. The frightening thing, the rather poignant thing is that it’s actually very beautiful, isn’t it? This is Tewkesbury Abbey in Gloucestershire, completely surrounded by the worst floods that we’ve had in the south of England for living memory. And that is part of the violence of climate. The abbey survives. Tewkesbury – well, you can move along the roads now. But this image will remain, I think, with many of us. You may have equivalent ones.
Now, I’m going to change tack here a little bit because I want to talk a little bit about, in concluding, attitudes. This is a graph – I’m not going to, we’re not able here to quote accurate figures. There’s no possible means of getting accurate measurements here. But, look, what this basically is is an attempt to look at how much of the Earth’s life support systems and resources is being used up by human beings at different stages in recent history. They’re going through economic figures, GDP, consumption of fossil fuels, consumption of water per head and so on.
And, I don’t want to argue about at what point we’re dealing with here, but, look, there’s only one Earth. OK? That’s what we have to deal with. That’s the one certain figure on here. And on any reasonable approximation, we’re probably using per year more than one Earth's work of a year’s replacement. I don’t mind whether you say it was in 1975 or whether you think that it won’t happen until further on in the century. It’s rising. Our demands on the planet are rising and at some point the planet won’t be able to replace the life support systems each year to make up for a year’s use.
What’s interesting is that this assumption, this figure here, was made on the assumption that we – that’s homo sapiens – would be prepared to leave 12% of the Earth's resources for other living organisms – I don’t count our domestic animals or our domestic crops – that’s for us. No, we’re leaving 12% ‑ one‑eighth – for everything else. Now, you may not think that’s an over‑generous portion, but if you allow, if we don’t use that then we go on for a little bit longer, but we will, by implication, have made life very difficult for everything else.
Now probably many of you have see Al Gore’s film. It’s very good, I think. I remember being a bit resistant to seeing it. I thought, ‘Oh goodness, I’ve heard so much about it. I can’t, you know, ‘I don’t want any more bad news.’ But I thought it was a good film and I learnt quite a bit from it. But there are other inconvenient truths and the way we get round this is by denial. Let me quote again today’s Irish Times, which was – this is the point, of course. We are getting more information now. Every day we can see something. This is Dick Ahlstrom, the science editor of the Times writing: ‘Climate concern having little impact on behaviour’. This is you he’s talking about. ‘A majority of people express concern about the environment and climate change, but few are willing to do anything to counter global warming.’ What this really means is that we can have the Mayor of Dublin, as she was yesterday, I think, lighting up energy‑conserving lights on the Christmas tree. That’s great. But are we going to say that maybe cheap flying is out and that maybe we ought not to take a car for anything less than a five‑mile journey and so on? No, we’re not. Not yet. We still are in denial. We still think that the Earth is going to provide.
Now, this is just one aspect of the Earth, which I think is probably the most significant piece of news for any day. And it’s every day, ladies and gentlemen. We are walking up a down escalator and I think we’re beginning to get out of breath, as one does on such a venture.
I won’t go any further into this. I simply will say that I think the first stage of getting back into some sort of balance, getting some sort of human ecology, is to recognise that this is a desperate figure. That’s the first stage – and we aren’t even there yet, because we’re still in denial.
Now, I’m a great admirer of Aldo Leopold, and he really is writing a kind of cry of distress from biologists who are worried about the natural world. 'One lives alone in a world of wounds' – I absolutely agree with him. I mean, alone, there are plenty of biologists – we’re not alone. I don’t feel alone, but I know we’re still a minute minority.
I don’t agree with this: 'make-believe that the consequences of sciences are none of his business'. They’re not the consequences of science at all. Science and technology make it easier for us to live and to destroy the world. They will put a chainsaw in the hand of somebody who can cut down a giant in the tropical rainforest in half an hour, whereas it would have taken six weeks to cut it down by hand. They can do that. But that’s nothing to do with science itself. Science is not a problem. It’s information which has infinite opportunity for us. But, at any rate, we are alone, some of us, in a world of wounds.
Now, this picture, The Guardian newspaper in Britain has taken to having a double‑page photograph in every issue. Many of them, I think, are a waste of newsprint, but this one struck me. I was horrified by it. Now, why horrified? Because orangutans are an endangered species. Here we see a whole lot of healthy orangutans enjoying some lychees. But any biologist will know that this is a world of wounds. Orangutans are solitary animals. They live... each has a large territory in the canopy of tropical rainforest. They never meet, except briefly for mating, and the mother rears her young with her for perhaps three, four years until it can go out and set up on its own. They never, ever assemble like this. This is totally unnatural. It’s a result of the destruction of rainforest, very often to produce palm oil for our toothpaste and our cooking, our soap, our biodiesel. It’s a tragic scene.
Well, the 10 themes again, and they indicate axes along which good science can bring us back. Now, I mentioned the launching at UNESCO in Paris and the encouraging thing there was that there were scientists from, I think at that point, 72 nations, come together to discuss the themes here and how they could collaborate and get the message across. Here’s where they are – the purple areas. One of the first countries to develop an international committee in operation was Iraq. Brave people in Iraq putting their head above the parapet and saying, ‘Look, there’s some science to be dealt with here’. Now, in many parts of Iraq, you don’t put your head above the parapet and start thinking that there are other things more important than whether you’re a Shia or a Sunni or whether the Americans are occupying you or not. They’re interested in long‑term problems.
I was a chairman of one of the sessions there and we had a tight schedule. And as I was beginning the afternoon, chairing, a chap came up to me and said, ‘I would like two minutes to speak and I would like to come up onto the platform’. And I thought, ‘Oh, come on. I don’t want this. I’ve too tight a schedule.’ This guy was from Iran, a part of Bush’s axis of evil – OK? What he wanted to speak about was not the destruction of Israel; it was about the way in which Iranian methods for harnessing and protecting ground water might be adapted for other areas in the Middle East. He was a geologist. He did only speak for two minutes and I thought, ‘This is what it’s about’. Science has a common language for all cultures – it’s culture free – and at its best it offers us an opportunity to explore the real problems that are facing us – what’s going wrong – and to get away from the awful short‑term things which occupy us. We can’t ignore the short‑term things, of course not. We’re living in human societies. We have to begin from where people are. But we have to recognise that there’s another stage above this and I think science can contribute here very greatly.
a. The black‑throated diver
Now, I always like quoting Socrates – well, maybe he said it, maybe he didn’t. Plato ascribed this to him. We are going to need wisdom if we are going to get through this and therefore we need love. We need to love the natural world. And I give you just a few examples. You, I hope, all have the same examples and I hope that you will help, be energised through science and Science Week to help all our young people to find something in the natural world which catches them and moves them.
Now, this bird, the black‑throated diver, moves me. I don’t know quite why. It’s a strange bird. It lives in remote lochs in the northwest of Scotland. It probably lives in Northern Ireland as well – the northern part, the western part of the island. I don’t know. It’s a strange bird. It lives in areas where it’s very difficult to get a living. It usually can only breed once every two years because the female can’t build up enough food reserves to lay eggs every year. It’s a shy bird. It doesn’t like any interference. What it needs from us is absence. It needs nothing from us at all. It’s leading its own life on the planet. And I find this inspiring. And I hope all of you will have similar examples. It’s simply, as Thoreau said in Walden, it marches to the beat of a different drum. And that is what we are in danger of losing. Let us cling on, each of us, to our own favourite.
b. Durdle Door
Now, look, another, a place in the natural world that I live. It’s the Durdle Door on the south coast of England in Dorset. It’s a limestone – it’s covered by chalk. But the chalk’s eroded away and it’s been tilted up ‑ the limestone underneath it. This is Jurassic limestone. It’s been tilted up, because when Africa hit Europe, it pushed and the ripple is going through. And you can see the contorted rocks here. And these horizontal strata were tipped up vertically.
So here is life, abundant life living now. Here is the Durdle Door and through the Durdle Door – you can’t see it in this picture – there are holes and circular parts, which are the roots of a Jurassic forest, with great lycopods growing back 200 million years ago. So, for me, this symbolises life and the Earth interlocked together. It’s also a place I love.
I have to leave you with that picture. That’s the only picture to leave you with, really, isn’t it? Because there is, as René Dubos and his collaborator Margaret – goodness, I can’t remember her name now, never mind. In 1972, they published a book, Only One Earth. That’s right – there is only one Earth. And the rest of the solar system is basically well represented by this – that’s the surface of the Moon. Not too much use to us. And so we have to look after our home, and I hope that from love comes concern and therefore we start to put it right. And science is one of the ways that’s going to help us to do that.
Now, I’m particularly fond of one of your great Irish politicians of the 18th century. But let me also mention to you before I quote his words of wisdom that the Geological Survey of Ireland has been organising a whole series of geological events throughout Ireland during this international year, and it will go on. There’s a website. You can get onto it and you can see what is going on in the way of outreach to get the people of Ireland to recognise the wonderful land that you inhabit – fantastic mixed geology in which you can see rocks of great ancients and you can see the work of the ice which only left here 12,000 years ago. You can see it all there. And if we can get our young people to understand this and to enjoy the science that interprets this, then we have much more hope – much more hope.
And that’s really it. There’s everything to play for. And science, we’re going to need all the good technology that we can get. But it’s going to be technology which is based around an understanding of what we’re aiming for, an understanding of the constraints.
And here are texts from Edmund Burke, which I will leave you with. The first is surely an inspiration to all of us and a consolation when you feel, ‘Oh my goodness, everything is going wrong. The world is going to hell in a handcart and there’s nothing I can do about it.’ But, yes, there is. And many people internationally are combining on this now.
And here’s a message for all of our politicians, but of course we elect politicians and so that’s the message for us as well. Thank you very much.
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